Thanks Harvey - your 3 weeks is not to be snorted at! I hope you will keep it growing.
You used a phrase which piqued my interest: '...detox KEPT ME SOBER...'. I've observed to a couple of people in recent weeks that for me (and I suspect most of us), a period of detox or rehab in itself does not 'keep me sober'. The very fact and experience of picking up again...and again...and again really p**^sses me off, given that, in the last 3 and a bit years, I've 'done' detox (short) twice and rehab (28 days) once.
The longest period of continuous abstinence was the six months following the rehab. Then a further six months of single session drinking (1 bottle) roughly once a month. All the abstinent days and weeks in-between those sessions I tried even harder to 'work on' recovery, attending almost daily meetings and a few outpatient groups, reading, reading reading, joining SR, meditating, doing recovery-life change oriented daily reflections and readings, and so on.
Hell, I even - very reluctantly - started some step work with a sponsor, late last year, but simply had too much un-needed additional cognitive dissonance and mental / emotional angst about that particular paradigm.
I believe I know / sense why I go back to picking up - whether it's much later in a day one, like yesterday, or over the previous periods. I am extremely alone; I can't work anymore due to various chronic medical / psych conditions so am on a disability pension; I seem almost incapable of getting out and doing volunteering and / or the other external activities which so many people advise.
Some of this is due to not so much full depression but rather its shady cousin, dysthymia - a chronic, persistent level of very very low motivation. I described it at my first SMART meeting on Friday as akin to a car which has run out of fuel, or more aptly, with a dead spark plug! Lost my mojo, compared to years past, in other words.
Another way of putting it is an expression used by a long-distant friend of mine. She was describing her elderly mother's state in life as 'being without portfolio'. That's pretty much my life now. My only 'portfolio' is to care for my gorgeous blue heeler-border collie rescue dog. Keep my rental place clean and tidy, including the very small garden. Pay my bills, feed and basically care for myself daily.
All the little projects I'd listed as part of the previous rehab programme, early last year, you know, for 'things to keep us busy in recovery', I barely start or attempt - again, somehow due to that dead spark plug factor within.
So, the whole 'happy joyous n free' mantras proclaimed by many recovered people (whom I envy!) kind of don't gain purchase in me. I guess that's what leads me to that moment of 'deciding to drink' as RR / AVRT puts it.