Dime

Tetra,
I am so proud of you for seeing your Doc and taking their advice! The first time I saw my Doc was because the Sherriffs department told me go to your Doc or come with us to jail. They were absolutely right and I was clueless.

Hope you never had a seizure again. Family members have and it was a very scary experience. I'm one of the lucky ones. I had several serious brushes with really nasty DT's with no seizures, I just got lucky. I'll say a prayer for you and your recovery. Best wishes for an easy recovery, just hang in there with the no more booze!

I absolutely couldn't do anything without drinking. Today I absolutely love being sober and not continually doing terrible things I deeply regret.

bigsombrero

I hope you are getting some good sleep tonight, that's always important to feeling happy I think. Your thoughts mirror many of ours. It's tough when we "get stuck" in that cycle, it's hard to get outside of our own heads sometimes when it comes to negative thoughts. Thing is, we don't have to live this way. EndGameNYC said it well when he talked about trying to live in the present, I think that was a really cool way to phrase it. Instead of worrying what everyone is thinking all the time, and reliving the bad times, why not just enjoy the true world for what it is, at this moment?

We have the power to drop our problems, and just "live in the now". We don't do it often enough, maybe start giving that a go?

lisatrying

Tetra I am a 45 year old single woman living with her mother unemployed.

And for a while I felt hopeless and drank about a bottle of strong spirits a day and took benzos to deal with my sense of failure for losing all that I had, a well paid job, my own house, my sense of self and worthwhileness.

But now at nearly 7 months my self image is different again.

I am 45 single unemployed living with mum studying at uni, volunteering with a great organisation, a great friend, and a caring member of my face to face recovery group. I could add some other stuff as well I guess.

I don't have a job or my own place but eventually I will have those things again. And I like myself again. A lot. I like myself even more than I did before alcohol and drugs took over my life.

It takes time I think to forgive ourselves for the bad stuff that happened, but no one else worth knowing wants to hold a grudge against us so why should we?

Eddiebuckle

Tetra,

This brings to mind something I read last week. It wasn't about recovery, but described a perspective I found very familiar:

• I am bad
• the world is terrible
• my future is bleak

This is what my disease brought me to believe, and left unchecked it will bring me there again. One of the things that I have learned to trust in sobriety is that the more emphatically and emotionally I believe something, the more likely it is to be false.

Sobriety is not a destination, it is a process. Don't judge yourself by your surroundings and certainly not by "my insides versus everyone else's outsides." We all carry our scars, and some are more visible than others. Be gentle with yourself. If you have the opportunity to do so, get a copy of a book called "The Spirituality of Imperfection" - it is fantastic, and helped me tremendously in working through that phase of my recovery.

You are a creation of the divine Tetra - don't lose sight of that.

Namaste!

PurpleKnight

Your therapist is very wise!!

tonigel

Hi Tetra,

Here's something that can help with negative memories from the past. Next time you get a flash back, try going through the memory from a different perspective. For example, try going through it from another persons point of view, or knowing it was eventually going to be ok, or that you would survive the experience.

This forces your brain to build more associations (a bigger picture) around the memory, which alters your experience of it. This makes it more difficult for your mind to trigger the old default memory, which was bothering you.

Hope it helps.....