24hrsAday

i am interested in hearing some others opinions on this.. (i just passed 3 years 8 months sober) i have heard people in A.A. say time does Not Matter. i disagree.. though there is no cure i believe your amount of sobriety Does Matter! i am Still Learning Every Day and Don't Have all the answers..

NEOMARXIST

I take my recovery 'one day at a time'. However undoubtedly I feel stronger for every extra day that I remain sober. For every difficult experience that I successfully work through and remain sober for then I gain in strength and self-worth. Clarity of thought only comes with sober time gained through successful positive recovery.

Time is a great healer (providing you put the work in. Sometimes the work is merely going to bed sober!)

peace

kiki5711

What do you mean time does or don't matter? Matter for what? To start drinking again?

least

My amount of sober time DOES matter to me 'cause the longer I'm sober, the stronger I become and the more I want to stay sober.

tooling

I will only assume here since I'm not far into being sober.

In my life I have been sober for many years, and that was my under 30 years. i would get drunk for a little bit, like a couple weeks then stop for months maybe a year or two.

After 30 is a different story.

Anyways, of course the longer away from alcohol the body heals and its chemical balance goes back to normal. But the desire to give up and basically put yourself to sleep cold drunk may never leave. It might be a personal choice of state of mind for people.

coffeenut

I was a drunk for 30 years. That mattered. It's why I finally got my life together.

I'm sober over 2 years, now. It matters to me. I'm dang proud of it. I want that time to grow and grow and grow. I want to celebrate it...daily! Yes, it matters.

If it didn't matter, I'd still be drinking.

I'm editing this to add: But no matter how much sober time I have, I'm still as much of an alcoholic as the person who just quit drinking today. It doesn't make me better than anyone else. Is that what the AA thought could be?

suki44883

I'm thinking what they mean in AA by Time doesn't matter is that regardless of how long you may have, you are still one drink away from being right back where you were. I could be wrong, but that's what it means to me.

tooling

This could be it. I heard this in a class I had to attend for my dui.

Basically saying the alcoholic will start back up where he left off. I think it's because we know how to drink and stomach it. We won't go back to the days of drinking 3 beers and getting all giddy and have fun. No, we will eventually pound them until we are in sleep mode again in short order.

TheEnd

I am very new to sobriety, so counting up the time helps remind me how far I've come. I would imagine that after a long period of time like 15 or 20 yrs that not drinking really isn't your problem anymore, so it probably wouldn't matter as much, but you would still be happy with the achievement you have accomplished. This is why I think you earn so many chips during your fist year in sobriety and only really celebrate every subsequent year there afterwards.

What really matters most to me is how long I go without messing up my life and causing serious problems, and since that seems to go hand and hand with drinking for me, I guess in a way it does.

Sudz No More

For me, I didn't know what it was like to stay sober until I failed a few times. I have a clearer vision today of what it will take to stay sober because of relapsing.

When I quit for the first time back in December 2009 it was the first time I had been sober in over 15 years. It was new to me and I didn't know how to handle it, making a few mistakes has allowed me to see the difference and want to try and stay sober.

LexieCat

I think it matters for at least a couple of reasons. One is that continued growth builds on what we have already done. Another is that when I hear someone say they have been sober five years, ten years, twenty-five years, I know that long-term sobriety is possible--the program does work.

RobbyRobot

Yeah, sober time matters. Its different for all of us of course because sobriety is such a personal journey it becomes useless to compare a persons one year with someone elses twenty-nine years simply because sobriety is not a destination in itself. Like has already been said in this thread, we're all just one drink away from our alcoholism destroying our one day of sobriety, and since today is all we have, we're all on the same playing field notwithstanding our sobriety "time"

So yeah, sure it matters because the combined times of all the personal sober experiences over my years validates my alcoholism and defines my spiritual life today. I am the sum of my experiences drunk or sober meaning the more time of either, then the more the "times" of my experiences. The quality of those experiences are purely of a personal quality, naturally. I don't want to go back to year one, LOL. I really want to keep moving along, just like a rolling stone.

Robby

24hrsAday

i feel it Matters Because i am Slowly Healing every day i stay sober...

Toronto68

I have a mindset that is similar to what has already been said. I haven't got a year yet (but that will be upon us in no time), and the added time is important to me. It doesn't feel the same as when I was just starting to count weeks and months though ("if I could just get to this number, that would be great").

What I do see in that statement from some AA people you've met (that time sober doesn't really matter) is that, yes, it does only take one drink for things to be ruined, and many of us have that in common. I also notice that when I take a look at some of my journal entries that something I said not that long ago sounded greener than it should be. In other words, if in my mind I thought I was more mature in my sober thinking by X date, I was actually less so, and I was feeling uncertain or timid or fragile with this new world of mine more recently than I would have guessed. So I bear that in mind, that I am still learning and adapting.

You could also compare it to age and its relation to wisdom. Normally people seem wiser as they get older, but some people are not ones to impart wisdom.

There are times when I am feeling negative and don't give a care about how much time I've got, but that sulking attitude passes; and it ultimately does matter to me enough to know how long ago the first day of sobriety was. It feels good to be able to think, out of the blue, any day, that I am doing something right.

EricL

No, to me time doesn't matter at all. All that matters is that today I found a solution to my problem. I know plenty of people with significant amounts of time that have no solution in their life.

For me, it's all about what I am doing today, the spiritual growth I am experiencing today. I don't accumulate a bank account of sobriety that I can draw upon when I need it-the actions I took over the past years means nothing if I'm not doing anything today.

Does it give me hope to see people with longterm sobriety.... sure. What gives me more hope though is being able to see that new guy come in shaking and scared, and watch him latch onto this solution we found and have his life revolutionized by god, have that obsession removed.

Time to me is fairly arbitrary.

CarolD

For my answer.....please check out my signature line

murrill

Does being sober longer necessarily mean you have all the answers? Not at all. I think there is value in letting people--newcomers, especially--know that it works. But does someone with 25 years have "better" sobriety than a person with 10 years, based on time alone? Hardly. I do think that it can be helpful to know where people are in the first few years: It gives us an idea of where they are, of the issues they may be facing. It can be a starting place for a conversation.

bellakeller

My sober time means so much more to my family and friends than it does me.

Che

I don't like counting the days, I just know the day I quit. I would have to look at my calendar to see how many days have gone by. I think the more specific you get about it, the more obsessed you'll be about it, which makes it harder to enjoy life.

If there were a resume to be a human being that I had to hand in before my creation, I would put 'non-drinker' on it, but I wouldn't put 'sober time' on it. To me the former is much more important. Who I am today matters most. Not who I am tomorrow (I'll improve such and such later) or who I was yesterday (I can't believe I did that I should just crawl in a hole and die)... Just what I am doing now.

Tommyh

of course it matters to me and my family
and a few others I know