jdgualazzi

Well friends, I seem to have hit a new low and I'm not sure how to dig myself out of it. In the past I've done pretty good with controlling myself or bettering myself. My husband and I will have a great week and then one day he'll say something or accuse me of something (drinking-wise always) and that will set everything askew. :-( Since he keeps such a watchful eye on me at home, I have taken to bringing my drinks to work and hiding them in a convenience store cup...that way I can get my "fix" (if you will) without him knowing.

No one at work has noticed because I don't get drunk, I just get buzzed, but I KNOW THIS IS WRONG and am very angry at myself for doing it.

I looked up AA in Las Vegas and the two websites I found were very confusing and I have not made the decision to go. I did ask my husband if he wanted to go to the retreat with me, since we live relatively close to Palm Springs.

However, back to the issue at hand, and since I haven't posted in a long time about my problem, what can I tell myself to convince myself that I don't need it?

Thanks all, as always,
Jenni

CarolD

Hello again I just read your past post...

I mentioned to you last year of the AA club...T.I.E.
That would be a good place to start.

Your co workers don't notice the smell of alcohol
on you and in the area? I certainly would.

I got fired over my drining issues...and then went to AA.

Take care... Blessings

jdgualazzi

Carol,
What is T.I.E? I've not heard of it...

CarolD

It's an AA club in Vegas


You said the web sites were confusing...so look for the name. TIE

jdgualazzi

Is that the Triangle Club? I looked at their schedule and didn't understand anything. Nothing had the Newcomer icon by it and everything is titled a quirky name that I didn't know what it meant like "Jaywalkers" "Misfits" etc.

CarolD

Those are simply the names of different AA groups.

The TIE is a clubhouse with lots of different AA meetings.

Look in your phone book and call AA.
Ask them for the nearest meeting to your location.

See if this is it,,,(702) 598-1888v

Take care..

jdgualazzi

he is so unsupportive of me it just makes me crazy! He wants to follow me around and drive me everywhere so he can make sure I don't have an opportunity to drink, but then, like last night, he knew I had to go to a meeting with two old coworkers of mine at a house (will all the alcohol you could imagine) and he was supposed to go with me (I had no problem with that) But 2 minutes after I'm supposed to leave, he makes my son dinner! So he obviously had no plans of going. ANd then he got mad at me because I went alone! It's a catch 22 what do I do about that? I swear I think he (subconsciously) does these things on purpose just so I will get into trouble. I don't know how to deal with that. How can I focus on getting better when I have to spend half my time focusing on figuring out his intentions?!

I slept on the floor with my dogs last night because they're the only ones that want to snuggle with me

Justme57

Good morning ! welcome back to SR!

Alcoholism is a progressive disease, and it will continue to progress , believe me .

The people at work, may well know you are drinking, and not know what to say to you . I thought I hid mine too, but found when I quit, that I was the last to know ! EVERYBODY knew!
As for your husbands reaction, he is probably at loss to know what to do for the best. Alanon would be very good for him I think, he sounds as if heis running round in circles , trying to control YOUR drinking.

If it was me, I would be ringing AA and getting to a meeting FAST! Get to your first one, then you can sort it out from there .

There are, of course , alternatives to AA, but I have no experience with them, I am sure someone will pst a link soon !

HUGX
Lee

SaTiT

I'm not so sure if peaple dosen't notice.
You can smell alcohol a mile away.
I was young at the time...so I would drag my ass into work
and my excuse was I was out partty all night , which i was.
It's a progression.
I use to buy a bottle after work
Then I buy a bottle in the morning.
Then I started pouring it in my coffee.
Then I had it my glove box.
Then I would only take a shots at lunch
Then I would start taking shots during break time.
Then I would just have a bottle in my filing cabinet, why go to my car.
Then I would take a drink on the hour everyhour.
Then I would take a drink when ever the hell I want.
Then I got trun on to the magic power, which kept me wide awake
so I would stay up all day and all night drinking, partying and working.

Then after a 2-3 months of that ....I body just gave out.
I went to sleep on one sunday afternoon.
A woke to co-workers knocking at my doors.
They were all in a panic..I thought the plant burnt down or something.
I was informed that it was thursday morning and everybody was worried
about me and have been looking for me for days. They called, peaple
came by in previous days..but i was totally knocked out.

Even then my office manager tried to talk to me.
The corpration I was employed at had med. insurance.
She tried to convievce me to go into treatment.
but I was in total denial. She even ask me again a week after that.
I had a major attititude and blamed everybody about how much i hated
my job...and so on and so forth. I quit a good paying job.
I found other jobs within weeks, but i had a hard time keeping them
or showing up to work

earlybird

There is nothing you can TELL yourself that will make you stop. Obviously, if you are drinking at work, risking your job, and your good name just for alcohol, you have a problem. I did the same thing. I went to bar at lunch a few times a week. I got away with it for over a year. Thought nobody knew. Found out after the fact that the majority of people knew. I only drank a little at first. Thats why I thought it was ok. This disease progresses,..and so did my drinking at work. I almost passed out. And I lost my job.

Peter

Don't need what? The alcohol or the job ? Because if you do not stop drinking very soon you won't have a job.

leviathon

Just a point, you say no one at work has noticed b/c you don't get drunk, just get a buzz, I can assure you some at work are fully aware of what you are doing. Quit kidding yourself and get honest, that is all you need to tell yourself where you are at and what your issues are.

TRISH1011

I drank at my last job, and the three before that. I was fired from one but I am quite sure that the colleagues that I had from each of those positions knew of my problem. One of them actually said I looked really sick all the time, very pale and she was very concerned about the affect the lifestyle had on my health. I just lied and said I was anaemic, hence my white complexion. "Didn't realise that anaemia made your eyes bloodshot and your breath smell like a spilt vodka glass" she said to me angrily. 'Fess up, get some help. I am sick of seeing you self-destruct" Another friend, who was actually my team leader said she did not realise I drank at work but there were rumours that I did. To this day, I have not admitted to her that I was drinking at work at least three days a week" but she does know that I am an alcoholic in recovery now.

It was not that I was obvious. I made sure that I did not drink that much as to slur. Or to act inebriated otherwise. Or so I thought until recently.
The problem is, sometimes you don't realise you have reached that point, especially if you drink fast as I do. Then it hits you. And you could be in the middle of a meeting. Then bang.

earlybird

the bottom line is,....if your alcoholism has gotten to the point in which you're drinking at work,.......people at work know. And EVEN if they dont,.....how long do you think you can keep this up? Pretty soon,...you wont be able to keep enough in you to ward off the shakes, seizures, or DT's. You are working on (and drinking on) borrowed time.

And believe me,....oh lord BELIEVE me,.....you think your depression is bad now? Just wait until you get fired for drinking at work. That rocket fuels your drinking progression, and sends the depression and embarrassment off the charts ( which also speeds up the progression of this disease) You cant win.....unless you admit defeat.

koko

nothing to be proud of -I drank at work daily,thinking I was getting away with it,after all I was the bartender!!Soon people didn't want to work with me,driving in blackouts,having accidents in blackouts,getting DUI,passing out on my break was just lovely,so finally I go to them saying I need help because this was a union job I had great benefits and made excellent money.No problem go to AA ,rehab,whatever.I was shocked-AA?screw that!They terminated me and believe me you smell every time you drink or even when your not drinking.It took alot more trouble and drinking and me being sent to rehab to finally accept that I cannot drink.think about you it-you can't go 8 hours without it-my husband always knew when I was drinking and when he left me alone it felt like I won or something!But he knew he just got tired of the ******** and lies.Its sad but you sort of have to reach these low levels of life to help you realize that you could be an alcoholic.

Steve58

Hi Jenni,

Just thought I would add my voice to the others, you are now on REALLY borrowed time. I used to try it, not at my job, but other functions, just stay buzzed, I thought I could do that, yea, just take a nip once & a while. I guess I noticed quick that others noticed, and I pretty much cut it out.

They know, believe me, they know. It's funny for me now, I dont have a great smeller, but I know the ones that are drinking. It has been incentive for me, and I am so ashamed that I may have been one "they" knew was drinking. Not for myself, but for my family. I hear the talk, "wow, bob is strong today", I wonder, Damn, did they talk about me that way? I guess they did. (Naa, maybe not, I was too clever, not like those drunks that talk too much, get too loud, and smell like a distillery. Bet no one noticed me...(((STEVE, wake up))) Oh yea, sorry.

Anyway, we are here to help, one of the biggest helps to me here is being able to be honest, as you are being. It helps to talk it out.

Have you introduced your hubby to this site? Is that an idea? Do you have family? Doing things with my boys help quite a bit (they have no idea they do, but they do).

Anyway, I hope you find the love and support you need here, we're all worried about you, and we're all pulling for you. PLEASE, slow down BEFORE something really bad happens that cannot be easily fixed.

Steve

leviathon

SMELL - That is an important point; it oozes out of your poors and on your breath, that is how alcohol exits the body. You cannot cover that up. Breath mints and deodorant and perfume can only go so far and then it is bad. It wasn't until I was around those that don't drink at all that I realized how much the odour of alcohol is present to non-drinkers. Quit kidding ourselves, everyone knows when we are drinking. Think about it, we have all smelled that sour hung over smell. Just because it is an odour that we no longer sense when drinking doesn't mean that others don't smell it.

2dayzmuse

I don't really know how I got to the point where I started drinking at work. Probably because I was trying to get rid of a hangover. You know, the hair of the dog? That is a nasty habit to start. So I guess it would be truthful to say that I started drinking before I got to work.

I started bringing wine in my purse. It is a woman thing you see. Apparently alot of ladies do this. I started doing that to stave off the shakes. Then I started drinking on my lunch hour too....???? I don't know why. Because I was an alcoholic and couldn't function without it. They knew, oh how they knew alright. I would come back from lunch so drunk I couldn't do my job. It was very embarrassing. They fired me.

I went on to job number two. Pretty much the same thing, but this time I was even worse. I was so arrogant to think that my boss was to naive to notice. It was awful, totally awful. Things ended on a bad note. I will say that much.

Job three, worse yet. I would start shaking right before I went in. I was waitressing. I had never waitressed before and trying to serve soup with the shakes isn't a good thing. Again, I brought wine to get rid of the shakes. My boss asked me if I sometimes drank before I came to work, I lied and made up some medical excuse for my shaking. She didn't buy it. Especially the time I was so wasted I could hardly function and the food went flying off of the plate. Even though I was very wasted it was very humiliating to face what I had become. Thinking back on those three years of my life, they were the most humiliating time of my life because I made a public display of my drunkenness. However it wasn't the worst.

Things got much worse when I was unemployed. I had all day to drink then. I had no one to answer to. I made a feeble attempt to try to limit my drinking if I thought I had to work the next day. Obviously, I wasn't very successful. Not having to work the next day gave me permission to go full throttle, and that I did. My most undignified moments I spent alone. I isolated and only went out to buy more booze. My life and reputation were pretty much on the skids. I was never so miserable in my life. When I thought things couldn't get any worse, they did. They always got worse.

Believe me when I say you are playing with fire. Get a handle on the situation and stop. Do whatever it takes to quit. You are risking so much more then you realize. It isn't worth it.

Kellye C

Muze, I am sitting here with goosebumps as you just told the story of my last year or so of drinking. I drank alcoholically for 3.5 years and for the last year of it lived in the hell that you described. Mine started out by me finishing off anything that might have been left in my glass before I passed out the night before. Then I started suffering through the shakes during the day. I began going out on my lunch and getting vodka (they can't smell that right???) and mixing it with oj to calm me down. Then I started running home and downing a glass of white zinfandel during lunch. Then the day came where I put a small bottle in my purse and took it into work. I was so horrified of being caught and it was an eyeopener to me of how bad it had really gotten. I couldn't work up the courage to actually open it at work so I suffered through the shakes but that was one of my all time lows. I missed a lot of Mondays and Tuesdays because I was so deathly sick from staying in a blackout all weekend. I can't tell you how many cases of "food poisoning" I had. It was typical to go 4 or 5 days unable to eat because I was so sick. I started swelling up and even though I drank so much my kidneys were barely working to remove it. I developed an unhealthy color. At this point there was no more denial about what I had become. I still thought I hadn't figured out the way to control it and that I just needed more willpower. I no longer wanted the consequences of drinking but I wasn't ready to give up ALL drinking. Basically I was lying to myself. I was taken to an AA meeting by mom in July 04 after spending the entire 4th of July weekend blacked out and passed out. My mom came in to see if I was going to get up to go to work that Tuesday and I asked her what day it was. I was STILL drunk! Even then it still took me a month before I was willing to give sobriety a try. My sobriety date is August 8, 2004.

After becoming sober and talking to some friends, some people were totally shocked and never suspected I was an alcoholic. Others knew I was drinking during lunch. Others had commented on the smell of alcohol when I was standing in amongst a couple of people. I played innocent but I'm sure they knew. I never lost a job due to drinking and I never got a DWI and that is only by the grace of my HP as I totally deserved both!

To answer the original question, if you are an alcoholic there is nothing you can "tell" yourself to get you to stop drinking at work. If you are that addicted then you are going to have to stop altogether. It can be done. There is hope. I"m glad you showed up here and posted and I pray that you will find the answers you are seeking.

Hugs,
Kellye

earlybird

another thing I wanted to mention. There was a guy at one of my jobs that left for lunch everyday, and drank. He told me this, so I know its not BS. He came back everyday with two of those candy "fireballs" in his mouth. What was funny was that even though the fireballs masked the smell, people STILL knew what he was doing because of the mere FACT that he always had fireballs in his mouth after lunch.