EndGameNYC

I apologize in advance, Returning2drink, for being so direct, but there are some alarming comments in your OP, particularly within the context of your toying with a deadly combination of chemicals.

I don't know whether you planned to drink or not. What's clear is that you did drink.

Your priorities were misplaced from the start. Instead of focusing on what you could do to remain sober, you got caught up in the integrity of your promises to someone you didn't want to disappoint, placing additional and unnecessary pressure on yourself, and eventually undermining your sobriety. You were more afraid of getting caught than you were of the more serious consequences of your actions. There are many things that are humorous about our drinking, but only in retrospect. Willingly playing around with our health and well being is not one of them.

You seem to have made a game of drinking while on benzos, rather than framing it is a potentially unintended suicide. No one cares about broken promises when the person who breaks the promise dies or suffers irreversible damage by virtue of his breaking the promise.

Keeping promises rarely "feels good." That's why we break them so easily. By lying about our drinking, hiding and minimizing the effects of our drinking, we render our promises meaningless. We trample over other people's trust. That's why breaking them is the ultimate act of bad faith, and why we need not only to put down the drink, but to change our lives, change ourselves, in order to achieve sobriety.

You chose to take a shortcut because you wanted to "feel good," and you now and will forever suffer the consequences of your decision until you get serious about your sobriety.

Finding "a shrink who makes u want to do the right thing" is not enough. You subvert your own sobriety by placing the responsibility for your thinking and your actions on someone else. This has clearly not worked for you, and it doesn't seem to matter whether or not your "shrink" made you "want to do the right thing" or not. You drank and, as you wrote, you've gone through this scenario with the same results on several occasions across many years. Why should your most recent episode be any different?

Life is hard. "Feeling good" -- maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain -- as a goal in life is a dangerous strategy for people who struggle with addictions, and which, for many of us, is the very thing that got us in trouble in the first place.

Put down the drink. Then you can start exploring with your shrink why it is that you reliably choose the more self-destructive path, and how it is that it became so easy for you to break your promises to yourself, how it is that you "lean toward keeping" your promises, rather than taking the necessary actions in order to save yourself.