Old 11-03-2011, 01:35 PM
  # 269 (permalink)  
freethinking
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Originally Posted by Terminally Unique View Post

If certain tools help you to mitigate those thoughts, so much the better, but to make the mitigation of such thoughts a condition of abstinence automatically creates a condition for drunkenness. You are essentially creating a bargain situation, where you will abstain only if you don't feel bad, and giving your Beast an opening large enough for a beer truck to drive through. If you do that, you can rest assured that as soon as the thoughts return, your Beast will chime in and say "see, you quit drinking, and you still have these bad thoughts, so what's the point?"
I totally get where you are coming from with this. However, me being curious as to whether or not these dreams are the beast (or not) is not because I want to shut them down so that I do not drink, but because as soon as I identified those conscious thoughts that I used to have (I mentioned them above) as ways in which the beast/av has gotten to me - they more or less stopped. I am fairly certain that nothing could make me ever drink again - so I am not worried about these dreams in the sense that I am afraid if they keep occurring that I will drink: I am truly and honestly trying to understand why they are occurring: Is it my sneaky beast again trying to wear me down? Or are these separate issues I need to work through? Because I have already played them out in therapy to death and quite honestly they are irrelevant to my current life and I want them gone (there has been no sexual abuse in my past, no physical abuse - these issues are not so major that they should still be coming up like this at this point in my life). If I understood why they were happening , then I could properly address them I guess. One of my theories is that they were part of the beast's way of trying to wear me down again...because other than that, I cannot for the life of me fathom what purpose they serve. As I stated before, when I was consciously thinking about all this past stuff every day and then recognized these repetitive thoughts as ways in which the beast was trying to wear me down, they more or less stopped one day.
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