zerominuszero20

is its availability.

Every time I feel bad a drink is just a liquor store away and I don't even give myself a chance to work through it. I think this is the main problem. Unlike the harder drugs, (which I don't use).

Booze are cheap and you can stock up on them by the liters. I understand that this is an obvious point I am making but if I were sent to the middle east to work, I would stop being an alcoholic overnight and I would be fine.

When you have little to no choice then your mind just won't fixate on things that aren't there anymore.

ScottFromWI

I would disagree zero. People find ways to get their drug of choice whether it be alcohol, cocaine, heroin, prescription drugs or anything really. Illicit drugs are available to just about anyone anywhere too, and they are getting a lot cheaper with large amounts being produced around the world.

We all can make the choice to drink or not, no matter where we live.

courage2

is that one will likely die of it, quickly or slowly, and painfully.

zerominuszero20

I understand what you are saying Scott. Records of alcohol consumption during The Prohibition are mixed but it is agreed that the population consumed 30-50% less. Maybe the moderates just gave it up completely, who knows?

least

Alcohol is readily available to me any time, but I don't buy it cause I don't drink anymore. I made up my mind to get sober for good almost nine years ago and haven't drank since.

zerominuszero20

Kudos to yourself huh?

JeffreyAK

The first rehab I went to was a couple blocks from a well-known drug scoring area, and many people who were there for street drug problems complained about how they had to walk through the same neighborhood they used to score drugs in, to get to rehab. Deleting your dealers phone number and blocking his calls was also a common topic of discussion, and not something us alcoholics had to deal with. I understand it's frustrating, but it's never the availability of alcohol that keeps us alcoholics, it's the continued deliberate choice to consume alcohol that does that.

Dee74

Noones trying to 'big note' themselves zerominuszero - I think the important takeaway point here is that even tho it's all around, we can still lead a non alcoholic life

ps I've seen a few members here from 'dry' countries too - never underestimate the relentlessness of addiction.

D

zerominuszero20

Alcohol availability is not the only problem, just the main one. My liquor store is literally a 3 minute walk from me. Its the same with cigs but them cigarette smoking won't destroy your life (not counting lung cancer please) and the withdrawal from quitting smoking is more annoying than anything else. I've done it.

Yeah, sure there are people from dry countries coming here but how many? 4 or 5?

fini

"...... and I don't even give myself a chance to work through it."

zerominuszero, i think your sentence there shows that the main problem is with you and your response to alcohol, and not with its availability.
your last sentence mentions a fixating mind....i found that to be the main problem.
not the alcohol, but my mind.

zerominuszero20

Could be. So do you think it is a good idea to get rid of all the alcohol in your house when you are trying to get sober?

fini

yes, i do.
in the beginning, i found it helpful to have no temptation. later, it didn't matter anymore.
there will always be booze available and you will always be able to get it somehow.....so you cannot rely on supposed non-availability as a solution.
i also think possibly you might obsess MORE about it if it were really difficult to get
that is how it was for me, anyway.
you will read on SR often about taking the drinking option off the table. people get there in different ways.
in effect it is taking the internal availability away so that the external one is irrelevant.

ScottFromWI

It's not a bad idea, but it's not always required. A lot of people get sober while their spouses or or other family members continue to drink.

Think about it this way- it's estimated that somewhere around 10% of the American population is either alcoholic or has a problem with alcohol. The stats might be fuzzy, but alcoholics are definitely the minority by a long shot. And alcohol here is literally available anywhere, anytime. If availability where the main factor, would you not think that there would be a lot more people with a problem?

zerominuszero20

I was in a Mormon town a long time ago and there was no way to get booze. so for that weekend, I didn't drink. It felt boring and sucky but I was fine for those 3 days because I just put the option out of my mind.

Dee74

Hey, if you think moving to abu dhabi is a good recovery move, go for it

My point was - you can still get a drink anywhere, if you're determined... and what happens when you move back?

Right now I live 3 mins away from a bottle shop and 5-7 mins each way to a pub.

I'm not saying it's not easy - it was the hardest thing I had to do initially - but after 3 months or so, it got a lot easier.

Its absolutely no worries for me now, ten years in.
You can get here too

D

JeffreyAK

Exactly, you put the option out of your mind. You can do that even if there's a liquor store a block away.

zerominuszero20

I put the option out of my mind because there was no option unless I wanted to rent a car and drive to another state so I just accepted that there were no booze.

I am not trying to make a debate here. I understand that it is an addiction. My point is that the more readily it is available the harder it is to resist. Now, are you all saying that it is exactly the same regardless?

An argument could be that if an alcoholic couldn't get his hands on alcohol then he would get high some other way.

Dee74

I ended up drinking all day every day, so I remember how hard it was not to drink when my life was geared to drinking, my friends all drank like I did, and my response to anything was to drink.


I remember one Good Friday - all the pubs were shut - so we went through this ridiculous wild goose chase of finding someone who'd sell us booze illegally. We never found anyone but we ended up in some really skeezy dangerous places.

We couldn't face the idea of not drinking for a day....

Madness

I think the point all of us are trying to make is - all that can change

It took me a while not to want to drink, but I worked hard on building a sober life I love.

I still love it

Now nothing and no-one in the world could 'make' me drink - not good times, not bad times, not peer pressure, not availability or some new kind of beer.

I just don't want to anymore.

It was hard to get here, but by no means impossible.

I've never climbed Everest but I know it's possible...y'know? .

D

MindfulMan

I didn't. I still have a wine fridge with a couple of cases of very expensive wine that I'm sure is lovely. I serve it to guests and give bottles away as presents.

I was told at rehab that I needed to call ahead and have friends get all of the wine out of my house. I didn't. I got home and had plans to take it away, or sell it. It was too much of a pain. And I seriously had about zero temptation to open a bottle or pour a glass.

Honestly I had just made the decision not to drink anymore under any circumstances.

There was one big caveat. I have roommates who drink and they had an open bottle of tequila in the freezer. After a few days of that bottle calling to me and feeling hugely triggered, I had them remove it. I wouldn't allow myself around open bottles of hard liquor for about 90 days, just in case. I had one really bad last craving/trigger walking past 3 bars in downtown LA, where I had my phone out to phone a friend from my outpatient rehab program. Once I got out of there, I was fine, and it was actually the last significant trigger/craving that I had, and it was about 120 days sober. I've got a few days to 500.

Been sober 18 months. I rarely have cravings and the ones that I do have are quite mild and quickly dissipate.

It's not how far away or available booze is to me. It's making that decision that I am no longer a drinker. Period. 18 months later I'm still sober.

Everyone is different. I had a Paul on the way to Damascus moment (and I'm not even religious) in rehab soon after finishing medical detox. I can't control my drinking. It might take weeks or months or even years, but I will go back down that rabbit hole of addiction. If I take one drink evidence shows that eventually my life will go to crap and I will end up very sick from alcohol. Once I start, I can't stop. But what I CAN control is...not taking that first drink. Ever. Period. The only way to assure that I will never end up in rehab again is to never drink ever ever again. So I won't. Being drunk is no great shakes, being under the influence of NO substances is a far more enjoyable state of mind.

I started to like life so much better without alcohol, even the 'just one drink' alcohol, that it's now a no-brainer. I can be around booze no problem; I just got back from a beer bust, where ironically my bottled water was more than a big draft beer. Zero interest. I had way big fun meeting people. Right about the time I was leaving some really drunk guy made a very indecent proposal, so I decided that was my cue to bail.

As an aside, when I was drinking heavily i assumed that EVERYONE was wasted at bars and parties. In reality, very few are.

I never formally did AVRT work, but I kinda ended up there.

Try changing your thinking along these lines. It worked for me. I also did inpatient rehab, a bit of AA for the first 90 days or so, outpatient therapy, and individual psychotherapy...just to be sure it all stuck. It did.

shortstop81

I agree to the extent that alcohol is not only readily available, but also very much part of our social fabric. Sometimes I find myself getting a bee in my bonnet over it, but in the end it's pretty simple: I simply don't drink anymore.

For me the main problem with alcohol is how it affects me once it's in my body.

Since my divorce I've been living with my son at my parent's house, and they're fairly heavy drinkers. There is always a LARGE amount of homemade wine in the garage. I'm not mentioning this to pat myself on the back, but just to illustrate that it's possible to make the decision NOT to drink even with booze readily within arms reach.

Yeah, this may not be the best setup if I were super-early in recovery. I've relapsed many-a-time during a weak moment where booze was staring me in the face.

Right now maybe it feels like the main problem with alcoholism. But I'm guessing it won't always feel that way.