Awesome, AO! It's such a delight to follow your progress here
With regard to the shame, I usually wonder about it in a similar way we often do about depression (which is no surprise as depression typically involves strong elements of shame). The chicken and the egg. Which was first, the shame or the drinking? In other words, are our shameful feelings the consequences of our drinking behaviors, reaction to them -- or did they pre-exist so that it's one of the features we tend to self-medicate? My opinion is that it depends on the person perhaps.
I am personally not so prone to shame and definitely don't recall being that way before drinking became a problem. For me it's more guilt that tends to color everything, and that became enormous when I was drinking, so much so by the end that I believe it was probably the strongest driving force for me to get sober finally: I could just no longer face and live with the consequences of my actions and what I perceived as a gigantic dissonance between my values and my actions. It keeps coming back now again when I think about what I may have done to myself with all the self-destructive behaviors in my life and how it still affects me, and more than just me. In my case, these feelings are the ones that I am very prone to, that relate to consequences. That I deliberately corrupted what was originally good about me. I never thought or felt strongly that something was probably wrong about me
a priori, even though when I think about it more deeply, there probably was... like genetic predispositions. But I don't tend to find that disturbing, actually more like stuff I can potentially build strategies upon if I am aware of them. But the guilt coming from the consequences of my deliberate actions can drive me nuts at times and for me this is what I need to work on in sobriety.
Just writing this as an example for how diverse we may be... There have been a few great discussions on shame vs guilt here on SR also previously.
Wonderful post and very thought provoking, thank you