Vandermast

god i had many moments where i realised that i was a drunk..i could only stop when had been savagely beaten 2 my knees enough

SirTopaz

Vomiting a snail through my nose in the bathrooms of a swish paris restaurant.

TheRestorative

It was last month, and I just looked at my life and realized I was tired of the way I felt all the time, tired of trying to nurse pain with something that kills, tired of being a downer, tired of not pursuing my dreams, tired of always being broke, and tired of labeling myself as hopeless and good for nothing. I wanted a clean, fresh start. I wanted a new beginning, and to start over. I wanted to stop the vicious cycle and get my life back. I was just ready. I felt it in my gut. Now I'm 36 days sober (longest time sober in years), and I honestly can say I never want to go back to that place again. I have no desire to drink; just a desire to be getting healthier, clearer, and more in control with each new day.

ElegantlyWasted

LOL... I would re-arrange the contents in the recycle bin to give the visual impression there were few Wine and Beer bottles/cans in there than there really were. I know its not really funny...

MadameX

Sitting in a jail cell for a dwi and realizing i could have hurt someone, worst day of my life but i thank god every day for it cause sometimes you need a hard kick in the a$$ to wake the hell up.

sandgirl

I didn`t drink at all until I was 36. Life got very stressful and I started using alcohol to relax.
At 40 I woke up after being out with my sister and she was fuming with me. I asked what happened she said I was ranting and raving says really hurtful things-I didn`t even remember doing it. At that point I realised I had a problem alcohol had crept in and taken over because I chose to let it. I HAD to stop drinking.
Since quitting I am realising I think alcohol has affected a lot more relationships than I realised. Stop now-it will only be harder later.

FBL

My "moment of clarity" came in the emergency room with an I-V stuck in my arm. I had started suffering from severe panic attacks and on that day I truly felt like I was going to die. The doctor on duty said I was "probably" an alcoholic (understatement of the century).

That was my "Day 1" and now, nearly 4 years later, I'm still sober and loving every minute of it (even when things aren't going my way)!

spent31

I woke up in IC unit after 3 days. I had died in my buddy's basement. My chest hurt from being resuscitated. I had a catheter (that was weird) and a tube down my throat and IV's in my arm. I was struggling as my arms were strapped down. I woke again 2 days later. Soon after a man I had never seen before walked in and started talking to me as if he knew me. He knew everything about me. I agreed to his offer of in-patient treatment and was off to rehab the next day. My first day in the treatment center I had a seizure, even after 5 days in the hospital my body could not handle the withdraws. Back to the hospital. To this day I don't know that man's name or who he was, but I would like to thank him. Unfortunately, I had to hit rock bottom before I got help. That was 2.5 years ago.

MadameX

Wow this post and its replies is something. Crazy read.

Groucho

I used to bag mine up and drive around the neighborhood to drop them in a neighbor's trash can so my (now ex-)wife wouldn't find them. I don't think there was a single moment for me, but that's one of a million little memories that reminds me to take this **** seriously so I don't relapse.

nodelays

As many people have expressed, it has been many unfortunate experiences leading to my decision to quit drinking. An overall feeling of embarassment, regret, depression, feeling ill, etc. A few specific memories are:

Leaving my friend's bar hitting a piece of wood and driving home on a flat tire.

Driving from another bar an hour, and not remembering the drive. Apparently my friend, who was not as intoxicated, saved me from wrecking at least 3 times.

Waking up in my own puke at my friend's house who held a party, and apparently I was quite the spectacle the night before launching myself off his rope swing, belly flopping on the soil after hitting his fence.

A DUI, though not heavily drunk at the time, but where I was driving to was not smart, and I suppose it was best at the time.

I consider myself lucky, and don't want to hurt myself or someone else before it's too late. Plus, I want to be healthy and not continue engaging in something that really is going to ruin my life in the long run. I also consider this process to be related to life's purpose, enlightenment, and my own spirituality.

Edit: A friend of mine who rarely drinks, largely because his father 20 years before was a serious alcoholic and he was living with him when he had a heart attack in front of him. He gave up trying to help him, and in a perverse sort of way began to assist him in his alcoholism. Would take him to the store, and probably encouraged him the last few months. It was a progression he'd seen his dad experience. Years before that his dad was in super shape. Would climb mountains, and had a great engineering job at Boeing. I don't think he'll ever get over that experience, and still sleeps in his dad's sleeping bag.

Baloo

Way too many moments should have woke me up.

I'm in a good mindset right now, because I'm aware of how much I need to change many things about myself and that alcohol will probably not be the hardest thing to change.

cejay

For me it was when I started having very strong cravings during the work day. That was the final straw.

CJ

PeppyGirl

Reading this post has been cathartic for me in many ways. Truth is stranger than fiction!

There are so many moments that should have been a wake up call, including:

Taking my kids to the theatre and being completely drunk and passing out in the theatre;

Waking up every morning with no recollection of how I got into bed the night before;

Backing out of the driveway drunk, hitting the trash cans and breaking my break light cover. I didn't want my husband to know so I paid for the repair in cash;

Having my friends talk about the events of the prior evening and having no recollection of it;

Kissing my son goodnight and tucking him in but breaking his bookshelf in the process. No memory of this whatsoever;

Getting in a major fight with my husband and ripping his cargo pocket off of his shorts;

Going to social functions completed messed up before we arrived and completely embarrassing my husband (not to mention myself);

Passing out at the pool at 4:30 p.m. during my kids' swimming lessons.

BUT,

For me the final straw was passing out while my husband was gone and my 8 year old having to call him home from out of state because he couldn't wake me up. Scary, scary stuff.

So happy to be 30 days sober today. PG

Vlad

I came home from work and was on my usual 3rd or 4th or 9th cocktail. My kids were building a boat out of sticks, leaves, and whatever they could find in the yard to float on a pond next to the house. Through the screen door I overheard my daughter ask my son if they should come get Dad to help. My son answered "He won't be able to. He's already started his adult beverages." It broke my heart. Like I had been shot. I boxed up the bar and threw it in the HOA dumpster that night.

ScoobyWoo

I was lying on my side, still drunk from the night before... looking and feeling like a question mark. I had slept through work, again. But that didn't matter because I wanted to die. And I felt like I could. I don't know why something just "went off" in my mind, but it did -- a little voice telling me that it was finally time to change, and that it was going to be ok. I was no longer scared. The next day I checked myself into rehab. It's been four sober years since then, thank God.

josi

I still struggle with staying sober even after being in treatment and detox several times. My husband keeps threatening to leave me, my kids are afraid that I'm hurting myself every time I start drinking, and my counselor says I need to make the decision to quit for myself. The problem is that I'm more miserable now than ever before. It's probaly selfish thinking but nobody had much of a problem with my drinking until I ended up in detox with withdrawals and all of a sudden everyone has a problem with it. I think if I was less depressed and and happier with life it would be an easier decision to quit drinking completely. The biggest part of my sobriety is vivitrol but I can't rely on that forever.

nodelays

I agree about the counselor telling you it's ultimately up to you. Feeling miserable doesn't help. I was thinking about it earlier, and it seems there are 2 paths with heavy alcohol use: Moving upwards in life, or downwards. It seems that simple. Everything else going in one's life is separate. Take the other issues one at a time without moving downwards through alcoholism. Now that's control!

Soberpotamus

I've had quite a few wake up calls.

The biggest was when I had to make the decision to take my mother off life support in April of 2010. She'd spent two months in ICU dying of ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome. This was a complication from a drug overdose. She took about 10 Seroquel one night. We will never know if it was intentional. But she had a history of drug overdoses, and they were intentional. So in my heart of hearts, I do believe she wanted to end her own life. She was a lifelong alcoholic and abuser of prescription drugs. I was her only child. I was 33 when she died. She was only 52. She had long since suffered from chronic pancreatitis and various ailments, all related to her alcoholism.

I met my husband in early 2011, just a year after she died. His love and patience have been instrumental in my getting sober. The last wake-up call came after he called an ambulance because I'd passed out on the floor and wouldn't wake up. I had some sort of blood sugar reaction to wine, after months of sobriety. I woke up in the ER, terrified. The doctor said I wasn't even drunk. Though there was alcohol involved. My husband was terrified for me. This was the summer before we married. I was sober six months from November 2011 (the month we married) until the summer when I crashed and burned after running and exercising excessively. I was depressed for two months in the summer.

We struggled through the beginning of our marriage, especially the 2nd half of 2012, because I was drinking off and on again. It was erratic. Finally, in March of this year, he gave me a sort of ultimatum... not so much an ultimatum as a desperate plea and warning that if I didn't stop I was going to force him to have to isolate me away from him, in a separate house, because he just couldn't take my drunken rages and verbal abuse anymore. I called a treatment center that week. I put myself into an IOP, intensive outpatient program for several weeks. I had never done anything like this before. Only got sober alone and by reading books and doing online meetings. This time I got myself around other people, in a group setting... and got honest and shared openly about my life. I have been in so much pain from growing up in a dysfunctional alcoholic family... my mom, her dad, his dad... it's a lineage. I finally wanted to stop it all.

So now I'm in AA, SMART, Women For Sobriety, group therapy and individual therapy. Getting myself around people and out of isolation was what I needed to begin to heal.

GiantNZ

My drinking had kept getting worse and worse and black outs were a common theme. My moment was when I did it several times in front of my kids. Too see the disgust on my 12 year old daughters face the next morning was the most shameful thing. Now what ever time of the day or night I will and can be there for my kids.