whenartdeparts

I have relapsed again. Alcoholism is so ******* berserk...I never thought this would happen to me again, I swore on my life I will never have to go through this, again, I was following a program and still, here I am, in physical withdrawal. Mr Alcohol just caught me offguard yesterday. I'm beginning to think I will never recover...

stevie88

Just get back on the waggon my friend......

doggonecarl

I think you can recover, but you seemed trapped in a self defeating cycle. When you say alcohol caught you off guard, what do you mean?

Did you convince yourself that this time would be different? Or did you just say "f--- it, knowing the consequences would be bad?

I'm just wondering how, with your history with alcohol, you could get caught off guard, and what you are going to do to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Hope for your sake that for this go around recovery "clicks" for you.

whenartdeparts

I convinced myself this time, unlike the thousand others, would be different. I tried to moderate and we all know how this finishes for an alcoholic.
I really want to recover but I have tried so many times, I'm beginning to lose faith.

RobbyRobot

Yeah, I was a failure too at recovery, until I wasn't.

The more I wanted to recover, the less real understanding I had of what was going on, and eventually so of course, back to drinking I would go. Looking back now, I can clearly see how selfish and deluded my "recovery thinking process" actually was so doomed for failure right from the start.

My deluded mind and broken emotions were at the mercy of my selfish desires. As well, my addictive obsessions and compulsions kept me outta having an honest sense of real progress -- sure, I wasn't drinking, but I wasn't free either, my want for alcoholic drinking was dogging me and haunting me. I couldn't really shake off that want, those desires.

So I was soon reduced to forcing myself to obey the rules of what I wouldn't do in my day to day life. I had internal stop signs everywhere -- dont do this and dont do that. Times I tried to just honestly be myself, let my hair down so to speak, I would really really want that forbidden drink, and all the stop signs went green. I was a sick tortured prisoner with alcohol or without alcohol. It didn't seem to matter anymore. My sobriety became pointless and worse than useful.

So now I would slowly come to the understanding that I must of gone wrong somewhere with this sobriety thing, because this not drinking was really not working. Everything was worse not better. My life at being drunk had the simple advantage of my not "feeling" or fully knowing my misery. Sobriety was quickly becoming an impossible task for me. And in that impossible struggle was born the ideations of moderating my drinking. There was no where else to go with it -- moderate or otherwise just go get drunk.

So for me moderation was really just my refusal to go get a good drunk on because that drunk was not going to be just another drunk in my mind. That next drunk would be my final ruination, my complete failure, my own personal apocalypse. I would in that next drunk confirm the truthfulness of me being nothing more than a lousy drunkard. All my earlier drunks would be validated, and all my future drunks would be forever embraced honestly and truthfully representative that I was indeed a useless, hopeless alcoholic.

Yeah, so of course I eventually lost all hope of ever getting sober, and moderation was really just my next fall back position. When you're doomed you stop asking directions because all roads lead back to hell anyways. Moderation was killing me more efficiently than anything else I had done in my boozing history.

I never did get over those experiences of my moderation days in the ending times of my drinking. I never did figure it out and moderate and from there get sober. I never did understand or want sobriety until actually having some real sobriety to experience. I was truly without faith and I was a hopeless drunk and all I had going for me was coming up for air between drunks.

My embracing the hopelessness of my drunk existance is what saved the day for me. My accepting that I would always always want to drink myself into a lost drunkenness is what changed my life. My surrender into no matter what I did or didn't do my selfish desire for a drink and a drunk would always be just a moment away is what really began my psychic change into a new life of not sobriety really, in those early months of finally getting sober in rehab, but of simply not dying as a drunken fool. Real life came later, after the fact of real sobriety.

Weird? Yeah, the more I accepted my wants for booze the more I was able to not pick up that next drink. It was like I could "see" the simple unvarnished truth of my alcoholic situation in that acceptance. And it didn't take really any effort on my part because the acceptance was so obvious, so real of my real life, that it was impossible to get it wrong, impossible to frigg it up. I was really just another drunk who wanted to be drunk, simple as that, and I didn't want to die that way, all drunk and lost, just as simple as that. Sobriety was not the horrible thing that distorted and fouled me up anymore, I gave up on sobriety, and with it went all my troubles at actually getting sober.

Whenartdeparts, I feel for you. I wish I could just have something better than my clumsy words to explain what giving up chasing sobriety did for me, how hopeless and without faith I too was in my last times of drinking.

What i see in your post is you coming to the same conclusions I did. I see you reaching the end, just like I did. I see you having no where to go, but into the embrace of being lost in your search for sobriety, just like I was.

You know, I finally sobered up by just accepting I wanted to be forever drunk, and not picking up while living with those honest truthful wants always guided me into doing the next right thing to not picking up that next drink. Its been years and years of sobriety now for me. Good happy sobriety.

Hope that day comes for you too. It can happen. I was and am just another drunk, you know?

Dee74

I tried weekly to stop drinking whenartdeparts...this went on for about 15 years.

Don't give up - I'm glad the same hardheaded jackass stubborness that kept me trying the same failed drinking experiment also led me never to give up on the idea of one day finding recovery

The thing that really changed the game for me was acceptance.

I fought like a tiger for years to keep alcohol in my life, almost bargaining to keep it around in some small controlled way - but in the end I had to accept it just wasn't that kind of relationship for me - it was all...or it was nothing.

I had no points in between and I never would.

D