In my early days of trying to give up drinking alcohol I would have horrible thought battles in my head that seemed to rage all day. My thoughts would constantly turn to alcohol and then I would have to convince myself that I didn't want to drink.
It was then a daily battle to fight the voice that kept begging for a drink and eventually after so many days I would give in.
The problem then is that you start your recovery over again and this is a form of self torture where you are locked in a spiral of self denial and repression.
You can keep staying off the booze for a small amount of time and I kept posting on SR but all the while I hadn't truly accepted that I should start a new life drink free.
Now that I accept that if I have one beer that I am offered I will most likely follow it up with another and then another and then disappear into that drunken vodka oblivion I'm comfortable with not drinking because I know what the consequences are.
It took me a year to come to my senses but I suppose in a thirty year drinking career that is not so bad!
Now I still have that daily conversation in my head but it is different these days. It goes more like this:
"A beer, I could just do with a beer. That would be nice."
"Are you kidding me? I mean seriously WTF! WHAT IS THE POINT!!!??"
I then answer the question in my head and I see that there is no point in drinking anymore.
Everyone who is here and reading this knows that drinking is not the answer and yet we still torture ourselves for a few days by abstaining and then drinking again and then trying to give up again.
That happened to me until eventually I would go on a vodka binge, wake up in the morning not remembering what I'd done and pour whatever was left in the bottle down the sink. I've been doing this for six months or so. How pathetic is that. That is insanity - doing the same thing over and over and expecting different things to happen always waking up with the same result like a perverse groundhog day.
Then finally I poured the bottle away one morning and instead of answering the "I need a drink" question in my head with "oh yes that would be nice" I replaced it with "WHAT IS THE POINT OF THAT!!!???".
Once I'd done that everything became so much easier. I stopped fighting with myself and accepted not that I could never drink again - I can if I want to, but that I don't WANT to drink anymore.
When I first thought I had a problem - almost a year ago - I was horrified by the thought of not drinking again and that thought was what made me have terrible mind battles and sometimes I would just go to bed to avoid drinking only to give in a day or so later.
Replacing that "I can never drink again" thought with "I can drink whenever I want to but what is the point?" thought is a subtle change but it makes all the difference between fighting a tortured thought process or accepting that there are two paths you can follow and one of them leads to a dark place.
Drinking yourself into oblivion is bad enough. But trying to recover from that and fighting your mind is doubly poisonous and leaves you exhausted - open to suggestions.
For me I accept that I can ALWAYS drink again, rather than torturing myself with NEVER AGAIN thoughts which always seemed to surface and demand attention.
Once I accepted that I could always drink again whenever I wanted but that the consequences did not warrant the beginning of the drinking process I found it much easier to stop drinking and I felt the time was right to come back to SR.
If someone had told me this in the beginning then it may have saved a lot of self agonising over the "never drink again" question. I hope this helps someone.
If you are struggling to come to terms with never drinking again like I was then try to look at it from a different angle. Accept that you can always drink. Accept it because trying to deny it takes you down a painful thought process and it is half of the thought battle that rages inside of your head.
The other half is to accept that the consequences of drinking by far negatively outweigh the benefits of not getting started in the first place.
Once you get these two thought items in place they begin to work in harmony. One side says that you can always drink but not that you "should" drink and the counter argument from the inner you is "what is the point"?
Now that I see it in these terms I find it much easier to stay sober and not crave alcohol and I'm also starting to see that I don't need alcohol to "have a good time".
In fact I had a better time at the last poker night through not drinking than I've ever had in my life because I actually made some good jokes from memory rather than crude drunken slurrings and the look on everyones faces when the "loser" on the table showed a full house was priceless.
The Ginger beer tasted good too. Especially if you put ice in it.
Right. Thankyou for listening to me my SR therapist.
I must go and do some work!
Peace and sobriety to all.