Justme2016

MelindaFlowers

Everything you write was me when I was drinking.

There was no moderation no matter what rules I set for myself.

I’ve found it much less stressful to not drink at all than trying to play that moderation game and losing every time.

Gottalife

I have a first class degree in stupidity with honors. I can tell you it is not a character defect, nor is it a barrier to recovery. I never saw anyone too stupid to recover, but I have seen quite a few too clever.

The nature of this illness as I have experienced it was that I lost the power of choice, as in the power to make the sane choice at the right time. What looks like a choice on the face of it can only be construed as pure insanity in the light of what always happens. The most frustrating characteristic of alcoholism -"why the heck did I do that?"

The way to recovery for me was to find a way of living that did not put me in the position of having to make a choice. Today I don't have to choose because it does not occur to me to take a drink.

Dee74

Hey justme

I keep on making the same dumb choices until one da I came here instead and made a different choice.

You have it in you to do that too

D

Hawkeye13

I kept trying to moderate over and over. It just is impossible once you’ve crossed the line into addiction.

You’re not stupid, but you really need to look at your relapse history and accept this truth. Peace lies behind this acceptance.

binger81

Moderation doesn't work. It may work a little better for a binge drinker like me but it simple does not work if you're trying to control your intake.

An addictive drug cannot be moderated

Anna

I think it's far easier to stop drinking completely, than to try to moderate your intake. I hope you feel better.

Rockbottom1964

Very, very true. Just take the people/members on this forum as an example. How big a percentage has tried moderation before total abstinence? Probably 99% +, if not every single one of us. Moderation is a word you scratch out of your dictionary once you add addiction to it.

Grungehead

Unfortunately, moderation is a luxury that only normal drinkers possess. The irony is that normal drinkers probably don't even realize they have that power as it comes natural to them. I found that for me I was able to moderate at times and keep my intake under control. The problem was that I couldn't predict when it would work and when it wouldn't, but in hindsight it always seemed to fail most spectacularly during the times I needed it to work the most. As the old saying goes..."Bad things didn't happen every time I drank, but every time bad things happened I had been drinking."I stopped even trying to moderate in those last grim years of my drinking.

This has been the key for me. I've managed to get "sober" for years at a time only to relapse when the circumstances in my life got difficult. It was when I was able to eliminate drinking as an option to all circumstances in my life (good or bad) that I was finally free, and I've had plenty of "tests" to this theory in the last 7 years.

Dee74

I was both a binger and then eventually an all day drinker, Neither way worked for me.

If you have to moderate your drinking, you're already the kind of drinker who can't moderate.

EndGameNYC

Might be a good idea to have your throat checked.