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Old 04-20-2015, 12:04 AM
  # 131 (permalink)  
ZaBoozer
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Join Date: Apr 2015
Location: Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
Posts: 1,371
Morning all,

Well it is the start of day fourteen for me. I made it through the unlucky (for some) number thirteen with minimal hassles.

Physically, I feel great this morning. Sleep seems to be coming easier now. I am able to drop off almost at will. I woke after two hours last night, but turned over and dropped straight off for another four hours. It seems as though I am finally getting the edge on the insomnia monster. The convulsions were also absent last night. I hope they are gone now too. I did not wake with a headache, but it did start to creep in after my bath. I suspect that this is another symptom that is now on its way out. I took something for it just in case. The burning under the skin on the side of my face is still a numbness this morning. So from now on I will refer to it as that. It is just noticeable. The hand shakes are here this morning, but as sated in an earlier post, I really have to look for them.

Mentally, I am as sharp as a tack. I have already managed to finish a huge load of work this morning, and I have only been here two hours. My mind is clear and focused yet again. I think the rate of improvement will now slow down rapidly so that the change will not be as noticeable without really sitting down and thinking about it.

Emotionally, I am in a reasonably good place this morning. I alluded to it last night when I said that I might have been wrong with my initial premise that the moods were not caused by the AV. The more I have read some of the AA literature and the more thought I have given to it, I must conclude that some of these emotions are indeed caused by the AV. Let's see, we have pride, anger, greed, lust and envy. If I think back to my emotions last week, I could put each emotion within one of the categories mentioned above. To further test this, I have been using a tool called AVRT (Addictive Voice Recognition Technique) for the last two days, to cope when hit by an influx of emotion. In my case, 99% of the time the emotion evaporates within seconds by using the abovementioned tool. This is not to say that all the emotions are caused by the AV, but a large percentile of them are for me at this stage of recovery. I understand that it is a trick to get us to feel sorry for ourselves. When we feel sorry for ourselves, it is very easy for the AV to convince us to take that drink. We feel sorry and blame someone innocent for reverting back to drink - look what you made me do. You drove me back to drink by not caring. Sound familiar?

Through reading and some research, I have learnt that we need to guard against certain thoughts and emotions. I am not going to throw the BB(Big Book) at people. I do believe that there is much good therein. I do like the principals of combating pride, anger, lust, greed and envy with their counterpart emotions/actions. In doing this the last two days, coupled with AVRT, I have managed to banish those emotions fairly quickly that were induced by the AV. I did not realise how close I was to setting myself up for a future failure.

So, enough seriousness for a Monday morning. I am sure we will all have enough of that at work.

Be safe and be strong.

Cheers

ZAB
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