gold1009

Much like a break-up with a bad boy/girlfriend OR a relationship with a best friend that has now ended--there are usually SOME positives that you can take out of your time with them, right?.....

Can you list any positives about your time spent with alcohol??

Dee74

By another post I see you're still drinking, gold?
What are the positives for you right now?

D

Boleo

The first 10 years that I drank;

I had more friends when I drank.
I got in less trouble when I drank.
I had better luck overall when I drank.
I felt better the next morning when I drank.

However, I seldom drank more than 3 beers per night. Slowly I had to drink more to feel the same results. Slowly my "betters" changed to "worse".

BHF

I don't allow myself to spend time romanticizing the time I spent with alcohol., When it happens, I try to immediately "fast-forward" to where I ended up by continuing to drink. Arrested, hospitalized, bankrupt, homeless, hopeless and desperate.

I thought that there were positives at the time I was actively drinking, but they come nowhere near outweighing the end result.

Reset

Sure, it was fun sometimes at the beginning. Getting hammered, losing inhibition, telling stories the next day.

But I can't go back to those times. It's too late and the only thing alcohol offers me now is depression, anger, a money drain, a bad example for my kids, and a crippling and ugly habit.

nandm

Were there positives? For me drinking was not a positive thing in my life. It created a mess for me and those who loved me. Chaos and confusion is where drinking takes me. I have no desire to wind up back there again. So no I can not think of any positives that might out weigh the negatives that alcohol brings to my life.

AmericanGirl

Drinking and all mind-altering substances had an appeal because they let me experience improved moods temporarily and artificially -- artificially and temporarily being the key words there.

And for me, at least, they were only able to do this type of magic with higher and higher doses, and their absences created a negative, until they stopped doing any magic at all and drinking was a no-win situation.

WritingFromLife

Hi Gold! I've read some of your other posts and you sound a lot like me! I do have lots of thoughts that float through my mind about my drinking days, yet like BHF, I have to fast forward QUICKLY to the truth, lest I romanticize myself right to the wine aisle. I didn't have a "rock bottom" (no duis, no family members wanting me to quit, no morning shakes) but that didn't stop me from feeling empty, anxious and sad most days. There are WAY MORE POSITIVES on this sober side, positives I could've never imagined.

CarolD

Welcome...

I can't think of anything that drinking improved in my life...
My mind became saturated with alcohol...I lived in fantasy....edgeing on insanity.

Jfanagle

Dorothy had Oz, Alice had Wonderland and an alcoholic has booze. Dorothy woke up and Alice did as well, the alcoholic who really finds a sober life, not just a respite from the bottle for awhile which all too many call sobriety, returns to reality just like the little girls. We awaken to reality.

"Men and women drink because they like the effect that alcohol produces." Dr. Silkworth wrote those words quite awhile ago and it is still true today. The point is that what we experience while drinking is an altered state of the real world. Those who drink moderately and can take or leave alcohol and who don't even think about their drinking as to how much or how often they imbibe, are the ones that you should ask when looking for positives.

If you are alcoholic as I am and if you drink alcoholically, as I did, then there are no REAL positives. There were some "through the looking glass" and "off to oz" pretend positives, but even the alkie has to wake up every so often and just like that damn White Rabbit, I found myself disappearing down a hole. Deeper and deeper and when considering what is positive in life I don't find confused, ashamed, foolish, or even stupid on the list.

Looking for positives in drinking for the alcoholic is like an amputee suggesting that with only one leg his cost of shoes is half of what it could have been. Booze cripples us and steals our lives, we are not like the social drinker and therefore it is really simple and amazingly liberating for me and my people to step back out of the looking glass and move forward with a full and productive and vibrant life. Turning around and gazing in the mirror only invites you to step back through and into the Mad Hatters Tea Party one more time.

Just my thoughts,
Jon

SASA

Without drinking i would not have bad experiences and i would not bee so greatful for my sober life. However i wish it wouldnot haave taken so long

wellwisher

Honestly, I don't go there at all. There were no positives. Alcohol did nothing to help me along. It did nothing for my parents and siblings at home in my youth, and nothing for me but cause a lot of suffering.

What it did is put me in a mindset and situations that took me years to dig out of. I learned many of my behaviors long before I picked up my first drink. I grew up in an alcoholic home. I also lost my younger brother to it in 1999.

It was the climbing, attempts to correct, failures, re-trys and subsequent achievements that did for me; the alcohol and mindset were what sent me off the deep-end in the first place.

I wouldn't have picked this path if I had a chance to do it over again. Hindsight is 20-20, as the saying goes. But, in the same vein, and since I cannot change the past, I am grateful for the process I have been through. I am presently living a happy and healthy life now, in spite of it all. I still struggle with happiness at times, but have learned to become vigilant. And I haven't had a drink in 17 years.

MsCooterBrown

The longer my sobriety gets the clearer it gets for me that there are absolutely NO positives at all. And I worry about anyone trying to come up with positive reasons..it seems to implicate reasons to pick up again. Skating on thin ice so to speak! So mark me down for not playing the game. If you want positives..you will have to come up with them without any help from me..

pennywistle

In the beginning when I was young and wild and free- certainly!
But I can never go back to that.

I have some fond memories, but they are outnumbered by many bad and useless ones.

gold1009

By another post I see you're still drinking, gold?
What are the positives for you right now?

I don't know how to copy posts...so sorry for above.....

But yes, I'm still drinking....need I remind you all of the positives???

Okay, I'll go there...(and feel free to flame me once I'm done)

I'm sorry but I believe a part of sobriety should be the ability to see what made you attracted to the substance to begin with. Admitting that you once "liked" it does NOT make your commitment to sobriety any less sincere....in my opinion....

COME ON!! Alcohol is very friendly at the begining!!!!...those very first sips that warm your body. Make the very most mundane tasks seem exciting!!--ie cleaning house, cooking a meal, etc. Watching TV or movies seems new and enlightening. Your self-steem once low---is now HIGH. The draining thoughts of the simple chores in life are now not only achievable, but appealling. You have energy and a positive outlook. You see the best in other people AND YOURSELF.

You don't remember any of that??

Yes, I still drink.

artsoul

Probably one of the biggest negatives of alcohol is that it convinces us it's a positive. Even the reason it feels good is due to the fact that our bodies and brains can't keep up with ridding themselves of the toxins fast enough and things start shutting down.....

But of course, I saw it a little differently when I was drinking......

BHF

A better question to ask yourself might be, "Why am I considering quitting drinking?"

Dee74

I remember all of that - but you left out the other bits - the fights, the falls, the embarrassments, the ill health, the possible break ups, job losses, DUIs or worse...the despair, the sorrow, the shame...

Then there's the fact that several people here have alluded to - drink long enough and those positives are not only dwarfed by the negatives - they vanish completely.

At the end I wasn't drinking to feel friendly or excited or otherwise enhanced - all those things ceased to happen for me - they were long gone by the end.

I was drinking to survive, I was drinking in a futile attempt just to feel normal enough to get up out of bed....and despising it and myself with every gulp.

How long have you been drinking, Gold?

D

Supercrew

The funny thing about positive memories of drinking is you can shine a positive light on it, but if you really take a look at the whole picture it's a negative.

Here is an example, about 10 years ago I took a surf trip to a small beach town on the Pacific Coast of Baja Mexico. If you talk to my brother or any of the friends that we drove down with it was the greatest trip of all-time. We slept on this magnificient beach catching fresh seafood and traded our chicken breasts that we brought to BBQ to the local fisherman for lobster. The surf was 4-6 feet and we brought down 20 cases of beer and partied for 4 straight days playing horseshoes all day and poker all night, then we stopped in Rosarito and got to sing on stage with a 60's Surf cover band.....great trip!!

What really happened was I was drinking and driving on the way down, (not 1/2 hour into Mexico, and got busted by the Mexican Federales and and they promptly took $250 from me to let us continue. We missed the turnoff road after driving 6 hours because we were all so drunk that we drove 1 hour past our destination. We got to the beach in the dark, and end up breaking one of the tents because we were too drunk to figure it out and slept in the bed of the truck which destroyed my back. The surf was great, but being that we were all so loaded only 2 of us got up to surf the dawn patrol. Everyone was pissed off and hung over every morning, and everytime we played cards or horseshoes we ended up arguing and fighting. Being that we brought so much beer we didn't have room to bring some camping basics for cooking, like a can opener or grilling utensils, so everytime we ate it was an exercise in futility. We bought enough fireworks to blow up the city of Ensenada, and being drunk we had fireworks battles throwing them at each other. I lit a M-1000 that my buddies rigged a fuse to because it broke off and it blew up in my face leaving shrapnel in my chest and almost blowing out my eardrums, (I still have a severe case of Tinnitus to this day 10 years later). I had a $100 pair of shoes that someone thought would be funny if they lit them on fire, and we ran out of ice on day three so we drank warm beer and Tequila. Someone was constantly sick and we got fried in the sun during the day and eaten by bugs at night. When we drove back, (I drove), we drank the whole way and stopped in Rosarito to eat dinner and they had a live band and pitchers of Margueritas for $5.00. I was so loaded that I sang one song incoherently and then fell off the stage and security booted us out of the bar. While drivng back to the border I missed the turn, and my brother was already asleep so I awoke him to tell him I was lost in some shanty town just south of TJ. He then verbally abused me for the next hour about what a dumbsh#t I was for missing the turn. As we finally got in the border line which took 2 hours to cross he continued to verbally assault me...until I finally punched him in the mouth while I was driving. I finally got back to his house where I was supposed to stay for the night, but we got in a pushing match in his drive way over the punch, and he told me to drive the *&%* home. So I did where I was promptly arrested for a DUI and blew a .24, 3 hours after my last drink. He had to come and bail me out of jail because my wife was visiting her sister and wouldn't be back until the following day, so I spent the night in jail using a boloney sandwich as a pillow only to be picked up by my a-hole brother and driven to the impound yard where it cost me $250 to get my car out of impound and then found that a bunch of my stuff was stolen out of my pickup. Then I got to tell my wife the wonderful story about our best trip ever the following day!!

So I lost over $600, my hearing, my dignity, and my license and almost my marriage on our "best trip ever"!!

It's all about perception.

artsoul

Whoa - What a story, Supercrew! SO true about perception. Great illustration!