ScubaDad

Sure, sometimes I feel like the advice I am getting here is pretty harsh, it sometimes feels like others are taking their experiences from the past and advising thinking only the worse can happen. I read a lot of posts where there is a very harsh tone to the alcoholic overall.

I know that I personally have drank too much and used drugs in the past to deal with a lot of my own personal issues. That is why I can understand the "self medicating nature" on an addict. When I was a teenager I smoked weed almost everyday sometimes two to three times a day for probably two years. That caused a lot of problems in my life. One day a friend said to me "you aren't funny anymore, you use to be funny." He wasn't saying it to be mean, he said it as an observation. He was also someone I smoked weed with. That showed me that I had changed. That was it, I quit smoking weed. I used drugs intermittently for the next few years, nothing like before and then stopped by 21 or 22 and never did it again. I drank pretty heavily in my 20s and early 30s. When I met my wife my drinking dropped dramatically and I even quit smoking. One day we were at a college football bowl game and I drank way too much. My buddies and I were horsing around and I basically did a very poor backflip, landed on my left shoulder and dislocated and separated it. I think about that day and know that if I had landed just a couple of inches over I could have broken my neck and been paralyzed. It could have easily happened. Now I have a constant reminder of my collar bone sticking up on my left shoulder as to why I don't need to get drunk. That was 10 years ago.

So my reasons for making that statement is that I know I have been at fault for drinking and using drugs and it concerned me that others might read that and think that I am being a hypocrite about my wife. And maybe I am, I don't really know. I apologize if my statement offended anyone.