[bimini] "I understand being scared. I wasn't scared of sobriety, I was scared of my own thoughts. They get better, it does take some time."
Being scared of your own thoughts is a good way to put it. I think we have become conditioned to believe we are controlled by our thoughts. For years and years, we have followed the pattern of thinking we need a drink to actually taking that drink. Think drink - Take drink. Think drink - Take drink. Intellectually, I knew my thinking couldn't control my behavior, but I knew that the thought always preceded the drink. And my brain pathways seem to have been accustomed to that.
So when we finally quit, one of those thoughts can be quite disturbing. They were for me, and even when I committed to life long sobriety, those thoughts continued to scare me. About 6 months into sobriety, an even scarier thing happened. I had one of those thoughts and for a moment, it seemed utterly harmless and reasonable. Seeing how easy it would be to fall prey to such a harmless thought scared me even more. It was then that I decided to stop being scared and simply think a thought like that through, regardless of how harmless it seemed. That made things a lot more comfortable after that, and I quit being scared.