Hey vulcan,
For myself, I figured out after a while, I saw only what I wanted to see, when I was still drinking.
There were and are no answers for me to be had until I quit drinking and learned to just deal with that for awhile.
... crawl before you walk type thing.
When I am sober I can look at a lot of things I perceived as barriers for myself a lot more rationally.
I did a combined 12 weeks of outpatient/inpatient treatment.
You strip yourself of the outside world in inpatient treatment, but most importantly of all, you completely remove yourself from the addiction.
And you know what I learned?
Once I got sober, like real and earnestly sober, life wasn't that appealing.
It was scary. All the wreckage left behind, all the things I had lost and learning that the only way to get through life and be ok was to accept life on life's terms, NOT mine.
The jumping off point was putting distance between me and that first drink.
I stripped my soul bare and did some really intensive work on my recovery for over a year. It was hard. But, it was rewarding. Appealing, well that's in the eye of the beholder because everything you take out of life is what you make of it.
No amount of work or making sense of all the things that were wrong with me, with my life, and with the world around me was enough to keep me sober if I couldn't utilize the tools I had learned JUST TO KEEP ME SOBER.
And when I'm not sober, nothing makes sense. Life gets put on pause. Because it's a good way of getting away from dealing with life in our addict brains.
First we stop beating the crap out of ourselves by not abusing drugs and alcohol.
Then we can learn to deal with the rest.
6 weeks of sober intense inpatient treatment, I walked out of there pretty raw and nervous.
It's never enough until we're ready to throw denial out the door and really commit to shutting the door and dealing with life. We don't get to call all the shots.
I say this from a place of compassion and empathy and because I truly do care. I am hard headed, and stubborn, but at some point I got so sick that I had to take a leap of faith that something had to give for me to get it.
Have you thought of treatment? I'd say it was a lifesaver for me. Now I'd say that it was a big jumping off point because I'm definitely not out of the woods yet. There is a vast wealth of support and community and knowledge available to us if we are willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
But if we kid ourselves that life is going to be easy on the other side, we are surely setting ourselves up for a relapse, or an inability to hit the tipping point that gets us to put down the drink.
But you will find bit by bit, you're not alone, it's doable, and the more distance you put between you and your last drink, the stronger you will get, and the more work you do, the more you will get out of it.
Forgive me, I am not one for being good at short and to the point
You are among SO many friends here. Keep posting and reading. Try to keep an open mind. Don't give up. Don't be afraid of those who say it like it is. I once was, I got past it. You can too. Don't lose hope, don't lose faith, and don't ever give up on yourself.
An important thing to point out too is that... a lot of what I post, and other people post, is not only to share our experience, strength and hope, but to help reaffirm for ourselves what he have learned in this journey.
And journey it is, one that we will continue to learn and grow through.
Sobriety and recovery is not a destination. And after awhile, the things we hear over and over become important because it took us a long time to get drinking rooted so deeply into our brains. Time to dig up that useless, deep-rooted weed and start planting some better seeds, no?
