Cow

Okay, I find this, is you guys think this more helpful. I want to has something very understandable for when I speak to other and when I speaker at AA meeting.

WHAT IS ANHEDONIA LIKE?
Anhedonia is an incapacity to experience emotional appreciation. There is a flatness of emotional response to anything and a general inability to experience pleasure. There is an ability to logically process things, but not an emotional ability to process things. Anhedonia is a syndrome that affects all aspects of life. The “passion,” “color,” or “zest” in life is lost completely. Anhedonia sufferers may feel heartless or guilty for not caring about things that normal people seem to care about, and they often have difficulty experiencing empathy for others or maintaining meaningful relational bonds. In general, anhedonia can be said to be a lack of emotional response to positively OR negatively valenced stimuli. Laboratory studies have used reinforcement paradigms to explore anhedonia in depression. One well-replicated finding has been that individuals with anhedonia fail to develop a response bias even towards rewarded stimuli.
Bylsma et. al., 2008
Henriques et.al., 1994
Pizagalli et. al., 2008, 2005

freshy, you avatar say "self recover" --care to expound?

Soberpotamus

It's a succinct description, Cow. A good one, I think.

trachemys

If it's all you got, work it to success.

freshstart57

Don't want to hijack your thread, Cow, it wouldn't be seemly. I have a thread already. http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...ined-long.html

Cow

Yes, thank you freshy, god forbids my threads ever become unseemly.

Della1968

trachemys

What's that acronym? ROFLMAO? Yep, that's it!

fini

[QUOTE=SoberJennie;5162368]Didn't you make a choice though? You could have chosen to continue drinking, but you didn't. So didn't you choose to quit drinking?

You lost the power of choice for moderate, normal drinking.

That's how I see it anyway.


no, Jennie, i didn't just lose choice for moderate, normal drinking. i can't remember last time i wanted moderate, "normal" drinking or aimed for that.
i wound up drinking when i had freely chosen not to. again and again and again.
this was the insanity, for me. the word compulsion is usually defined with something like "irresistible" in the definition.
i cannot "explain" it to you or anyone who doesn't simply get it. i couldn't explain it to myself. that apparently any choice i made NOT to drink i couldn't reliably stick to. i spent years in that torture, and sober months sifting through it later.

sorry, but i've spoken to it over and over and clearly cannot find better words. words are just an approximation.

fini

oh freshstart;
unseemly is the foundation here
lucky for us.
not that we don't keep building on it...

Cow, that description/explanation sounds great. YOU would know if it's entirely correct.
you could print it on a little business card and hand it out with your sweetest smile. fake or real.
you could even sigh while you're doing it

seriously: if i were in a situation at a meeting or afterwards where someone came along and mentioned a "condition" i knew nothing about, i'd appreciate a card or handout like that. it would give me some pertinent, basic info without me feeling like i were putting the other on the spot if i wanted to ask something about it but wasn't entirely comfortable doing so and was unsure of the other's comfort level.
plus, it would show me how to spell it

too many smilies in this post. can barely handle it.

trachemys

fini

Cuz is nothing driving choices but my intellect.

not cool to doubt your self-knowledge, i know, or your words about it.
but i do.

if your intellect is choosing the coffee>alcohol...it would be sensible to intellectually not choose it.
and if that were as easy for you to stick to as it intellectually is, then why wouldn't you "just do it"?

Soberpotamus

So, fini, did you not choose sobriety?

Rather, what I meant was... did your sobriety come about by something other than choice?

Cow

fini, I understand SJ question, which is: at end of day, at end of times, at pivot point, did you no finally "choose" sobriety for whatever reason or catalyst, even though before this, at all such times, choice had fail you? And if not, then how did you arrives at sobriety?

As for me, my intellect has no visceral preponderance. It go life...mmm....death...mmm.... my mind need support of emotion, oomph, energy, power, some sort of thing whatsoever for to make it go, oh, alright, yes, we go this way, this way better. Just because is logical, rational way is not have much impact to my mind, although, my mind even nonchalantly ponder that. That why I make sure to include in my definition about anhedonia that "One well-replicated finding has been that individuals with anhedonia fail to develop a response bias even towards rewarded stimuli." That mean, even if decision is no-brainer and I clearly rewarded for choosing certain way ---next time decision come up, brain is still like, meh, either way, whatever. AKA, my brain less lucid than a hamster.

Trach, behaves. Or I site you for flagrant use of smiley.

fini

it came in a moment of clarity, Jennie, where my understanding was seemingly re-arranged by a flash of insight. i understood/grasped/knew i was a drunk (that's how it came to me: "OMG, i'm a drunk!", whereas for the decades before i knew i had a problem with alcohol that i battled with and couldn't overcome).
it hit me in a totally different way from what i knew before.
if i want to use AA language, i can say that the obsession was lifted in that moment.

but those were not words i used then, though they fit well enough.

and none of this means that i didn't deal with triggers, urges, breaking associations, habits, having to reconstruct my life and my activities, re-assessing my relationships...all the stuff most of us here have to do.

but no, i never had to choose anything about it again. drinking has never been an option again. though intellectually of course i know it's an option. but it's never come at me again as a decision to be made.

what i DO choose is the things i do every day to stay with the truth of that clarity. that is where my choices and my power are.

fini

That mean, even if decision is no-brainer and I clearly rewarded for choosing certain way ---next time decision come up, brain is still like, meh, either way, whatever.


yes, butbutbut: then the infamous Big Plan way where you make it once, never to revisit the decision again, would take care of the little matter of the decision coming up again, no?

courage2

I don't know if this is relevant, about the question of choice, but I don't think I chose to drink or to stop either, not in the way that normal people make choices.

At least for the last 10-15 years, I was compelled to drink.

& as far as choosing sobriety -- I had no idea what sobriety meant -- even that it was possible. There was a long slow bad season that was my bottom, and I only know it was my bottom because at the end of it I was frightened for my life & ready to try to do something about my drinking.

For the first long time, a long time, I just postponed drinking, hour after hour, day after day. I just said to myself, I'm not drinking now. I remember how hard I tried to get to 3 days, and then I couldn't do more than that, which scared me even more.

A lot of times it was about not doing anything because anything would make me want to drink. I was un-choosing. I was running away from drinking. You can say that's a choice, but that would be word-games, because it didn't feel like that. Would you choose to run if a roaring lion was chasing you? The question doesn't make sense.

Cow, reading back through this, I realize that I quit out of fear. Are you afraid?

Hawks

So we are on diary number ten and page 17.

And a woman talked a bit much about herself at AA?

I think you should make friends with her

silentrun

I totally was scared straight Courage. I have heard Fini's experience before and mine was a lot like that. It was more the ripping away of the denial and seeing the truth of the situation. I went from It's not that big off a deal but for some reason I have to keep doing it. to This is a huge deal and you cannot keep doing this. So yes I did have a choice I just didn't know I did until that moment.
I would see the entertainment in that situation with the lady who keeps sharing. That doesn't make you a sociopath unless maybe I am one too. Watching people get irritated over petty things is good times!
So Cow how are you still clean? Inner SR godesswhatever power has given me now almost a week off the cigs and sugar. I will have to make it a month before I start talking like I for sure got this. I feel good about this one almost like I can feel a change.

Cow

fini, *sigh* sadly Cow brain is no amenable to me telling it that decision is made and it not ever to think of it again. Since it pretty much all I got, mind is very active, it like to wander, ponder, contemplate, percolate, habituate, imaginate, it looking for pronounce stimulation to make up for lack of emotion. That why I usual slip with stimulants and probable why I a very provocative comic who use extremely foul languaging. Which I has learn (through patience of the great Mr. D.) no to use here.

Is you really make DECISION about booze, and then never choice ever come up in you mind again? If so, wow!

Bunny, I wish I was afraid. I not can feel fear. Remember my duel with Hill of Death on my dirtbike last summer/fall. That was total intellect decision, both in times I took it on and could have easily kill self, and, in last time I decide no, and turn around. Was no fear. Was decision. But still was ...meh... decision. Most of time it go way of "whatever, just go." I doing same thing in city. I not going for tests I suppose to go to. I not going inpatient. I lying to sponsor. I doing other dangerous things. Whatever. ...meh...

SR, you keepa go, you total got this. I glad for you, yes, glad, and that best I got!

Hawks, you a son of bitch, but I likes you. Good point. But nobody here is hostage. Is plenty other thread to read. When I start my "diary" here it was sincere that I think that I was getting sober right then, RIGHT THEN, and that was gonna be what I write about. Oops. But one thing I promised was I gonna tell truth about where I at, and stick it out. Not really think I still be here over year later, but then, that classic addiction, yes? I hoping you stick around and keep call it like you see it.

In any case, in hopes that I make it out, I think is good to have record of my long, protracted, pathetic journey. Both for self and just so maybe someday is somebody else relate to that. Maybe is somebody else out there that think I NEVER EVER gonna make it ...but hold on, that pathetic Cow thing make it, so maybe I can too! I hope I makes it for those people. But if I not make it, then I think is still important to document what really is life of struggling alcoholic, although Mötley Crüe biography much more entertaining.

courage2

Don't frankly believe this. I recollect you seemed pretty scared when you thought you'd damaged your liver. You may not call it fear... regardless, what matters is not whether you get scared but whether you get scared enough. When will your fear (even if it's only intellectual fear) of using be greater than your fear of experiencing time without using?