StewartUK

Alright folks, although I dont post much here I do drop in every single day to read the posts from others.

Lately i keep going through spurts, 3 weeks/4 weeks no booze then bang im back again. It's so tiring im back at a 7 days and feel fine, i keep going through the process of am i an alcoholic? am i not? does it matter? is my drinking a problem? It makes me feel miserable when I do drink so it must be problem, enough to stop surely? What do i do when i stop? i dont wanna be the guy at parties that has to explain 100 times why he doesnt drink, maybe everyone feels this miserable when they have a hangover? so why do i obsess over alcohol when im trying not to drink it, is it because im an alcoholic or because im trying so hard not to drink that i cant stop thinking about it? is it the OCD that i struggled with since i was a kid just coming back in another form and if so does that mean im an alcoholic or just obsessing?

Thats more or less a snapshot of my brain 24 hours a day at the moment.

Norther

Non-alcoholics just don't ask themselves these questions with so much urgency, if at all: so I have been told. It never even occurs to them that they might be alcoholic. I too have an underlying psychiatric condition: it has gotten immeasurably better since I quit. It may be that you have very bright days ahead, if you can quit for some period of time. It's a disease that can be banished from our lives, though not cured: we're lucky in having a disease whose effects can be dealt with. All you have to do initially is not drink and, I would say, go to meetings. Best of luck to you.

Dee74

Hi Stewart

I was pretty much like you - I'd go a few days - feel good, think that I could feel this good so soon I must be overreacting...and start the process again....

I thought about drinking alcohol, or not drinking alcohol, or getting better from my last bender constantly.

Didn't ever strike me that this was perhaps not normal at all.

I didn't want to have to explain 1000 times why I wasn't drinking either...I didn't have any problem with being the guy who passed out or who was embarrassing or who vomited though...that was just unfortunate....

I didn't want to be a drunk...but I simply didn't want to give up drinking.

Call it stubborness, call it pride, call it foolishness - I wasted a lot of years trying to do the impossible.

My life is good and I have been at peace since the day I accepted I was an alcoholic and stopped drinking.

D

NEOMARXIST

Sounds like you're giving it a lot of your time. That is your anser there really. Plus the fact that you've been a member of a site for recovering alcoholics and addicts since 2006. That's another stark indicator.

Unless you can accept your alcoholism then you're probably going to be stuck in this same rut forever.

You sound like you are projecting your thinking. I used to do that a lot too and it would get me back into a drink after a week or two. You only need to concentrate just on today. Not about parties in the future that may or may not happen.

Don't drink just for today and try to keep your thinking about life rooted firmly in the day too. Otherwise your head is just racing overtime and it will wear you out. I used to feel like I had done ten rounds with Tyson when my head used to go. But I got through it.

I accept that certain things have to change now I live my life in recovery. But that's OK because I'm an alcoholic and addict so my recovery has to come first. Without my recovery I'm a dead man walking anyway. I would lose everything very quickly.

Accept your alcoholism and move forward and live recovery. IT truly is great to be free of all that mental obsession and turmoil. It ain't healthy. Of course you may not be an alcoholic but drink is obviously affecting your life negatively.

artsoul

I agree with the really great posts here. I think we hang on to the hope that we're not alcoholics so that we don't have to get sober. Denial is a hallmark of this disease, and we've all had it. There are people who drink too much, have a hangover and think "I'll never do that again" and they don't.

We alcoholics tend to associate with other heavy drinkers, so we're not aware that very few people drink much, if at all. Once you get sober, you can see that obsessing over drinking and partying every weekend is not a normal way to live at all.

Maybe you could write down all the positives and negatives of your drinking, so you can see it in black and white and it's not all swimming around in your head.

It takes a little work, but you can get sober for good, too!

Peter G

This is so true artsoul, and so worth a mental note. When we graduate to "Serious Boozer" fame, it's hard as he!! to believe that not everyone drinks copious amounts of alcohol, and almost impossible to picture that MOST hardly ever drink.

Strange that in a world of priorities, consuming booze should be less important than Britney Spears latest bikini wax, yet we alcoholics obsess as if it's more important than our own heart beat. Deep in our own denial, we somehow accept this perverted point of view as the normal thought process.

Man this bloody disease is foul.

hendershot

I hate AA platitudes, but they often have some truth. I am reminded of "Don't drink. Don't think. Go to meetings." Pretty good advice really. It sounds like your mind is running around in circles trying to think yourself out of your troubles. Unfortunately, these aren't generally problems that thinking can cure. I'd suggest giving sobriety a shot, a real honest try. Stop worrying about why you are the way you are and just go to meetings and work a recovery program. See where you are at after a few sustained months of real sobriety, if things aren't where you like you can always go back to drinking .

StewartUK

I think after 25 years of living im genuinely only now starting to notice that people outside of my own social circle don't drink the amounts that i assume they do and that in other situations it would be shameful. The UK culture and university has alot to answer for but more importantly my own denial has more to answer for than anything. Im dreadfully sick of myself stopping and starting to the point where going for soberiety once again feels like another huge daunting hill but i dont think id ever forgive myself for not giving it my absolute best shot.

ninja7

Well said!

I also realized that people even in my own social circle don't drink the amounts that i assume they do. I thought many people hung over everyday and just hiding.

NEOMARXIST

[QUOTE=StewartUK;2618327]The UK culture and university has alot to answer for but more importantly my own denial has more to answer for than anything. QUOTE]

Alright mate. Well said. As alcoholics we will use excuse after excuse and blame other people/institutions/mental health/society etcetcetc for why we drink. I used to do just that. In my self-pity and victim role that I was in sitting on the park bench drinking Carlsberg Special brew cursing the UK's binge-drinking culture and my mental health and just so p*ssed-off with myself for messing up my last 5 years of life. I was using booze as my solution to life.

I stopped blaming and looking for excuses and began to live in the solution and not in the problems. The only way is to move forwards one day at a time and keep sober just for today.

Peace

StewartUK

Very true, very true.

Toronto68

Stewart, I know you are not longwinded with your posts, but when you say you are reading here a lot, what is happening? Are there subjects that make more relevant sense to you than others? I know having a binge cycle is one of them, blacking out is another. Something tells me you should interact on topics more, but I am guessing.

StewartUK

Hi Toronto, I think the reason I tend to be so short in my posts is that I am so sick and tired of going through this in my own head it almost pains me to put it down onto the forum if that makes sense?

Your absoloutely right about the bingeing and blackouts, that's what I relate to so i find it hard to relate to other stories of not drinking for today and starting a life without alcohol because large chunks of my life are conducted without alcohol involved. That's not to say that alcohol hasn't had an equally damaging effect on my life as anyone else, im sure it has it just happens that its in a different way. As stupid as this sounds I still feel reluctant to admit that im powerless over it and I guess i try to justify anytime ive drank by other reasons but whether they're valid or not doesnt really matter i guess because bottom line is I have problems with drinking and as you can see fro my joining date theyve been going on for 4 years.

I dont know where to go right now, im sure ill accumulate some sober time again but its not a long term solution. My dad is an a true state right now from alcoholism and it scares me to death, to be honest im pretty scared myself about the damage ive already done to myself.

MyPaperAnchor

Stewart I really relate to what you’ve posted here. My entire social circle and life revolved around drinking and going out; even when the truth was right there staring me in the face I still denied it. The thought of life without booze was too scary. WTF would I do with myself? What would I tell people?

I was a binge drinker. I’d be sober for couple two or three weeks then I’d drink for an entire weekend. Toward the end of my drinking career that didn’t mean Friday and Saturday night, it meant around the clock Thursday night to Sunday night. The 4 day bender was enough to put me in to DT’s when I’d stop to go back to work, so eventually I began showing up in ER’s due to heart arrhythmias, tremors, and overwhelming panic attacks.

I won’t get into my entire story, but the main thing I want to relate here is that once I made the decision to quit, I was shocked at how many people were accepting and even glad that I did. These are even folks I used to drink with. Not all, but many; certainly wayyy more than I’d thought.

In closing, quitting hasn’t been anything like I expected, and not yet have I woken up on a Saturday morning and thought to myself, “man I really wish I would’ve gotten wasted last night”.

Toronto68

Well, I guess I can see why the broken frequency of consumption can facilitate a denial about alcoholism. According to a documentary I saw called Rain in My Heart, you can have someone in an emerg room defining an alcoholic as someone who drinks every day and that same person dying two days later.

I don't think I remember you mentioning your father dealing with it before. I do remember you having joined a long time ago, and that was one of the first things I remarked to you.

My denial was different. I knew (got a glimpse) about the powerlessness in 1996, when my everyday consumption became apparent. Before that, it was broken up more and involved other people most of the time (bars and parties). But the self-knowledge definitely wasn't enough to be worried enough about it, since I kept going. I stopped for brief 2-week stints about 2 or 3 times between 1996 and 2002. Any other time, it would've been a couple of days, if I was too sick to drink. Extremely rare though to be too sick to drink or smoke cigarettes. My only real quit that I can see is last November. But all the way up till last November I would identify with alcoholics (get teary watching a fiction about someone's addiction, for example), and I would just drink on top of it (like the gesture with the ears covered and singing "lalalala"). To me, it is like having curly hair vs straight hair - but it's still hair on a human being. I see you as probably the same as me for the alcoholism, only we've got different manifestations of it. Another demonstration of this is our presence here: I told myself I was an alcoholic for a long time and discussed it with certain people too yet was not here; you, by contrast, have not necessarily articulated that you are one yet you started to initiate use of this site long before me. Different, but how different, in other words.

Drinking to the point of snuffing out...It's an awful thing.

I guess by wanting you to talk more, it reassures me to see you do it, because I worry about you sometimes, like an internet uncle wannabe, ha ha. I can't do more than put words on the screen though. I hope you will look into some ways out of the drinking that you are studying.

NEOMARXIST

I too was a binge-drinker. The periods in between the drinking were worse in some ways than actual comedowns/hangovers from the binges. Because all of the stuff you're talking about would be whizzing around my head too.

Also I was just waiting for my next binge. I wouldn't be able to think about anything else (it was always in the back of my mind) and the thought of not being able to have a binge that I 'deserved' used to depress me terribly. Like what would be the point of living without being able to get wasted?

I am so glad I accepted myself as an alcoholic and decided to live in the solution. It is nice to have relative peace of mind.

All The Best

loveon2legs

I was a binge drinker...then it turned into every other day.... tried "controlled" drinking...I knew I was powerless over alcohol when I was arrested for DUI in January....and even at first I would never admit I was an alcoholic...I just "had a problem" I know without a doubt...Hi I'm Liz...I'm an alcoholic...very liberating......

NEOMARXIST

Yer, I always enjoy saying it at an AA meeting. I remember the first batch of AA meetings I went to I never introduced myself as an alcoholic, Needless to say I went back out drinking again.

Bored3

It is said that alcohol is a drug that can take over your life and you become the slave to it as it empowers you, that is what alcohol is doing to you now without you even consuming it.

I think you have answered your own question. There is no joy you are getting out of alcohol, just misery. Don't let alcohol take over your mind and the next time you are thinking about drinking, ask yourself how much happier you will be with it than without it.

intention

Hi Stewart

I'm sorry to hear about your Dad. Unfortunately you have learned in a very personal way what happens with untreated alcoholism. It just gets progressively worse.

If you already have caused damage to your body and brain you have a chance to heal yourself if you stop drinking now but there comes a point where the damage is irreversible.

I couldn't stay sober until I admitted and accepted I was an alcoholic. You know there is help, if you can't do this alone. Take care.