DownButNotOut83

Anything, anything you put above your sobriety, you WILL lose. If you haven't yet, you're just lucky

I'm just repeating very true wisdom I've heard from oldtimers

zjw

it is sort of scary how sobriety has to be the #1 priority for me. with out that none of the other priorities will mean squat i'll trash them all sooner or later if i'm not sober.

Soberwolf

Sobriety will always come first

DownButNotOut83

Sjw, the point is that to keep what matters in your life, you stay sober. The people in your life will be happier, you'll do better your job. How much have you given up to alcohol? I have no intention of insulting you. if we could drink like normal people, we wouldn't be here , I get it im a drunk too

zjw

no i think we are on the same page. I told someone just today that you could torch the world around you to the ground and if you stayed sober you'd STILL be better off then if you where not sober and had not torched it.

FeenixxRising

I'm not fond of this particular cliche because the idea behind it can be misconstrued and abused. Here's a question. It's not hypothetical, as someone in AA told me this is what their sponsor told him:

1) the sponsee could not attend his usual meeting because he was caring for his young children (around 12 or 13 years of age), and he could not find someone to watch them while he attended the meeting.

2) his sponsor told him to leave the children home alone and attend the meeting because if he put his children before his sobriety (care for his children rather than attend the meeting), he would eventually lose them.

Do you feel the sponsor was correct? Was the sponsee putting his children before his sobriety?

HereIAm321

That sponsor sounds nutty.

I would've told them to take a hike & stay away from my family.

ubntubnt

Thats because it not a task or a project or an achievement its a sense of being....a precondition of life. Like whats the point of try to be promoted in work or build a happy family if you are dead or drunk? Its simply not possible. I don't view being sober as something to aim for alongside all the other things I need to get done, its in a class all of its own. So my priorities are:
1) be alive
2)be sober
3) everything else

finallyimfree

I have put more important things above my sobriety, because of that, i am still sober until now. Sobriety will follow, if you know to yourself what is more important in your life, your mind and body will follow because there this "important thing" is at stake if you stay being alcoholic.

Kensho

For me, it goes something like this:

A life worth living requires sanity.
Sanity requires clarity.
Clarity requires sobriety.

If I lose sobriety, I will lose clarity.
If I lose clarity, I risk losing sanity.
If I lose my sanity, I will eventually lose
all that makes my life worth living.

Dee74

Sometimes folks not really understanding what something means will interpret it a very literal and rigid way.

I might add thats not a phenomenon exclusive to AA

Would take take advice from someone who told you to leave your kids alone Feenix?

I wouldn't

D

DownButNotOut83

Im not a big book thumper, but I have found sage wisdom in meetings. Child neglect of course is not a sound example. And I've been posting a lot today, trying to take my mind off withdrawal. I'm sorry, wasn't trying to preach. Rambling seems to help

MelindaFlowers

Agreed. Anything and everything positive in my life depends on my sobriety.

Drinking was only half of it. I found that the hangovers wreaked just as much terror and havoc in my life as the drinking. Goodbye to both!

thisisme

I agree.

EndGameNYC

I built a very nice, challenging and fulfilling life for myself when I was first sober for twenty five years. The more I achieved, the more I progressed, the less concerned I was about my sobriety. I at first slowly stopped doing the things I needed to do to take care of myself, my sobriety, and then pretty much gave up altogether on the things that got me there.

I had a great life, so why shouldn't I be able to enjoy it like everyone else? My achievements demonstrated that I could do all this on my own, right? Picking up the drink for me after all that time didn't immediately follow trauma, crisis, a breakup or a positive, life-changing event. The more I think about my relapse the more I discover. More than ten years before my relapse, I lost someone who was very dear to me. Following that, I also had a professional setback. Such things happen to everyone on the planet, but because I'd lost my connection to my program of recovery, each of these two losses eventually caught up with me in ways that I was not aware of -- or refused to see -- at the time. I had support, but not the support I needed; the support was also not in response to my being honest about what was going on with me. I then suffered a prolonged episode of major depression. Working myself through that awful time only reinforced my conviction that I was okay, even successful, at taking care of things with little or no help from supportive others.

Instead of continuing to (or resuming) work on my recovery or my internal life, I placed my bet on my newer, better life to save me. I'd been sober for a very long time, right? So my "solution" was to "work harder" (confusing activity with making progress) on the external achievements that populated my newer, better life rather than attending to my internal life, my recovery. And I was only superficially successful at doing this, though that seemed to be enough at the time. I was operating under bad faith, and when I eventually picked up the drink again, it was out of indifference rather than overwhelming crisis or grand achievement. I allowed myself to be blinded by an ego that had grown out of proportion, and by a broken heart and a muted soul to which I did not properly attend.

I then found myself a 'round-the-clock drinker, every day for the better part of three years, and lost everything and everyone dear to me in life.

So here I am. One would think that, after living through both the horrors of alcoholism and the insane successes that redemption brings, I'd have been "smarter" about my recovery and the way I lived the rest of my life. My failings, my losses and my humbling revelations weren't about alcohol. They were about my determination and my conviction that I could continue living a better life without sober support.

FeenixxRising

No, I wouldn't. But I can see how someone newly sober could easily be mislead by someone lacking a little common sense. From my perspective, skipping a meeting (or anything recovery related) to take care of my young children while sober is the essence of "putting sobriety first".

So it's a matter of perspective, and that's why I'm not fond of recovery slogans and cliches--they are too easily misconstrued and used inappropriately.