Yikes! After writing an enormous response post, containing multiple quotes from the brilliant posters on my thread (to whom I haven't replied since my last post) I accidently lost it!
Therefore, to Delizidee, Freshstart, LBrain, Dwtb, Tursops, CelticZebra and Algorithm: Thankyou for your fantastic support, encouragement and words of wisdom!
I am transforming. As a massive procrastinator whilst under the influence of alcohol for years, I've an enormous list of tasks to address and it's daunting. I feel like a little girl thrown into an ex-addicts body. Out of my depth at times. But yet, at others, it's awesomely fantabulistic and the highs are massively larger than the muffled lows.
Occasionally the Beast kicks in with the opportunistic Addictive Voice, "Why don't your cut yourself a little slack. You've succeeded, you're now a normal drinker, no longer physically dependant. Let your hair down once in a while, like normal people, relax, chill out". My Beast remains a trier! But it's no match for me. I'm now wise to it's single minded path to destruction. I've chosen the opposite path: life.
Just want to recount my latest excursion. I attended a concert with my husband. I love concerts, but this is the first after years (alcohol bill didn't allow luxuries). I've never attended a concert sober. It was a historic group from my early twenties. I really did let my hair down, full concert mode. Dancing, waving arms, loud applauding, hooting, shouting more, more etc., at the finale.
My husband was concerned by my behaviour, he asked whether I'd started drinking. I was offended, but he explained that I was so uninhibited that he believed it was caused by alcohol. The irony is, when I attended concerts whilst drinking, I'd be inhibited (whilst secretly envying those outwardly enjoying themselves) because I didn't want to disclose how drunk I was!
This time, I was sober and my behaviour was the natural high, the exhilaration of liberation! The ability to listen to every guitar riff, each voice, watch the lighting show, all of it, filling my senses in full glorious technicolor.
With the interval came the stampeding feet to the various bars. I had a soft drink and watched people, noted the gulping of the first drink, then the second, the picking up of another in a plastic cup for the second half. The loud, repititive voices, the glazed eyes.
I am just so very grateful to this secular AVRT thread and its occupants. I was on the final slope down into the abyss and truthfully, I wondered at times, why I hadn't already died due to the huge amounts drank over such a lengthy period.
If a newcomer happens upon this thread, having found that other methods of stopping drinking haven't worked for them; then I urge you to suspend disbelief and try alternative methods. I did and I credit it with enabling myself to stop drinking.
Sadly, whilst I struggled to stop drinking for many years, I believed that the power to do so was outside myself. It was only when I realised that the power to stop drinking was within me, my own free-will, that I grasped that internal power by utilising Rational Recovery's AVRT, that I finally managed to save myself.
Onwards!