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Old 09-22-2017, 06:02 AM
  # 16 (permalink)  
Gottalife
12 Step Recovered Alcoholic
 
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: New Zealand
Posts: 6,613
Originally Posted by Anarock View Post
Not great. Step one is hard.
Hey Anarok, I appreciate your honest answers. It is possible you have more than one issue going on here, and one, depression, is something I don't have the experience or qualifications to help you with. The solution ther would lie with professionals and your complete honesty with them.

Alcoholism, and recovery is something is have some experience with, and I can relate very strongly with your original post. That black spot you describe is very much like an experience I had. If I think about it, most of my efforts at sobriety ended because life sober was so miserable.

The experience I am thinking of is when I was discharged from treatment. I found it incredibly hard to function, I got progressively more miserable and in the end couldn't get out of bed. I had let everything go. A nurse from the rehab visited and in his report, which I saw a year or two later in my medical file, described my living conditions as absolute squalor. He diagnosed depression and gave me some pills, which had no effect.

A well meaning friend suggested I try pot, as I was such an awful person on the booze. I had a puff, and within seconds a drink was down my neck, and another bender was underway. What I was suffering was what we in AA call the spiritual malady, more so than depression, though they are hard to tell apart. Alcohol was always my solution to that. That momentary and eventually elusive sense of ease and comfort which came from the first few drinks. The AD didn't work but the alcohol provided instant though temporary relief, before it began destroying me again.

Spiritual malady is another word for untreated alcoholism, and as long as I was on the wrong side of the steps, my alcoholism remained untreated, and I continued to drink. In the end it was the drinking that gave me step one. I sometimes say work on my first step started with my first drink. I had to be totally convinced that I was powerless over alcohol, and it took a long time to convince me of that fact.

However, until I was convinced there wasn't much reason to do anything about it. How could there be. When I came to see that I had a progressive terminal illness that always got worse, that would only end with me being locked up, covered up, or sobered up, when I really saw the seriousness of my situation, then step one became a no brainer. All it really does is identify the problem, and for some reason I was the last to see it.

Step two was a no brainer as well. Over the time of my drinking I had come to believe all sorts of things would fix me, like new town, new job, new girlfriend, counseling, rehab etc, and nothing had worked. The only thing left was this spiritual business with AA, and I had met some people through the meetings who seemed to have a real solution for me. So step two became my choice of a solution. It could have been anything, but in my case I had come to believe that it was at least possible that the same power that helped these folks could work for me too.

Having identified the problem and the solution, I made a decision in step 3, to put the solution into effect by taking the rest of the steps. From step five onward I never experienced that sober misery again. A whole new world opened up to me.

Notice I don't say after x months, or x meetings. I know a lot of people with many months and many meetings who are still miserable. My experience was that my progress in recovery was closely in sync with my progress in the steps. I got to step five after about six weeks, I would guess. And my life changed forever.

In your position, I drank. I had no solution, no insight, and could see no alternative. I had to learn the hard way. Maybe you don't. Perhaps you can see the truth of your situation. Maybe you need to find a sponsor who can move you on through the steps, and as your recovery progresses, so will your ability to deal with any other issues. Treatments for other disorders always seem to be more effective if the patient is sober.

All the best.
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