Life
 

Ever since I watched my mother in law go through the end of life stages and moving into her house, and watching my wife have to go through the pain of going through her belongings I've been having a very hard time staying sober. I don't even want to be sober. I don't know what's wrong with me. I so wanted to be sober before it all happened. I have constant anxiety of something else going wrong. I just want to get drunk every night. I haven't even had any dreams for weeks.

The weird thing is when I'm drinking I'm not just sitting alone in the dark being depressed. I'm having fun, and laughing and just having a great time. Until I feel it the next day and regret for being drunk and I keep on telling myself tomorrow will be day one again. Not really sure where I'm going with this but thought maybe it would make me feel better or something.
Have a good everyone.

Life is hard Jacks. I can pretty much guarantee you though that the alcohol isn't helping. All those feelings we try to escape by drinking are still there when we sober up, and they accumulate. I hope you can find the strength to quit and seek help. Dealing with life long term is much easier sober.

You are romanticizing alcohol....linking it to the good times while forgetting the bad times it caused. It will disappoint you. Stay strong for your wife and don't go there.

Have you considered grief counselling Jacks?

Grief & loss, in fact any intense emotion, can be hard for some of us. All many of us do want to run away.

Could that be the case here?

Someone trained to help you deal with overwhelming feelings, with an outside perspective might be able to help?

D

Dee is offering very good advice. As will happen to all of us, I went through the tragic loss of my wife, and experienced very powerful, even overwhelming grief, something I had never been through before. I didn't know what was going on and the grief counsellor was extremely helpful, explaining that what was happening to me was quite normal. Grief seems to have a mind of its own. It is not easy to just bury it.

The little quote above caught my eye. If my drinking was like that, I'd still be drinking. But the truth for me was far removed from that. The fact was all the fun and laughter was long gone, and had been replaced with misery, fear and insanity. For me to think it was fun would be the height of delusion.

Your wife lost her mom. Is she handling it without drinking?

Then so can you.

Get sober, be there for your wife. Whatever fear is driving you to drink...fear of death, fear of facing the emotions of grief...they have to be faced sober.

It seems like you are not being emotionally present for you wife
by escaping into "fun" and the bottle.

That's what a lot of us alcoholics do as we aren't comfortable with feelings.

If I were your wife, I think I might be feeling pretty lonely about now.
Can you put down the bottle and face the discomfort for her sake?

Maybe you're dealing with the reality of your own mortality?

I think when we first get sober, there's so many fresh bad memories with alcohol.....as we're sober longer and longer, we feel better and better....as time passes, the memories fade and we start to only take note of how we feel now.
I'm sorry you're going through all that...it's only natural to want to seek out relief, so don't beat yourself up for that. Just stay strong and remember there is no true relief with drinking....it will only take your mind off of it very temporarily...and if you're like me, it will only make your emotional state much much worse...we can't rationally deal with our emotions with alcohol.
Know that facing all this sober is initiating some serious personal growth for you

we cant count on much in life cant count on others probably cant even count on ourselves but we can count on life. Life will always be what it is good and bad etc.. what we do about ourselves is the question. We know for a fact life will be what it will be. its not always going to be peaches and sunshine but sure sometimes it will be and sometimes its going to hand us a load of crap. How do we get from one day to the next without allowing the kick to the teeth to knock us over and send us right to the bottle?

Best I can figure is acceptance. Surrender etc.. I had to learn to start shruggint higns off throwing my hands in the air and saying theres nothing I can do about this. The old serenity prayer comes to mind.

"God grand me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference"

Thank you for your time to respond to me. I appreciate everyone's thoughts. So both me and my wife have been drinking together. I mentioned to her we should go see a grief counselor but it's not something she wants to do. And I can't really force her to do anything that she does not want to do.

For myself I would like to go talk to a professional. I have an overwhelming sense of something else bad that could happen. For example I think everything in the house is going to catch on fire. or the stove is going to blow up.
Could this be part of grieving or my own imagination?

Thats normal. I get that all the time when I drink. Its because your mind knows you have no control over anything because you're loaded drunk so it can't process its daily thoughts, feelings, routines etc.

When I got sober thats the first thing I noticed (I felt very much in control all the time).

Well, I did the same thing dealing with my mom's dying--drinking with my spouse

Overall, it wasn't helpful at all for processing the pain and coming to terms with anything.

It just made its own drama in the end as I leaned on it more for other things too
and only kicked the can of grief down the road.

If you know you have a drinking problem, I suggest you rein it in and
don't let her drinking be an excuse for you to join guilt-free.

Somebody maybe needs to be sober in this picture to be the rock?

I found my notebook that I started writing in when I first got sober January of this year. I wrote in it atleast once a week for almost 3 months. I'm going over my sober experience and how much I enjoyed it. I'm going to stop being selfish and get myself together again. Thank you all for your help. I've had a lot to think about today.