stillnotdrinkin

I'm a 50 year old guy. Been totally sober about 17 months (since 12/8/09) after hopefully my final and most hellacious detoxing on my own that I ever care to go through again. I have stopped drinking about 8 or 10 times for a week to 10 months over my 30 year drinking career. The times I stopped usually began when my stomach would simply not allow another drop of booze to stay in it. If there was another way of putting alcohol directly into my system, I would have done it and still be doing it or be dead from it. Over the last couple of years of my drinking i could barely go two or three hours between drinks before my hands would begin to shake very noticably and I would begin to stagger and sweat, get dizzy and feel like I was going to fall down. For years, two or three drinks at lunch would bridge me over to 5:00 and heavy drinking. Later on, I needed a couple drinks before going to work in the morning. When I began ducking out for 11:00 lunches and leaving the office at 2:00 to quell the shakes etc, I knew things had gotten very dire indeed. It was almost like I would feel drunk when I began to sober up and I felt normal, even sober again, when I had a few gulps of booze. At the end I was drinking about 2/3 of a quart of vodka on weekdays and more on weekends.

Over my drinking career, there were many times when I would tally up the benefits I got from drinking versus the negatives. My alcohol warped mind usually cheated by diminishing the negatives and exaggerating the positives. After 17 months of sober retrospection, I figure I should have pulled the plug on drinking around 30 or 35 years old. That would have been about the time the negatives clearly outweighed the positives. Be that as it may I didn't and here I am.

While I know intellectually and without a shadow of doubt that I should not drink, I am daily confronted with my body's desire for alcohol. I have dreams of drinking almost nightly. When stressed, I sometimes imagine gulping a large glass of vodka or bourbon. At night between dinner time and bed time, I invariably have a great sense of unease and agitation for seemingly no particular reason. When I finally get to sleep, I usually sleep right through the night and feel quited refreshed, drinking dreams and all.

So why am I here and what am I looking for? I'm not completely sure. I just know that I can no longer drink and hopefully by putting more time between me and my last drink and by reading and learning from you all, I can learn how to live a sober life as an adult. I have no real frame of reference of living life as sober adult to reflect back on as I have really not been truly sober since I was a teenager.

I titled this "A bit about me" but it is clearly a bit more than a bit and I will continue this at a later time perhaps. Thanks for reading and thank you all for your fine postings that I have been reading and learning from over the past year or so.

EmeraldRose

WELL! Congratulations on your sober time. Very impressive. And you've done it all alone without support? That might be one reason you feel empty inside -like somethings missing.
Ironically, about 5 years before I quit I had alot of free time and got in touch with my spiritual side. It then came in handy for the day I quit. January 28th to be exact. I have a better grasp on my feelings, my spirituality, my thoughts, what I want and don't want.
I drank for 30 years, too and lived my whole adult life wading through whiskey never reaching the shore. Now I'm on the beach and enjoying the sun. Life is good sober.
Glad you're here.

Dee74

Welcome aboard stillnotdrinkin

Congratulations on your sober time - I know you'll find a lot of support here.

For me, just stopping drinking wasn't enough tho - it was like the tide went out, sure, but all that did was uncover the mountain of debris I'd tried to hide over my years of drinking....

I really had to make major changes to my life and the way I thought about and reacted to just about everything.

I used booze to cope with just about everything so I needed to find new healthy ways to deal with a range of things.

Have you thought of a recovery programme or counselling or anything like that?
D

stillnotdrinkin

Thanks for the advice Emerald Rose and Dee74. Other than extensive reading about alcoholism and reading a very large number of posts on Sober Recovery, I dont do any counseling or AA or anything like that. For the most part, I am a happy productive person, married with plenty of friends that I still socialize with while nursing my diet Sprite. I have had a couple of relatives in AA who made careers out of being in AA and alienating anyone who wasn't in AA so I perhaps have an unjustly negative view of that. I think that just reading about and conversing with other ex drunks (as I think of myself) helps me quite a bit. I do have a couple of friends in AA and other aquaintainces who are no longer drink or drug who I converse with as well. I have also noticed that just putting time between me and my last drink seems to lessen my compulsion to drink as well as giving me time to learn how to act like a "grownup".

LaFemme

Hi and welcome to sr!

There are other things one can do to improve life sober. I have a brilliant counselor and use sr

CarolD

welcome...

Well done on your sober time.

Years after I quit drinking a med my doctor prescribed gave
me a sense of nervousness and vivid dreams.
I requested a change ..he agreed....and that worked out well.
.

stanleyhouse

Congratulations
17 months is great. Not drinking is a great accomplishment. If you don't feel a hundred percent just keep working on it until you do. I am very familiar with the physical situation you were in when you quit and we don't want to go back to that.
SH