pennywistle

In the last couple of years I have met and reunited with some people who were in A.A. and went back to 'normal drinking'. This happened today when I went to visit an old friend who was my biggest sober cheerleader when they were in the program, but once we started talking catching up, my friend very nonchalantly talked about how they like to have a couple beers after work every once in awhile. Needless to say I was pretty shocked, and felt really let down because I initially went to this person hoping for some recovering A. to recovering A. support, and also because this person usually landed in jail when every time they drank.
My friend seemed really healthy and happy today. I don't understand!
I'm guessing it's just a matter of time?
It did not make me in the least jealous or thinking that it was possible for me to drink alcohol like a normal person, in fact it just made my resolve to stay quit even stronger, but I don't get it.

bcboy

Hey Penny

I can not speak for your friend and it could be that she might have been a abuser of alcohol vs full blown alcoholic. And is now able to moderate her drinking to a few beers every once in a while.

Glad you did not use her as an excuse to try the moderation game. Once you have that resolve firmly in place like you do, life will for sure get easier as time goes on.

Be happy in the person that you are discovering inside.

It is so worth the fight

Antiderivative

Very few select alcoholics can go back to "normal" drinking. It will depend on many factors, especially how much you abused alcohol and how far down you slipped. However, I believe taking the risk of picking up and trying this excercise after you been sober for awhile GREATLY exceeds the rewards.

Who knows? Your friend may have never been an alcoholic, but a problem drinker. I don't know him well enough to pass an opinion. Then again, he also may be an alcoholic who is rationalizing, minimizing, and lying to you about his drinking. Who knows, he may slip hard in the future and continue his old drinking habits. Or he may not. This is all speculation on my part.

I agree 100% with bcboy. I am glad that you didn't use his drinking as an excuse to pick up. It certainly would tempt many recovering alcoholics. It is very cool that it strengthened your resolve.

I know I am pickled. I can't ever go back to being a cucumber. In fact, I never had the desire to be a cucumber. Having a couple of beers never appealed to me. I drank to get drunk and it caught up to me.

artsoul

Your post reminds me of me - I was just like your friend, all involved in AA and recovery and then decided to go back to drinking socially after a few years (made some new musician-type friends and wanted to be a part of the scene). I managed to control my drinking for a while (with those telltales binges that I tried to hide or explain away). Eventually, though, it was back to drinking alone and isolated from the world.

I went to treatment (again) and did everything all over again (90 in 90, steps, etc.) and got 4 years in recovery and said "hey - I'm doing so well, let's just try social drinking again."

You guessed it - same results. I was drinking a bottle a day in secret, yet telling family and friends I just enjoyed a glass of wine occasionally. I wonder now what they were thinking...... geez.

So...... based on my experience and the experience of others, you have every reason to be skeptical. I'm just glad it didn't change your own commitment to sobriety. Good for you for staying strong!

least

I tried to moderate my drinking too many times but never could. I can't speak for your friend but I hope her drinking doesn't lead you to try the same experiment. And my drinking was never 'moderate' cause I always drank to get drunk...

LaFemme

Like everyone else I think its great you didn't use this person as an excuse to drink

I think its hard enough for me to figure out my own life...everyone needs to walk their own path and I try not to think about it to much!

mikel60

The way I feel right now is that if I was told I could drink in moderation...I wouldn't want to. In sobriety I've discovered that I don't like the bar scene, I prefer watching sports with mty family rather than with a gang of foul mouthed louts (of which I was once the loudest and foulest), and life is much better sober.

I realize that things can change, but for me, for now, sober is most definitely better! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me sobriety or give me death!

Apologies to Patrick Henry

Mike

Kmber2010

Penny, I have found that it is best to live and let live. I see folks do things that are negative or have the negative potential if you will but I can only wish them well.

For me....I can't moderate (proven history there) and like Mike shared.....I don't want to now. I don't want alcohol in my life because I have seen the devastation and I just don't want it. End of story - no fancy explanation.

Now I have plenty of folks who drink around me.....even had a non alcoholic pal who began having some pretty negative consequences due to her drinking. She knows I'm in recovery and I said....there is an answer here. You can just stop drinking. She said yeah....good idea. Some time passed where she would yap about having a few here and there before she described a very bad situation as a result of her drinking. What could I say? Not sure why she rambled about her drinking adventures to me since she knows I am recovery but I again offered support and finally.....I closed the door on that friendship. For other reasons as well......she was unhealthy for me and I didn't need that in my life.

I am glad you stayed the course and I have seen folks drift in and out of my life. What has seen me through is my recovery and continued work.

All the best!!

Isaiah

It might just go to show how little we really do know about alcoholism. We can't (in a technical sense) diagnose it, you can't catch it in an MRI, so it's hard to really know when or how it can go into remission.

But I know if I get overwhelmed with "why not me?" then chances are I'm still as much of an alcoholic as ever. The irony is that if I was capable of drinking normally then I probably would have little desire to actually do so. Just keep telling myself that I am not suffering for being sober.

Good job not letting it throw you off your square. Envy that lead to drinking would probably just end in the usual disaster.

ZZworldontheweb

pennywhistle, actually, posts like yours are VERY RARE on forums like these. They are vastly outnumbered be posts from people who are either abstaining entirely, have relapsed into active alcoholism, or know people in one of those two categories. I take this as an indication that very few people can go back to moderate drinking.

Your friend may well be a statistical aberration. Or, in all honesty, she could be lying about how much she's drinking. Alcoholics never do THAT, right?

TheEnd

There are many addictions in the world, food, alcohol, sex, drugs, and exercise just to name a few. People who are addicted to food don't give up eating, people who are addicted to sex, don't give up having sex. Alcohol is one of those things that people seem to feel that you have to give it up forever when you cross a certain barrier.

Why is that?? As far as I know there are no research studies to back this theory up, so why do we feel that when someone is an alcoholic that they can never go back to drinking again. If someone had some other underlying problems that caused their drinking to get out of control, then once they fix those problems, why can't they go back to drinking like people go back to having sex.

Just something to think about, I'm not saying either way if it's possible or not. I know of people that have been out of control crazy alcoholics and they went back to drinking after years of abstinence and they are doing quite fine I guess they had a stronger desire to be a normal drinker than most. I don't have a desire to be 2 drink guy, that's just not me right now, and that may never be me, but I won't begrudge someone for being able to do it or wanting to do it. It's human nature to want to give ourselves pleasure and we have to all admit, alcohol at one point in our life was pleasurable.

So if someone goes back to normal drinking, more power to them, but that doesn't mean it's for everyone.

Nyte Byrd

Well, perhaps either they were truly not really alcoholics or perhaps they are just foolings themselves. But as anyone who is really sober in AA knows, there is no 'going back'.

While some may be able to tell you that it sounds as if no 'harm' is coming from it, ask them this one question.....
'how is it benefitting them in their life?'. Does it reap financial gain? Does it improve their health? Has it improved their relationships? Do their wives or husbands say to them, "sure, go up to the bar, you go have a good time with your friends, while I stay home with OUR children."

Good chance, they don't have an answer for that! And keep in mind, when someone is actively in their addiction or alcoholism, 'honesty' is not exactly synonymous with their character anymore, so who can say what the truth is and what the lies are you are being told about their present drinking habits. You are probably not with them 7 x 24.
And if you spend too much time with them, you would probably be jeopardizing your own sobriety in the process.
I would strongly consider your intentions of 'reuniting' with them for any prolonged period of time unless they wish to meet with you at a meeting.

And better chances are, that, given time, they will find themselves back in the same spot that got them into AA in the first place. But some of us have to learn from our own mistakes. Some are lucky. They get to learn from others'.

Don't fall for the lies. Good luck to you.

sailorjohn

My my my. It seems that you are saying precisely that, even offering anecdotal evidence to back up your argument.

And this is something you learned in AA perhaps? Have you ran these thoughts by your sponsor yet?

If you had done a little more research-pick up a book and read it-you'll discover that the opposite is true, there are countless studies that prove that alcoholism is irreversible.

Good luck.

DayTrader

Maybe they weren't a real alcoholic in the first place and just needed a "cooling off" phase to get their lives back in order.

My experience though (and hopefully some of the folks with decades in recovery will respond here as well) is that even a real alkie who goes back to drinking......even IF they can moderate for quite a while......will always end up right back in the squirrel cage - only worse off that the previous times.

I'm with ya penny. Watching someone do that usually is a good wake-up call to me.......a reminder.........that THE dumbest decision we'll ever make is one we make "sober" - the decision that we can pick up that first drink and believe things will be different this time.

TheEnd

You don't know what the hell you're talking about........

Actually there is no research to back up what you're saying. As in a research study where someone gets participants and actually does a true experiment. But I do not care to debate this subject, not worth the energy.

Nyte Byrd

One may not consider the AA Big Book, research studies, but it pretty much explains it in there. You may want to read it sometime to answer your question and clear up your confusion.

Yes, as the Big Book points out, that 'human nature' as you put it, we believe the root of it to be 'selfishness and selfcenteredness'.

As has been pointed out, and probably has been before many other times before, and probably will continue to be, not everyone is an alcoholic. But also AA is not for everyone either. And sobriety is not for wimps either anymore than getting old is.

yeahgr8

It doesn't matter why or wherefore...the facts are that your friend had a problem with alcohol and couldn't control it...it ended up with him in jail cells and certainly bringing a load of misery to a lot of people...the question is why then would someone with this track record think it was ok to have a couple of beers every so often, if they were now a sane and mature adult they would, at leeast, be so distraught and embarassed by their previous life that they would never touch the stuff again full stop...

dubbguy

It reminds me of cigarette smokers that fall off the wagon after a long period of quitting. If you quit for a good amount of time you probably don't start back right at a pack a day. At least most though aren't foolish enough to kid themselves that they can "just smoke socially" after being a smoker.
Just a matter of time before back to the old ways if given enough time.
I don't think it matters what substance you are talking about, that is the nature of addiction.

Toronto68

Penny, I am basically in agreement with Yeahgr8 on this. Others have said maybe the person wasn't a real alcoholic after all. I suppose that is a possibility and that another one is that they just changed. But I think it's pointless to get into the algebra of what a real alcoholic is, there are just different experiences. I think people usually go back to drinking because they are still an alcoholic and problems would come along eventually. Somebody I knew, and whom I've talked about here before, stopped drinking and did AA and stayed sober for about 12 years went back to "just drinking beer" and told me not to worry, he could handle it, blah, blah. He hanged himself two years later. It's not everybody that would kill themselves, but in his case, there was reason to worry about it being "just beer." For those people who don't reach the point where they want to kill themsleves, there still could very well be something wrong going on inside. Without having done a lot of empirical research on it, I am inclined to think the norm is that when alcoholics go back to drinking it's because they have a problem that will only get worse.

I'm sorry you have that plummeting disappointment feeling about your friend. You should stick with the convictions you've got about staying on the right path, because that's what you need.

sailorjohn

Well, I was one of those guys that decided-after 14 years of 'sobriety'-that maybe I was wrong about being an alcoholic, maybe I could control my drinking.

When I started drinking again, I probably appeared on the outside to be as 'normal' as anyone else, I put a fair amount of effort into controlling/hiding my drinking.

We all know how that ended.

Glad to hear that it didn't effect what you believe, there are any number of explanations for what you experienced. If I were a betting person I would vote for relapse, but that's just me.