adventures in AVRT
About a month ago, I read Trimpey's "Rational Recovery" and starting practicing AVRT (after about 15 months sober). I wanted to share my experiences with that.
I made a big plan as I was reading the book. My AV got really noisy in the days that followed -- and has continued to be noisy on and off this month. It tends to conjure up future scenarios in which drinking might somehow be justified -- such as, I get cancer and need/deserve to drink, or my husband dies so there's no one around to notice/care if I drink again, or I get a bad cold and can then drink half a bottle of cough medicine. It also likes to imagine scenarios in which I'm isolated -- on an out of town business trip, or holed up in my sailboat for a few days -- where I can drink and then go back home to sobriety, as if nothing had happened. These thoughts are annoying, but not seriously confusing, because they're so obviously desperate fantasies of the beast.
These thoughts are different than the ones I had my first year of sobriety (in which AA was my only method). During that year, I had fewer fantasies of drinking, but I had a lot of confusion about whether I was "really an alcoholic". At my worst, I was drinking 3 -4 glasses of wine a night (sometimes on top of a single painkiller), with no blackouts or big obvious consequences (yet). So I really wrestled a lot with whether or not I belonged in AA and was really an alcoholic, or whether I might somehow be able to moderate. I was really confused by these thoughts and very identified with them -- in other words, I thought they were real questions belonging to "me".
I can see now that those thoughts & that confusion were just the beast, very much objecting to my sobriety. I can see that whether or not I use the label "alcoholic", there has developed in me a beast that wants alcohol so badly, it is happy to imagine scenarios such as cancer or my husband dying, that might allow it to drink again!
If the beast is this loud, persistent and demanding, after "only" a 3-4 drink/day habit, how much louder would it be if I had continued drinking? It makes me glad I made the choice I did.
It hasn't necessarily been a comfortable month, but it has been an educational one.