View Single Post
Old 01-29-2017, 09:57 PM
  # 17 (permalink)  
Clean30
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2017
Posts: 67
Originally Posted by vulcan30 View Post
Hello again,

One of the problems I'm facing when I try to stop drinking is missing it. The problem I’m having is that the more of those lonely miserable evenings I go through without drinking, the more I desire it. The thing is, I can grind through maybe two or three without alcohol, but come the third evening, it’s just too much. Not drinking on a string of lonely evenings is akin to breath holding, by the time that second or third lonely evening approaches, it’s like I’m gagging to surface.

The problem is for me, not drinking=torture, emptiness, misery, boredom, gluttony for punishment. I’ve put myself through the hell of enduring the gut-wrenching loneliness, I’ve had enough and I also feel that I’ve been ‘good’. It’s this that’s a major barrier.

The longer I've gone without alcohol, the more I feel I've been 'good'.

I think that the right question to ask is, how to make those alcohol-free days less painful. Grinding through on sheer willpower is clearly not a sustainable solution.

As I've rightly identified, the only solution is to get my needs met for the right sort of social contact, intimacy and activity. That's the only way to reduce the pain on those no alcohol days. The problem is, my situation is so painful, that those evenings of not drinking=horrible, don't want to go through that again' to my brain.

Has anyone had this problem? Feeling like stopping is depriving you?
I guess when the time comes to quit you will value that more than not.

Do you want to get old and look back and wonder where 10 or more years went as you partied them all away? Do you think you'll be an old man drinking and still parting? Can you picture yourself at an older age 10 or 20 years from now adding up all the booze you drank into the tens of thousands of dollars and being okay with this? Are you okay with sub-par health and a face that shows you drink too much? Trust me that face will show it in time.

I think the most important idea here is would you hang out with all your drinking friends while you are all sober? Could it even happen??

By deciding to party your life up and put your life on hold, many years later you will find yourself as if you did nothing with your life in that time. Maybe you did do something on the side here and there but you could have been sober and progressed your life forward instead of chuckling at a bar destroying yourself.

Hopefully you can imagine yourself at the bar all old and grey, money on the bar and nobody sitting around you because half of them died or they are young people you don't know and they think you are a drunk.

The drunken end is not better than sobriety. When you are ready you will quit. And those boring days will be filled with useful projects you task yourself with and the lonely nights can be filled with a friend who is as well sober and in control of their life.
Clean30 is offline