NobleCause

i do a good amount of traveling for work, and so a few times each month i pack my life into a suitcase, fly to some city where i'm largely anonymous, and live in a nice hotel on a client's tab. aside from all of the work that accompanies these trips, they can be a nice escape. the problem with escape tho, is that it can be easy to forget where you came from. you can really pretend you're anyone in a nice hotel.

a few days into the last trip, with about 70 days sober, i found myself feeling inexplicably sad. sobriety is a lot of thoughts and feelings that i've yet to find my footing in. seeking warmth and a break from my worries, i started circling around the idea of a drink. a double scotch in and of itself isn't alcoholic, i figured. a half a bottle of wine's probably safe too. and really, i reasoned, you're only an alcoholic if you drink like one. so i picked up a few bottles, used a sharpie to mark the allowable nightly volume, and rationed my intake. in an alternate world, this could've worked out fine. the beast growled at the end of every last glass, but i stuck to the lines. by the third day tho it had become the sole highlight of my day, and by the fourth, my lonely obsession. my colleagues made a frequent show of ordering iced teas at dinner as a gesture of dry solidarity, while i smirked away the irony and excused myself early to quell the craving back in my room. and by the end of the week, the sharpie lines became irrelevant.

i'm not giving up, and i recognize the slipperiness of my current slope. but at the risk of sounding like a copout, it sort of feels, good or bad, like maybe this is just the way it's supposed to be. there's something so compelling to me about sobriety (not least its lack of legal trouble), yet time and again i find myself chin deep in wanton self destruction. i debated posting anything at all, and cringed imagining a chorus of 'you're not serious about sobriety' feedback. but, sitting here scratching my head with two days sober and two days left until i pack my bags again, it seemed there might be some value in acknowledging the truth. honesty's not been my forte of late.

AB1111

I relapse. It's what i do. I'm also a real alcoholic and for the first time in sobriety I feel comfortable in my own skin. I have no clue why or when it happened. The only thing I've done with perfection in AA is I keep coming back. We do this one day at a time and we do it together. Welcome back! Stay.

BackToSquareOne

NC, when those periods of sadness come on and you see release and relief in alcohol have you ever tried to shift your thoughts to the horrific side of drinking?

Dee74

No beat ups here...I will share something tho

I was terrified of feeling...I was terrified of being sad, terrified of feeling lonely,of being stressed or worried or angry or bored...

I was that way from a child.

Alcohol was actually a control mechanism for me.
As the years went on I tried to control more and more feelings and situations...

As you know, the paying of the piper got more and more as well.

The only way out of that cycle was a leap of faith free fall.

The only way I ever got used to feeling those feelings...joining the rest of the human race in experiencing the fullness of the human experience...the only way I ever moved from sporadic bursts of not drinking into real recovery...was to not reach for the drink.

I'm glad I did because - no matter how hard it seemed at the time - it was nowhere near as hard as I imagined it to be.

And...I moved from a monochrome life into a full technicolour one.
I genuinely grew from the experience - and I have no regrets.

Drinking had to stop being a viable option for me.

I was weak, I was beaten, I was destitute & had been for many years,. even before I took my first drink - I had 40 years of abuse to reckon with....

If I could do it, I'm sure anyone else reading this - including you - can too

Don't lose faith - just work out a plan - make some real changes

welcome back.
D

awuh1

The truth is good, but "This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man".

Veritas1

welcome back nc

instant

It's good you are here NC. Let's get it straight, in the longer term context 70 days is a solid situation.

I think the way forward is not making the same mistakes over and over. It's a learning game. In my experience it took at least six months of sobriety before the weird emotional states stopped. Even now I am still learning what emotions are for. I have no doubt we have to grow and develop in order to stay off the juice.

A better sharpie won't help.

Posting on SR daily keeps me in the groove.

OklaBH

Out of town trips were and are a trigger for me. I dont know why since I did my drinking at home. Ive always considered myself that "special" alcoholic though.

Shoebox62

The exact same thing happened to me, NobleCause. I was 7 months sober, doing well (I thought) and went on a business trip to NYC for 3 nights. Was there with a co-worker who is definitely a trigger, a big wine drinker. We went to dinner the 2nd night, and I could hear the voice in my head saying "What's one drink. You deserve it. All these months without a drop. How can one drink hurt you?". Of course, I had several that night, and fell right back into the routine I'd spent 7 months digging out of. (It's amazing how easy it is to go right back as if you'd never left). Now, 3 months later, I'm back on the wagon, committed to making this work this time, learning from my mistakes, etc. I actually see the relapse as a "good" learning experience for me, so I'm not beating myself up too badly. But I definitely know I'll be wary of any future business trips, especially until I've got more time under my belt and a better understanding of why i do what i do.

Best of luck to you NC. I'm right there with you.

Sudz No More

You are singing to choir so join the chorus

If we could just turn that voice of "reason" off huh?

Glad you are moving forward. Let's continue

2granddaughters

I bet there are meetings nearby those fancy hotels.

All the best.

Bob R

LifeBlows

Good for you for telling people and for recommitting to your sobriety. A bad thing would have been if you had just kept going.

davaidavai

Your posts have always touched me deeply. As for myself, I was going somewhere, but I was going no where. I drank because I loved it. I endulged my every inclination toward despair because I cradled myself with those certainties. I was failing. I consciously set forth to be good at drinking because at least, where I was nothing, that was something. That was an image, an identity. I wanted to hold my liquor in the world. It was something I was good at, a knowledge my father passed down, how to sip at raw, cheap vodka without making a face. That was my approximation of personhood that ended at the first sip. That was my posited link to the world of smiles and connection, where people were falling in love, where respect was tacit. I could skirt there on the fringes, not as a participant of course, but as a momentary foil, a fleeting parody, a mascot. I wasn't the biggest drinker, but it was the thing I liked best in life far, far and away. And so I drank and so I flipped off the world and its people, wildly anchored in their self-certainties, or so I believed. And so I aquiesced to the world, bowed my head to its perceived judgement of me. Because at least you can do that? At least you can side with the world against yourself and thereby negotiate a truce? Side with the world's magnificant, shimmering ego, which you hate, to crush the self you love and pitty: the self that is failing you, which you are practicing a hatred of. That wasn't the way. That looked like change, but it was really destruction. But that's just me, my story. We're all different. Maybe the key is connection and communication. A pleasure to know you. I believe your journey is leading toward deep insight.

MetalChick

I can relate to marking the bottles. I have never done that because I was a beer drunk, but I could see myself doing something like that. Whenever I had the occasion to drink vodka I would pout water in the bottle so my BF couldn't see how much I was drinking, but that is different. Anyhow, marking bottles, counting beer etc... for me, is just another reason to stay sober, because those actions take me out of denial, and show me the abnormality,anxiety, and obsession with trying to drink normally when in fact I can not.

Now, when I am in situations wherein I crave beer more then others I make a plan of attack.

Thanks for the honest post

CarolD

Not until I began working the AA Steps did I
shift from often shakey sobreity into solid recovery.

Welcome back..

Retread59

Your story seems familiar to me, as I too had loved to bust my sobriety when I would travel. I'd not go so far as to mark bottles, though. I'd just plant myself at the bar, or buy drinks to take upstairs, because no one would know.

Eventually I realized that was not a way to stay sober and that I was only fooling myself. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out how to make a stronger commitment to our sobriety. For me, the steps of AA held a key to overcoming these relapses, specifically in the sixth step.

For others, there may be ways to "become ready" to have our problems dealt with that aren't step specific. But for me, maybe only because that's the program I chose, this is what it took to overcome that behavior. Becoming entirely ready to have this problem resolved meant not clinging to the notion that I could have these "freebies" without consequence. And once I had more people in my life to be accountable to (sponsor and sponsee) I couldn't continue with the deception and feel the slightest bit okay about it.

I know this is a method-specific response but there may be something within it that could translate out into a helpful set of goals or something that could be used within the context of a different method.

Keep working on it, whatever method you use. Seeing this is a very good thing of itself.

Obladi

Noble,

I appreciate your honest post and identify with your concept of not giving up while recognizing that somehow this is how it's supposed to be.

For me, not as in "I recognize I will always struggle and so will always slip," but more like "It's a journey, and there are no short cuts, as demoralizing or tiresome that may be. With persistence, it's GOTTA get better at some point."

Not sure if that's anywhere near your take on it, but I do thank you for being there/here.

RobbyRobot

NobleCause

each term of sobriety, and each subsequent return to getting loaded, has somehow been helpful, yielded more data. some things have worked and some things obviously haven't. the gaps get exposed and my understanding of addiction, and myself within it, has grown, albeit in fits and spurts. by choice, or by need, i've excluded other people from this part of my life. i've shunned aa (and every other group format), lied my way thru rehab(s), refused to confide in friends, and fired shrinks when they got too nosy. somewhere along the line i decided that the haunted house that is my mind was a more suitable place in which to silo my recovery. so perhaps it's no surprise that it hasn't quite worked, that i've grown more isolated, and that, regardless of whether i'm sober or not, a significant percentage of my conscious thought centers always on drinking and getting high. it was like groundhog day everyday.

off for a crack of dawn flight. thanks to all for the thoughts.

Zencat

Trial and error as taught me some well earned lessons. Being willing to move forward, as hard as it can get sometimes, still be committed to make new behavioral changes, gain new perspectives, is the the heart of my wellness treatment.

Recovery tools, tools, tools... SOS, LifeRing, SMART, CBT, Urge Surfing, DBT and AVRT ...knowing and practicing them, if you fall get up again "first things first" just for today.