No one believes I'm an alcoholic
Member
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: New York, NY
Posts: 12
I spent way too much time in early sobriety worrying about this. And people would reply to me that they had the same problem, that they were so good at hiding their drinking that no one knew.
The problem with that was that I didn't really hide my drinking (except for the occasional meeting my husband at bar, chugging a scotch before he got there and then ordering a drink upon his arrival pretending it was my first, or secretly re-filling my wine glass at the parents house in the kitchen while everyone else is in the den). But other than that, everyone KNEW EXACTLY how much I drank, and they still didn't think it was enough to qualify me for "alcoholism".
Then I realized, a lot of those people are most likely alcoholics themselves.
And, most of them don't see me at my worst. They didn't know that I blacked out three or four times a week and that when I did black out I would do or say awful and mean things to my husband late at night and home alone. My husband bore the brunt of it, not those other people.
And even if he (husband) weren't in the picture, they were not there when I woke up in the morning. In my head, alone. With my guilt and shame for whatever it is I had done the night before that I could not even remember that I had done. And so at the end of the day I stopped caring what other people thought. I knew that I never wanted to feel that way again, and that the only way to guarantee that was to not get drunk. And the only way for me to not get drunk is to not have that first drink, because 9 out of 10 times I cannot stop when I start. And the only way to not do that is to go to meetings. SO that's what I do. And in a month I will be coming up on a year!
Anyway, good luck, and don't worry about what those other people say!
I heard someone say in a meeting once: "The elevator is only going in one direction: down. But you can get off at any time. You can stay on for the entire ride, or you can get off now, but it's still going down and it's not going back up."
The problem with that was that I didn't really hide my drinking (except for the occasional meeting my husband at bar, chugging a scotch before he got there and then ordering a drink upon his arrival pretending it was my first, or secretly re-filling my wine glass at the parents house in the kitchen while everyone else is in the den). But other than that, everyone KNEW EXACTLY how much I drank, and they still didn't think it was enough to qualify me for "alcoholism".
Then I realized, a lot of those people are most likely alcoholics themselves.
And, most of them don't see me at my worst. They didn't know that I blacked out three or four times a week and that when I did black out I would do or say awful and mean things to my husband late at night and home alone. My husband bore the brunt of it, not those other people.
And even if he (husband) weren't in the picture, they were not there when I woke up in the morning. In my head, alone. With my guilt and shame for whatever it is I had done the night before that I could not even remember that I had done. And so at the end of the day I stopped caring what other people thought. I knew that I never wanted to feel that way again, and that the only way to guarantee that was to not get drunk. And the only way for me to not get drunk is to not have that first drink, because 9 out of 10 times I cannot stop when I start. And the only way to not do that is to go to meetings. SO that's what I do. And in a month I will be coming up on a year!
Anyway, good luck, and don't worry about what those other people say!
I heard someone say in a meeting once: "The elevator is only going in one direction: down. But you can get off at any time. You can stay on for the entire ride, or you can get off now, but it's still going down and it's not going back up."
Member
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Colorado Springs CO
Posts: 889
I had higher power issues too. Things got bad enough that I put them aside to try this. I was fortunate enough to get a sponsor who gave me instructions for the second step that helped resolve them. I wrote about my "God ideas", and I found out a lot about my thinking. I still hold many (probably most) of the beliefs about religion that I had before I got sober, but my motivations are different now and that makes an immense amount of difference. The "God thing" is given an interesting treatment on page 12 of Bill's story in the big book, maybe you ought to give it a read. It's also probably a good idea to worry about the second step when it's time to do the second step. What's to lose? It's not like you're going to wind up in an airport passing out literature or in Guyana drinking kool-aid.
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