Hi Tatsy! Congrats on making it back to sobriety!
One major thing about becoming sober and staying that way is that simply stopping drinking is not enough. Stopping drinking is just the first step, and all of us who have long-time sobriety know that. The follow-through steps are what a whole bunch of alcoholics don't do, with the results being that long-time sobriety and permanent sobriety are never reached.
After stopping drinking, the next parts involve rebuilding who you are. Only you can do that, and it takes work. This is where others help you do this, and you have to find others who are trustworthy who know what they are doing to assist you. I can tell you, "it ain't always easy, folks!" You have to work at it constantly, and you have to take the point of view that it isn't a drudge, a hardship, and a pain between the hip pockets. It's okay to take a break from working on that job once in awhile, but don't take a break via a drink. You are doing it for yourself, and you must view this job as something for your benefit. If you don't view this as something for your benefit, you will continue to slip back into being an active alcoholic over, and over, and over.
To put it even more plainly, you have to get the things out of your life that are triggers for drinking, and you can't go around looking for things outside of yourself because they aren't there. We all have nasty things going on around us, we all had nasty things done to us, and there will be nasty things in our future. What we have to do is get over this stuff and what it did to us, which isn't easy. This is where others help us. These can involve very real medical problems. Got one leg shorter than the other? You aren't alone, those others are not alcoholics. You get the idea I'm talking about. I had it rough when I was a kid, and I've been sober for coming up on 22 years because I actively work on staying sober. I'm still working on getting better and better, it never ends, and I have always viewed what I'm doing as a very interesting and fun thing, never a pain in the butt. I LIKE myself. You have to get into this mindset to stay dry.
Lautca
7971 days