Advice on dealing with bad days and relapses?
 

I had 11 days off drinking and was feeling pretty good about it. And then day 12 came around. Crappy day at work, come home and find my husband has been drinking and the house is a mess so I said **** it and started drinking myself. :And then of course I continued on day 13 and day 14. scorebad WHY? I'm so mad at myself. Starting over on day 1 again. I feel like your spouse should be there to support you but instead mine seems like he's my trigger. It's not his fault I should be able to handle this. I know I have a problem and I admit it but the thought of going to AA literally brings me to tears.
How do you all handle this? How do you handle the crappy days? What do you tell yourself when you come home and think '**** it', how do you turn it around?
I've seen people post that you need to go easier on yourself after a relapse, but how do you train yourself to do that?

AA is so helpful
 

AA is not bad at all! All you do is walk in and sit down. It is eye opening! You will be glad that you went, trust me ☺All you have to do is listen, you don't need to say anything at all.

That was yesterday, this is today.
Make the choice, every single day, that you will not drink.
Separate that from dealing with life.
Deal with life. Walk through it with some help if you need. No matter WHAT happens, drinking will not help, drinking will not solve anything, drinking will not make you feel better.

Be ok with feeling like crap. Love yourself anyways. Find things you are grateful for every day. Be your own best friend first.
Life is going to happen.
I hit some hard knocks at the beginning of my time out of treatment.
I got support. I was kind to myself.
I made it through sober. And I was SO grateful for that.
And then, I realized, NOTHING could make me drink. Nothing, and nobody, but ME.

No more excuses to drink, being kind to yourself is not punishing yourself with drink. Don't believe the lies your head tells you. Focus on today. Make a choice to stay sober. It's always the choice we make. It takes practice.
Do you have a recovery plan?

What is a recovery plan?

I'm really glad you asked us what is a recovery plan. People here have a wide variety of them but generally they involve working out what triggers us to drink or take drugs, making an honest assessment of our problems and getting out of denial, seeking some help and support and setting up a simple system which keeps us focussed on good habits rather than destructive ones, like drinking.

My recovery plan include SR, AA meetings, doing a journal and doing regular exercise. None of these are unpleasant things to do - although to be fair, I had my misgivings about AA and the exercising before I got into the habit.

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...very-plan.html

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...y-plans-2.html

:)

why does the thought of AA bring you to tears?
how did i handle bad days?
i admitted and accepted alcohol was no longer a solution for ANYTHING.
then decided i was willing to learn how to live life on lifes terms.

"I've seen people post that you need to go easier on yourself after a relapse, but how do you train yourself to do that?"

training-the action of teaching a person or animal a particular skill or type of behavior.

training myself with the training i had to live life on lifes terms would have gotten me drunk whenever i had to learn something new because drinking was what i trained myself to do for anything and everything.
that alone had me realize that alcohol wasnt the problem, but the solution- so i thought.
i thought wrong.
i found my way to AA. started working the program. did alot of listening to others at meetings. asked questions.
and started putting into action what i was learning.

Drinking makes EVERYTHING worse. If you're anything like me, you make horrendously terrible decisions when you drink and sabotage your life.

You'll lose literally everything.

Being sober isn't some magical island where life is perfect. It's the same crap and bs that you have to deal with,whether you're sober or not.

You said you were mad that you drank. Did it help you to drink that night? Did it make the crappy day go away, or did it just add on to the crap?

I decided that I was not going to drink. It was not part of my life. It was not a solution to problems. It is not a day to day decision.
I wish I could help you with your partner. My wife drinks occasionally. I won't deny her that because she doesn't have this problem i have. You have to come to some acceptance of that I guess.

My husband still drinks too Noceila. In the beginning of my recovery it was terribly difficult for me to not drink, while continuing to watch him destroy himself. Like you, I felt that my husband was my biggest trigger. I began working on myself and detaching from my DH whenever he was drinking. Eventually, I set boundaries with him. No more drinking at home. I explained to him that my sobriety was more important to me than anything else and I expected that he would respect me by keeping alcohol away from me. He agreed and now, if he wants a drink, he goes out.

Hang in there, things will get better the more time you have behind you.

100% agree, well put. The crap piles up and only seems to get pushed down the road.

Well said.

Like what has been mention already, the best thing I found was to try to and understand my triggers and what made me do it. What I would say is, don't feel bad. We all make mistakes, just try and learn and use it as knowledge and a positive thing for moving forward. I find we learn the most about ourselves and life by being in the darkest places. I now see a lot of patterns of my behaviour and can see why I drank at certain times. If I hadn't relapsed in the past and made mistakes, I wouldn't have learned certain lessons that help me now.

Just liek in life there are bad days, so it is in recovery.

That's why I'm always banging on about recovery plans (POST #6) - if you have a recovery plan to fall back on, you won't be blindsided by whatever the day throws at you :)

D

Just to add to the GREAT posts above....IMO, relapse does NOT have to be a part of recovery so "training ourselves to deal with it" is not the right perspective. Learning that only WE control whether or not we drink and that needs to be a choice to never do it, is critical. Self-talk, especially at the beginning, is so important on a basic level (I won't drink today, for example).

That becomes more nuanced as we are sober, better able to handle LIFE and have tools from our chosen plans- and IMO/IME, ongoing study and learning about how to live my best life, from all kinds of resources....and we can learn to deal with anxiety, use tools like "playing the tape through" (ie, fast forwarding to how you felt after you chose to say f* it and drink...not good, right?)....

Hope to see you around here.

Lots off good advice Celia and welcome to SR. How is it going today?

Great advice
 

That was great advice

Hi celia, I'm at 7 months and my husband still drinks also. I hide upstairs a lot and I stopped watching a movie with him the other night because he kept opening up beers. Of course he had about five which is a ton for him and I would have had three times that much. But it's hard to be around and I don't have an easy answer for that, just that part of my feminist, self loving and strong answer is to be true to myself always and at the top of that list is sobriety.

Make it your number one priority and then it's just never an option any more.

It's the support of other recovering alcoholics that makes AA such a lifesaver. I call my sponsor, go to more meetings and share about it. If I were left to my own devices there's no way I could get through the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

A few weeks ago, after co-chairing a small meditation meeting a crazy person threatened to kill me. In 26 years of meetings nothing like this has ever happened. Her threat triggered my childhood abuse. I went to a store, bought a chocolate cake and ate the whole thing. I wanted to isolate but instead called my sponsor who recommended getting to a meeting. Didn't want to but did anyway and after a week I was back to normal.

Looks like this is a post from 2017, oops