fini

...biggest lies I told myself. I wonder tho if they really were lies if I believed them at the time.

yeah, THAT one.
in retrospect it's soooo easy to "decide" that these things were lies, just as at times it's soooo easy to call out others on it.
but i KNOW that at the moments i made those statements i was authentically and genuinely sincere about them and what i meant and convinced of the truth of them.

i'm thinking they're not really a matter of truth or lying.
"denial" isn't really about truth or lying, either, in that way.
but that's a tangent....

RobbyRobot

We all have our respective life experiences to own and make of them as we wish. I lied to myself about my drinking, sure I did. I also lied to myself about living a life of not drinking too. When I finally did quit for good, I quickly realised I had self-deceived myself on both sides of the lie question. Mostly I was wrong about living without alcohol. My biggest lies came down to not quitting but much more about justifying why I shouldn't quit.

However we want to slice and dice our past lies, it really dosen't matter if we believed our lies or not, imo. What matters is that the lesson to learn here is we choose for ourselves what we believe - and obviously even the powers of addiction don't compare to the powers of our lies when we believe our lies are truth, or of course the other way around our truths are discovered to be nothing but lies.

Interesting thread, lol.

Arbor

Yeah. That hits home with Me right there. Countless times I've told this to myself and to God. Times where I've probably should have been hospitalized. A time when the traditional hangover developed into a serious health scare.

freshstart57

I don't know about most cases, but I do know about mine. I didn't ever try to quit but once. I never really quit drinking at all, I don't think I missed more than a handful of days in decades. A screw loose? I suppose I did, but I tightened up through acceptance.

I guess for me it was logic and reason with a whole pantload of acceptance. The acceptance was the kicker. And that really is pretty simple.

EndGameNYC

I never swore off drinking, and never believed I could drink safely. I knew I was an alcoholic at a very young age.

My thinking was more along the lines of, "I'm an alcoholic, and this is my fate. Just accept this and stop fighting against what it is that I am. I'm doomed, so I might just as well continue drinking."

At minimum, I was a pathological liar while I was drinking, if only because being honest would only provoke unwanted criticism from others about my drinking. Because I was doomed to being an alcoholic, I had the right to lie to everyone about anything related to my drinking. They "just don't know what it's like."

awuh1

The three statements above stuck out as I read this thread.

I must disagree with you to some degree BTS1. I believe both logic and a moral compass are necessary for recovery. In line with what freshstart said, my drinking (at some point along the way) became an immoral thing to do. I was endangering myself and those around me with the potential for great physical and emotional harm. Waking up to this fact took the form of an inspiration. The reality of my situation finally became apparent. I was, at that point, finally able to see things as they were.

I think fini made an important point and I don’t think it’s tangential to this discussion. “Denial” is a psychological defense mechanism that we all use (to one extent or another) in order to cope with unpleasant realities. The physical addiction to alcohol, and the use of it to deal with life, generates the need to distort reality in order to continue to ‘cope’. One of the psychological mechanisms used to distort reality is denial. There comes a point where denial actually causes unpleasant reality.

This epiphany IMO is essential to recovery. Even then however, an individual can just say “F*uc it”.

Still needed is the willingness to adopt a different course in life based on the direction shown by some sort of moral compass. Initially this may just involve the reduction of harm to one’s self. It's my experience that those with long term success generally expand their horizons to include the greater good.

Deckard

On the way out: "There must be a better way."

Now I found it.

fini

“Denial” is a psychological defense mechanism that we all use (to one extent or another) in order to cope with unpleasant realities. The physical addiction to alcohol, and the use of it to deal with life, generates the need to distort reality in order to continue to ‘cope’. One of the psychological mechanisms used to distort reality is denial.

yes. it can serve a good purpose, in that way.
be necessary, even, at times.
reading Robby's response it's the "self-deceived myself" that comes closest to what i was aiming for...it's not the same as lying.

self-deceiving is not about truth or lying as much as about blindness and struggle. inklings of what's "real".
well, mine was.

BackToSquareOne

I wonder if rationalization isn't a much bigger problem than denial. I never denied that I had a problem or that it was wrong so I never saw myself as being in denial. I do think I had a tendancy to rationalize everything I did though.

RobbyRobot

Yeah, rationalisations and justifications about being drunk/sober had much more to do with my continuing my drinking then being in denial of whatever. It was impossible to be in denial of my consequences for my drinking, lol.

Being rational with ourselves means balancing the subjective with the objective in our experiences. Alot of room there to make what we will of the opportunities created within the fields of objectivity and subjectivity. Denial existed of course, but it wasn't in the drivers seat, lol. My driver back in the day was absolutely my ego gone wild. Today, not so much

MrGhost

Good post. Considering the fact that I had already lost my sanity before drinking, every lie you can think of just so I could drink, I said. I was too overwhelmed to realize that my drinking was going to take over me, but I had already been taken over before even drinking.

fini

don't know if it's "a much bigger problem"; i think it's a different thing.

certainly i rationalized, and that , to me, was about using reason, really, to allow for continued drinking. deceiving myself with false reasoning that i could make sound rational and reasonable to myself.
i didn't deny i had a problem, and i felt it was "sin" quite often (whole different conversation), but i was mosty certainly self-deceiving about having control/being in control.
THAT wasn't lying but a lack of understanding/seeing.

when i rationalized continued or repeated drinking or a return to drinking when i'd committed to NOT doing this again.....yeah, that always had a baaaad taste mixed in with the utter short-lived relief of drinking again. the rationalizing i knew on some level wasn't sincere or authentic or genuine.
but i was very very good at it

BackToSquareOne

You nailed it Robby, you can really rationalize being drunk to the nth degree. I have a cousin that just died, his famous words were, "Your going to die anyhow, so why not die happy". He still associated being drunk with happiness and died that way. Guess he got what he wanted if that's what he thought happiness was.

awuh1

I think denial is nearly impossible to recognize while it’s taking place and it’s often very difficult to see (in ourselves) even with hindsight. Denial is often used when viewing the magnitude of the problem, not just that a problem exists in the first place. Without this form of denial (often referred to as minimization), few of us could have gotten to point we did.

Likewise, rationalization was just another form of self-deception. Both are just the means used to perpetuate the lies, and the lies were in place to make it easier to avoid the (moral) responsibility for the drug and alcohol use.

I believe many continue to use both denial and rationalization to deal with their past intoxicated behaviors, and they do it long after they have had their last drink or drug.

EndGameNYC

Good stuff. Love the passage from the Tao Te Ching.

BackToSquareOne

Denial infers the person is unaware of the problem or is denying the serious nature of the problem. Can a person still be in denial if they are aware of all those things.

awuh1

It's not a matter of awareness (short of someone being asleep), it's an example of distorting reality in order to make it more palatable. This link has more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial

BackToSquareOne

Interesting article, I never knew there were so many types of denial. It does seem like a term that can be abused, if you don't agree with my ideas I can say you are in denial. I think it's way overused by the recovery community without having a clue as to whether or not the person really is in denial.

RobbyRobot

Denial was obvious to me, and certainly not nearly impossible for me to recognise. I didn't understand my denial in common terms of psychology, such that denial is created as a defense construct, of course. I did though understand that my drinking required me to justify and otherwise rationalise my experiences so as to continue my drinking. I suppose people claiming they were in denial of the process of their looking the other way as they drank themselves to whatever consequences is possible, but such denial is not in my past experience.

I knew I was drinking. I knew I was suffering consequences. I drank nonetheless. No room there for denial. Plenty of room for justifications and rationalisations, of course.

I was also brought up in an abusive dysfunctional family. Let's just say things were done to me, forced on me if you will - and there is certainly room for my denial in these kind of experiences, yes. Being abused by something/someone that goes against my own freedoms of choice, my own moralities, my own powers to protect myself -- yeah, I absolutely went into denial about all that -- and that kind of denial contributed to my making my life out to be something that I felt should best be served by being flushed away -- and that destructiveness was best served by drinking from age 12 onwards -- yeah, that denial, sure thing.

As for drinking though, anyone can believe or not believe that I knew the reality of my drinking, and at least enough of the consequences to not have a chance in hell of me not knowing I was f ucking myself up when I drank. I drank because I knew all too well that drinking f ucked me stupid. It really helped me be something and someone else then who I really was back when. It worked until it didn't, and then I was really screwed, lol.

Hey, isn't denial a river in Egypt?

fini

what i "denied" was that there was such a thing as alcoholism, such a thing as an alcoholic, and that i am one.
this is what i personally mean by saying i was in denial...i knew i had a problem, it wasn't right, it wasn't "normal". all those were clear to me.
but the alcoholism part? no, that went with the powerless-thing, and i couldn't see that for the longest time.

seems, too, that "denial" is a word used most often by people about others. by "outside-viewers" about what they think they know they see.

will read the link posted as soon as i have more time.
interesting thread; thank you.