Justfor1

I see a lot of people posting about relapse. Usually, they say things like, "I screwed/messed up." I use to think like that for many years. I have 14 months of sobriety (minus a day) & have learned that beating myself up for mistakes is not going to help. The last relapse I had was 1 day only & when I woke up I decided that I was not a horrible person. To those who are struggling, I guess I just wanted to say that relapse doesn't define you as a person. The world is not going to stop spinning if you pick up a drink or if you stay sober. I finally realized that I am just not that important in the grand universe.

Zee

It just means people are being honest. This is a recovery forum after all. People aren't gonna type "Hey, I got smashed and had a great time"!!!!! This place is for people who want sobriety and slip-ups are something that people are not proud of in their quest for a clean and sober life.

Justfor1

Zee, I understand that. But feeling shamed or surprised by returning to booze shouldn't be devastating. It keeps some folks in the cycle of relapse. I use to feel so shameful of relapsing that I would go on huge benders thinking I would hit a new bottom. The truth is my last drunk wasn't that big of a deal at all. I have a heck of a lot of low bottoms in the past though.

RobbyRobot

Before July of 1981, the very most I could stay off of drinking was like a rare 30 days. Usually, I would go at most a few days without at best. And those lousy non-drinking days were a total nightmare of delusions and selfishness gone wild. Nothing short of a living hell. Alcoholism at its absolute worse: caught between drinks. Always on the wrong side of things. More dying than living.

A return to drinking of course got me out of that kind of hell and into the hell of drunkeness. Neither drinking or not drinking was working for me. I was dying either way. This crap went on for like 6 years. I tried to quit my addictions to alcohol and drugs when I was 18. I managed to quit my drugs after age 22, but not my boozing until i was 24. I started drinking age 12, and by 15, I was already destroyed and wasted as a chronic alcoholic drug addict. I didn't stand a chance against alcohol, my DOC. It beat me stupid every time.

I'm saying all this to qualify myself as a sober alcoholic who understands what is what when others say they relapsed\slipped\returned to drinking\whatever one wants to say about it.

I'm not one who suggests a relapse causes more relapsing. In fact, relapsing is a relief for those who relapse, and so, in that way relapse is a temporary instant solution to a horribly chronic problem.

Of course drinking to solve problems dosen't really work well, and so the solution is very short-lived. Soon enough the problem becomes once again an alcoholic drinking problem. And all the original reasons for quitting still exist even more so.

So, the long and the short of it is alcohol for me solved my drinking problem, but alcohol did nothing but destroy my life as the price to pay for solving my drinking problem. It becomes seriously obvious that a different answer was needed.

That answer was the complete and forever removal of my drinking problem. To achieve and keep that status required me to never again drink alcohol. To achieve that grand success required me to forever change from living the life of a drunk drunk to a sober drunk. So I did a rehab stay including a supervised detox, AA, gestalt therapy, and my making an AVRT kind of choice to never ever be drunk again. Period. Done.

So now i've been a sober drunk since 1981. No more drinking problem. No more alcohol problem. No slips or relapses. I'm all set. No problemo.

Now back to this thread. In my experience, relapsing\slipping is a nice PC way of saying a return to drinking, even if for only a day...

Of course, with a return to drinking, absolutely the world does stop spinning. It really just depends on your personal perspective, yeah? If we are defined by our experiences, than surely drinking or not drinking completely defines us...

A return to drinking is a big deal, and can even be fatal, as in being dead. Dead is not good, so yeah, a big deal. When its not a big deal for those who return to drinking, that simply means to me they are just between drinks, and like I was saying above, the so-called relapse serves the intended purpose of being an instant relief from the drinking problem, and nothing more or less than that was accomplished. Even if there are many months between drinks, same lousy deal.

For sober drunks, a return to drinking is the same as a death sentence no less.

For drunk drunks, a return to drinking is just same old same old.

Been there and done that.

Justfor1

robbyrobot, I liked that post. Yeah I think when I picked up the drink it solved my problem for a few hours yet made new, bigger problems at the same time. I hope that makes sense. I heard that when I drank I got a short term gain but long term pain.

TheEnd

I like your spin on things and I understand where you are coming from. For some it's not the end of the world, but for me to pick up a drink could be fatal. When I relapsed about 20 months ago, I went on an 10 day binge, that ended me up with 2 detox visits and 2 Baker Acts. I was stuck in a downward spiral of drinking and drugging and I could not get out. I don't want to test the waters and see if my luck would be different next time.

So for me and many other people it could be fatal, for you it might be OK. I don't think it really matters if you have 14 months minus one day or all 14 months. Progress not perfection is the key, but that one slip could be the one that takes you out. So while you shouldn't beat yourself up, you also shouldn't undermine the experience either.

Remember the statement "When you play with fire, you get burned." Maybe not this time, maybe not the next time, but eventually it will happen.

Justfor1

theend, but the scare tactics never kept me sober. Consequences didn't seem to matter to me anymore. I was willing to take the risk when I picked up a drink. Lots of "by the book" AA and treatment advice didn't always help. Alcoholism is a fatal disease. I know it is & still picked up again and again. I guess I'm posting for those folks who are constantly in & out of the cycle. I have probably detoxed close to 20X in hospitals & at one point was so insane the police didn't even want to deal with me & would haul me to the hospital. I think whats keeping me sober this time is letting go of the past & forgiving myself.

RobbyRobot

Awesome to hear you're into forgiving yourself, Justfor1. Letting go of our wretched past is a real achievement for any and all of us. Its often a slow process has been my own experience, so take it easy, and take comfort in your sobriety knowing you're doing right.

Gottalife

I liked what Robby said about more of the same old same old. If there's no recovery, there can't be any relapse I suppose. It's just a matter of returning to drinking, the most natural thing in the world for an alcoholic to do.

So what's going on when an alcoholic wants to stop but just keeps going back? In my case I had lost the power of choice. I couldn't choose not to drink but by the same token, I didn't choose to drink either. I just found myself drinking without any conscious thought - perhaps this is what is meant by no effective defence against the first drink. It was baffling, but of course once I had started, I couldn't guaratntee what would happen or when I would stop.

I believe it was more to do with other choices I made "between drinks". First to deny the problem, then later to reject any help, then, as the problem got worse, to accept help but with reservations and conditions. Each time there was brief recovery but after a little honeymoon the internal conditon returned and I started coming apart at the seams then found myself drunk again.

Finally, I realised the seriousness of my situation, that I was dying, and I accepted help without reservation. I recovered and haven't had to drink since.

The so called relapse is a serious business because of how the inexperienced newcomer can see it. They see someone going out and coming back and seeming to get away with it, maybe they could too. They are not so aware that sometimes the relapser doesn't make it back.

We don't have the power to sober anyone up and stop them relapsing, but if we can encourage them to choose a path to recovery and support them in that, perhaps that obsession will be removed.

BackToSquareOne

Did you ever consider the possibility that you were just in the throes of addiction. Was it the biology and brain chemistry of addiction at work or was it supernatural forces taking away and then restoring your power of choice? Do you ever really lose free will, the power of choice or is it the twisted brain chemistry of addiction that causes one in active addiction to believe these things? Something to consider.

Change4good

I hear you Just, and I never think we should be defined by our addictions. But I do think that everyone's reaction to what they experience is there own, and that is okay.

Shame for me was a great motivator. I needed to sit with it. But that is just me. The trick is, as you say, not letting it catapult you into a bender, but turning it into a force for change.

RobbyRobot

Addiction ambivalence, on a purely physical level, surely exists as sure as science and biology of the human body exists. Brain chemistry is real science. We are all at least flesh and blood beings. So true indeed.

However, when we consider the human psyche, science cannot go beyond theoretical constructs. Science has only reasonable questions and no definitive answers in these discussions of the human mind and human spirit.

Of course, we know from personal experience we are much more than just a fleshy brain housed in a physical shell. Science would argue that anything more is simply supposition and imagination at best, and at worst delusion and wish-fulfillment.

Throughout the ages, personal experience triumphs science. Science is very good at yielding answers for reasonable questions - and humans are absolutely very capable of being both resonable and unreasonable as we may choose for ourselves. In this way, science cannot keep up with us, and so science becomes simply another tool of limited understanding. We created science and we our the masters of our creations. At least so far, lol.

Human psyche seems to be something that cannot be wholly mastered by the best of us. The human mind is apparently more then the sum of its parts. We seem to be both master and servant of our respective minds.

Hmmm. This opens many doors and windows not useful for science itself, but certainly very productive and useful experiences for a living human being in a world filled with almost 7 billion other human beings.

I could go on and on how very little science understands about so many essential human interests -

love
orgasms
genders
spiritualism
supernatural being(s) - (God)
imagination
the human psyche
mother
father
brother
sister
daughter
son
friendships
addiction
alcoholism
war
politics
religion
family dynamics

and so on... the list is endless.

I'm all for science. I believe in science as being an amazing human achievement. I'm also very much interested in being all that I can be in a personal sense, and science just can't keep up with the richness and depth of what it is to be a real human being. All of us, in our own respective ways, easily surpass science, on so many levels, no problemo.

freshstart57

I hear that 'I found myself drinking without any conscious thought', and this condition then leads to a return to drinking, or an abandonment of any previous resolve to quit.

There is always conscious thought. We are not robots, and any number of conscious acts need to happen for us to drink. We put our shoes on, we walk down the street, we dodge traffic on the way, we open the door to the bar, we place an order, pick up the glass and drink it. All of these acts are conscious and under our control.

It is instead a question of becoming mindful of these thoughts and the conscious acts that come from them. The act of drinking can be stopped at any one of these acts - all we have to do is to pick just one. We make that decision to drink, and we can make the decision not to drink.

If there were no conscious thought about drinking, we wouldn't be posting on this forum.

RobbyRobot

From my experience, the process of conscious thought does not in itself guarantee an assured ability to make a conscious decision. Depending on whoever is doing the thinking, conscious thought may only realise a potential for a timely and useful decision. Timing is everything.

freshstart57

Yes, Robby, I was speaking only from my experience too. First came my mindful awareness, and the potential for timely and positive decisions followed from that. How we decide to frame the problem makes a big difference in the solutions we consider.

SASA

whay happened happened andwe need to learn from the mistakes so they do not reoccur. I think you are lucky. I am very afraid that if I start drinking again I may never return. You made it back and have another chance, use it wisely, that is just my opinion.

soberlicious

This is true for me. I was forever feeling like things just "happened" to me, when in reality I had control over many of those things. I just didn't know it.