DayTrader

Very well said. Cracked in just the right places , I dig it! My reality has been that those cracks continue to appear no matter how much better I think I've gotten - though my willingness to look for them and to admit them has varied.

Like a lot of people do, I got caught up in the mistaken belief that I could "positive affirmation" myself into doing better and feeling better. Combine that with the other big misconception that I fell into where I felt I needed to "sell" everyone around me on how well I was doing and how what I was doing in recovery was something they should be doing too. I suppose it makes sense that I'd do those things.... I'd been a bit of a con-man and a tremendous liar for so long it was like those traits had become part of who I was.

So there I was, talking (and posting) like I was doing so great..... so grateful for life..... so happy about being sober..... so sure that I was on the right track..... so convinced that the longer I hung around the better it would get..... yet at month 5, it wasn't any better than month 4. And then 6 seemed to be a little tougher than 5. 7, 8 and 9 were more of the same. Months of clean time was stacking up but INSIDE, my mental/emotional "recovery" wasn't progressing anything like I had been saying it was. In fact, I was getting more and more bored with recovery. More and more disenchanted with it. So what did I do? I upped the BS level - lol. I started getting MORE vocal about how well I was doing.....more insistent that I was improving.....talked MORE about how happy I was. All the while, my insides were diverging more and more from what I was saying and that caused even more darn pain.

Thank God all the junk I'd been talking continued to bring me more and more depression. And thank God that the worse I felt, the more I'd try and BS myself and everyone else about how well I was. And than God it continued to drive me crazy and get me to seriously start considering suicide again..... sober this time though. Ya know, when you're "talking" and pretending like you've gotten soooooo much better but then you notice you're having fantasies about how nice it would actually be if you just didn't wake up tomorrow morning of if some random 18-wheeler would just lose it on the freeway and take you out....... it's kinda tough to not notice how full of you-know-what you are.

I had experienced some pretty bad stuff as the result of my drinking. I had some things happen and had engaged in some behaviors that truly made me disgusted. But man oh man, that emotional bottom I experienced from about a year to 2 1/2 years was more painful, more upsetting, more depressing and more destructive than anything I'd ever felt.

I get that I'm not alone though. I'd wager it's this exact same thing that takes so many of us back out to drinking and/or drugging after we rack of some clean-time. Sometimes we just get cocky and believe the lie that we can handle it better "this time" but boy do I ever run into a lot of folks who've gone through what I did and came to the conclusion that they just had to drink or get high again because obviously this not drugging/drinking stuff sure isn't producing results anything like we had expected.

I'm super grateful for all that pain and discomfort though. It was the catalyst for what's turned into a life that I actually, honestly and truly enjoy. The coolest thing started to happen - I finally started to speak honestly about how I was feeling, about how UNhappy I was about not-picking-up one day at a time, and about how depressing life seemed. And ya know what? It was like the flood gates opened up and a whole bunch of folks who'd gone through I was going through - and had come out the other side better for it - started showing up in my life. I started to learn from them the value in being honest about myself - with others but especially with myself. I had already experience the failure of trying to talk myself in to doing and feeling better but hadn't really tried the being completely honest thing. I had always listened to my false pride and my false ego and all they told me was to keep trying to convince everyone how great I am.... Old habits die hard though, and it took a fair amount of time, a loooooot of practice, and a LOT of changes in what I was doing and how I was living.

Hardest of all, I had to admit to myself (AND become willing to incorporate some major changes) that what I'd been doing up to that point was woefully lacking, that I was failing in my recovery and that I definitely needed help. LOL.... and to this day, even TYPING that "I need help" tends to make me want to shudder in disgust. LMAO. I sooooo wanted to just stop drinking and straighten my life out...... admitting that it sure seemed like I could absolutely NOT accomplish that task was a killer. But, like I typed earlier, that was the damn key that I'd been missing all along. It was the last barrier to actually having the life that I'd been only talking about for oh-so-long.

At the time, about all I could have told you was that it felt awful. It didn't feel like a catalyst. It didn't feel like a key to breaking the last barrier to happiness. It FELT like maybe I should probably be on meds or something - ya know - to deal with the depression of being a liar and a failure. LOL. Bottoms are like that though - they're the worst things ever that are really the best things ever. The good stuff doesn't come in the process of bottoming though.......... the good stuff comes as the result in the change of trajectory we experience as we bounce up in the opposite direction. It comes as the fruits of the changes that are made in us and in the changes we make in an attempt to get up off that bottom.

Sorry for the long post... TLDR, I'm sure, for a lot of you. On the other hand though, I've found that when I honestly share about my experience, and that I've recovered from it and gone on to actually haaaaving the type of life I'd always sought (but never found), I usually get a lot of feedback and even some PMs from folks who are experiencing exactly the same thing and are looking for a way out. Helping them and watching them improve is probably my favorite thing to do.......

Outonthetiles

Lots of rock bottoms, but I kept crashing through them. My last drinking was a random Tuesday in February 2016. I'd been struggling with quitting drinking using imaginable method, none of which worked. Finally I was able to stay sober for three days in a row and looked up "three days sober" and was led to one web group that didn't work for me, and then found SR, which absolutely, without a doubt saved my life. I didn't have any "last drink," no selfies with my last beer, didn't save my last bottle or can as a souvie, I couldn't even say if my last drink was hard booze or beer, but in any case I came here and it all clicked for me. I didn't go to AA, but that would have been the next logical step if SR hadn't worked so well for me. SR has become a huge part of my life. I get really emotional thinking about all the positive changes that I've been able to make. Virtually every aspect of my life has improved in the last three years.

Obladi

DayTrader,

Not too long for me. I loved every word of it, so if nothing else, you helped me just by expanding on the theme, keeping the feeling going. I can't get too much of that right now. And the wonder of the thing is that it just keeps coming from unexpected places. Yeah, I've been describing my last venture as the Best Relapse Ever. Because it was just that transformational.

At this morning's meeting, the speaker talked about AA being a program of action and how seeing as things weren't fitting together for him, he reckoned he was gonna have to figure out a way to make it work for him.

There's much more where that story came from, but it's not as uplifting, so I'm gonna leave it rest there for the time being.

This is the year to pay attention to how I'm feeling, to enlist the help of my trusted confidants here, in AA and wherever else I find them to track down the source of the cracks and determine how to best repair them.

To thine own self be true.

O

Reid82

Yep, I had one, last May. Well I hope it is my rock bottom, I certainly don't want to see can I dig a little deeper again.....

Callas

Day Trader thank you. I also find recovery devoid of much joy at the moment. It would be nice if you could do a post sharing what you did to actually change things for you. Every small practical tip will be appreciated.

Obladi

Excellent suggestion, Callas.
Did you mean start a new thread to address this topic of struggling with discontent in early recovery even while you're "doing all the right things?" (Not sure if those are the right words, but is that kinda sorta what you meant?)

Derringer

Cumulative damage really for me.

Plenty of catastrophic events and red flags that should have been wake up calls and they went on for decades.

It was really when I tried to control it then realized I couldn't, so tried to stop under my own power and that didn't work either.

The big book called it pitiful and incomprehensible demoralisation.

I'd never tried so hard to fix something and I couldn't and it got worse.

Had to eventually throw in the towel and that was the start of recovery.

least

My breaking point was just waking up and knowing I couldn't go on drinking my life away. I was sick and tired of always being sick and tired. That was over 10 yrs ago and I don't regret a minute of it. I have never once woken up sober and wished I had drank the night before.

DayTrader

I got serious about recovery, got serious about not dying from alcoholism (whether I drank or not), got serious about stopping my talking about AA and actually trying it - taking all 12 of their steps.

I'm a completely different person as a result.

SunnyCoastK

ScottFromWI

For me things really didn't start improving until I took actionable steps to improve the underlying issues that were still there after I quit drinking. Most of us have them, in my case the main one was Anxiety - GAD and Health Anxiety mostly. It did improve slightly after I quit, but it was definitely still there and causing me problems. I had this vision that being sober was going to be magical and that some day i'd just be "happy" all the time.

Turns out, getting sober was only the beginning. It's certainly a necessary precursor, but not a solution to all of our problems in itself. For me ( specific to anxiety ), the things I have found that have helped have been Counseling, exercise, mindfulness and mediation, diet, cutting out sugars/caffeine, reading, and even some simple gratitude writing/journaling. Also I detached myself from most forms of social media - i found even that was causing me unneeded angst and mostly a waste of time.

Briansy

Really great post

Gottalife

One of the earlier posts got me reflecting on my rock bottom. I think iy came it two stages roughly a year apart. After a spell in the loony bin I had been making a serious effort to stay sober on my own power. Though I did not attend AA, I was not short of support, but just like the alcoholic who attends meetings but does not "join" in the action, I was very short on the action.

The outcome of this approach was well documented in my medical file which showed after several months struggling on just not drinking, my living conditions had progressed to the level of "absolute squalor". Part one of rock bottom - I cannot live in the world without alcohol.

So, just like many of the meeting makers life became so intolerable I turned back to my old solution, alcohol. It took about a year for part two to become apparent to me, that I can't live with alcohol either! (It was apparent to everyone else a long time before I could see it.

Futile attempts to manage the situation, with and without support, had consistently failed, my physical and mental condition had deteriorated drastically. It dawned on me one morning that there was no way out that I could see. Ahead I saw alcoholic misery, or the black hole that sobriety looked like.

In this frame of mind I went to AA as the last resort, not really believing it would work for someone like me, and I brought with me a willingness to do anything to escape the misery. I would have crawled naked across a field of broken glass if that was what it would take. Rock bottom had hit home, best described in the big book as the realisation that" self reliance had failed utterly."

Cellardweller

My rock bottom happened when my life should have been perfect. The right job, the right place, a relationship that was better than I was, but I had my head too affected by alcohol to see all that. I was responsible for that. Rock bottom was in the making for years. I was drinking immediately after work till blackout all week and then all weekend (drinking alone till I'd pass out, repeat), depression, calling suicide hotlines, talking to friends about suicide (while drinking and blackout), then finally puking, alone, all over my apartment at 3am. I realized this was not working. It took all that and years of crappy behavior to finally pound it into my head that "this is not working".

I think I had to really realize, to KNOW deep down, that I didn't want to drink normally. That drinking is for getting drunk, and underneath any sort of romanticism about taste, experience, or craft, it's just alcohol. I had to change careers, which meant up-ending my life. Things had never been what I had thought they were. Change can be scary, but at some point it gets so bad that it doesn't matter. I was ready for that, but it took the better part of 10 years to happen.