Stevie1

Those are the stages of grief (Kübler-Ross.)

The 5 Stages of Loss and Grief | Psych Central

Do you think at least some of us go through a similar pattern when we quit drinking? I'm only 12 days sober and I feel like I'm stuck in between anger - I am just so tense and irritated much of the time - and bargaining; that would be my stupid AV telling me I can drink just for tonight.

I'm afraid that the depression is going to come roaring back soon, now that I'm not masking it with alcohol. When I get 30 days I'm calling my doctor to get back on meds. My emotions are all over the place these days but dammit, I want to feel good, not angry at everything.

I should also say it's not all bad - I am sleeping better, finally, my house is cleaner, I'm not hungover in the mornings so I'm walking my dogs, I'm starting to feel hopeful. I had gotten to the point where I was thinking dark thoughts of suicide as I didn't see myself ever getting off the daily drunk treadmill. I really never want to go back to that place in my head.

Sorry, I feel inarticulate and foggy and cranky. But I am sober, albeit on my third ginger soda of the evening. I picked up a bunch of books at the used book store earlier so I'm going to go to my freshly-made bed with washed and moisturized face and brushed teeth to read myself to sleep.

Stevie1

Huh, interesting. There's a lot written about substance use and the stages of grief - scroll down a bit on this wiki link to get the bare-bones version.

least

I think that's pretty accurate. I think I went thru those stages when I got sober. It is a loss we go thru, even if it was something so bad for us.

Olive1

I sometimes thought of drinking as my best friend. And when I finally gave it up, it was like my best friend died.
So I absolutely think I went through those stages.

Like time will help heal the loss of a loved one, so, too, will time help heal the life of drinking lost.

Aellyce

Yes I definitely went through that over a period of a few years. I could describe it as grieving my own life, as if I were dead already and looking at my life and myself from a different dimension.

MemphisBlues

Good to see you back, Stevie.

With a my history of major depression and or dysthymia, booze, benzos and pot were my way of self medicating for a decade or four.

But the worst depression of my life was during my first year or two of sobriety. I was paralyzed with depression, near catatonic the first year, actually.

I think someone in the early stages of recovery who wouldn't meet DSM criteria for depression is a rarity.

Give it some time. And as someone who was prescribed nearly every combination of antidepressant and other adjunct prescriptions for depression and anxiety over two decades, and as someone who had weaned himself from those meds over a year during my second year of sobriety, tread carefully in just opting to see a MD and ask for an antidepressant.

That seem to be the consistent recommendation from folks here. Depressed? Go see your doctor and get a script to fix that "chemical imbalance" in your brain.

Personally, I think sad is a normal state for us when in early recovery and the advice to ride it out for a few months is rarely discussed here.

And speaking of grieving, the new DSM now categorizes grief after the death of a loved one past several months a "disorder" warranting pharmaceutical treatment. Again, not all sadness has a chemical solution, even if pharmaceutical companies disagree.

phoebe64

I have always felt it like a loss, like grief, every time I get a month in or so.

Hevyn

Yes, I went through all those phases & often thought of it as a grieving process. For me, resentment was part of it too. Thankfully it all calmed down and I was able to let go.

Stevie1

Glad I'm not alone!

Memphis, I agree with you that "go to the doctor and get a prescription" shouldn't be the default first response to all of life's ills. That's really strong that you were able to weather crippling depression without relapsing. But I've been on and off meds for brain cooties since 1992, on and off counseling since 1986/87 and was diagnosed with manic depression/bipolar a few years after that.

When I'm on a good meds cocktail (combination of anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers, along with an anti-d and a little soupçon of something for anxiety and ADHD) I do well; otherwise I drink and don't do so well. Or, I do neither and go off the rails with mood swings, anger, not sleeping for days and other types of self-destructive behaviour. I was stable for a while until about a year ago, then started drinking again and that along with the meds gave me the shakes - coarse tremors - that, naturally, instead of stopping the drinking, like an idiot I stopped my meds. Actually the last appointment I had with my doctor was first thing in the morning and he's over an hour away (he's a board certified addiction specialist and I really liked him) but I was so hungover, I missed the appointment and haven't been back.

I've been drinking more heavily than ever this last year - when I didn't have to work, drinking in the morning and all day. Ugh. That's something I'd rarely done before. As many here understand, this is progressive and every time I quit and then relapse, it's worse.

Anyhoo. Onwards! This certainly isn't fun, but so far I am feeling pretty strong. I need to focus more on what I'm gaining than what I'm losing and accept the negative feelings as part of the process.

MythOfSisyphus

I did mourn the "death" of my ability to drink for awhile. But after a while had passed I realized that, in my own case, this was idiotic. There was almost no joy in drinking by the time I stopped; booze was just dulling the ache that it was itself causing. I don't know how to describe it but drinking was a salve for the disease of being drunk all the time.

It's not like a death at all! The death of someone you love is a genuine loss that leaves your life diminished, at least for a time. Getting sober is like a birth...the creation of a new and better life. That's cause for celebration not grief.

fantail

I'm a bit sleepy right now so I'll dig up links later... but the stages model of grieving has been mostly rejected over the last few years. Apparently even at the start it was kind of a misinterpretation of Kubler-Ross' work.

Anyway I don't say this to be annoying The thing that's important about the new research is that the process is known now to be far less linear, far more complex... so they now caution people against getting too concerned about where in the process they are. All of those emotions might pop up again and again over time after a loss. If they do, it doesn't mean that you're regressing, just that grief is complicated and sometimes circular. For a while there if someone didn't pass through the stages in order, they got labeled as having a disorder (forget the name, might be "pathological grieving" or something similar). Now they realize that that approach caused more harm than good.

Anyway, still a very interesting comparison, linear or not. I'm not sure that I'm experiencing my loss of alcohol as grief, but I can definitely understand the overlap.

Soberwolf

Well done on 12 days

Dee74

I think the Kubler Ross stages lend themselves to lots of things, but alcohol was very important to me - it's removal from my life was definitely seen as a loss by me, and I did grieve.

D

MemphisBlues

Stevie, our psych experience runs close, though my diagnosis was always unipolar depression, panic disorder and GAD.

I began treatment in '93 and was on a cocktail of drugs that when added with a dosage of Klonopin, would have literally made a horse stumble. And of course, adding in beer and pot to smooth the rough edges certainly wasn't ideal.

Here's the list of meds I was put on after my 10-day hospital stay after going cold turkey from booze and 20 milligrams of Klonopin daily: Zoloft, Depakote and Seroquel. Shrink never mentioned a bipolar diagnosis, but just surmised that is what was needed to stabilize me. Two weeks after stopping drinking and stupidly thinking I could quit the benzos cold turkey, I had a half dozen complete psychotic episodes akin to Disney doing a horror flick on LSD.

The meds did absolutely nothing to alleviate the crippling depression. My brain had to totally rewire from the decade-long run of shrink prescribed benzos and, frankly, I think the meds aggravated the post acute benzo withdrawal syndrome that lasted well past a year for me. After 25 years of psychopharmacological treatment, I lost all faith in that paradigm of care.

I have read some memoirs of those with bipolar, and while I have opted to go med free for the past two years -- and have improved since then -- I'm clueless about bipolar conditions. I did have a friend who is sober and bipolar with mania and when she went off meds it resulted in a horrendous relapse of using and manic behavior.

Earlie this year I did reinstate Trazodone, an old school antidepressant (not a SSRI). I believe that after our brains are souped in these chemicals for a few decades, they just can't fully repair, and while I reject the psych med advertisement that these drugs are "correcting a chemical imbalance" in the brain, I believe for some of us there is no turning back because of long-term med exposure as opposed to my disease of depression returning.

I must add that I eliminated meds from my system under the guidance of a psychiatrist specializing in addiction treatment and depression. I improved for a year, then crashed and sought a shrink that would conservatively help me reinstate a med of my choice.

I think you are on track to stabilize in sobriety for a few weeks and make that doctor's appointment. And I certainly think there are psych meds in your future that will help you.

But I strongly recommend you read this book: "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America," by Robert Whitaker. He won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book of the Year Award for the effort a while back.

In the meantime, take time to heal. Swallow any drug the shrink thinks will help you stay level and sober.

And remember my motto: Early sobriety just sucks. Period. It was and remains the hardest thing I have tackled in my life. But with my mental illness and four decades as an alcoholic and addict, if I can chalk up four years sober, I think almost anyone can.

Stevie1

Thanks Memphis, I'm going to look that book up on Amazon for sure. Is he akin to Thomas Szasz? I read the Myth of Mental Illness many years ago, certainly a thought-provoking book.

I would love to be free of both medication and alcohol! Seriously, I am glad you've made your way to a good place without them, four years is huge. I have never done benzos but I do wonder if I've done irreparable damage with (like you) about four decades of illegal drugs, alcohol and psych meds. Undeniably my concentration, STM and cognitive agility are very compromised now.

My last cocktail was lithium, depakote, seroquel, trazodone and ativan. I think they hit on the bipolar dx because a: antidepressants, none of them, worked on their own. And b: when I got manic I did many very stupid and rash things at a really epic level. I dislike labels and argued I was just a hyper person who also got depressed, but I do realise that adding mood stablizing drugs gets me back to an even keel.

But that won't happen until I quit drinking forever. I'm feeling less cranky today.

Soberwolf

Good to hear Stevie

MemphisBlues

I read "Myth of Mental Illness" eons ago. Whitaker is a journalist turned historian who who covered the medical beat for the Boston Globe.

He also wrote detailed scientific reports on clinical drug trials for medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies. If I recall Szasz was a psychiatrist oft ostracized for his writings.

As a historian, Whitaker first wrote "Mad in America, Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill." He stumbled on the premise of the book when researching what he thought was an unethical drug study using schizophrenics. The study he focused on measured psychotic relapse in patients rapidly withdrawn from antipsychotics. Any layperson would think such a study was cruel on the surface. But in his research he stumbled along studies that examined the relapse rates of schizophrenics who were on antipsychotics, relapse rates for those on antipsychotics and withdrawn from the drugs, and schizophrenics never on antipsychotics or only on low doses short term.

The surprise was that the best long term outcome for schizophrenics was for the group never exposed to antipsychotics. He then investigated reports from the World Health Organization searching for the best outcomes and least psychotic relapse rates for schizophrenics, and, surprise, the best outcomes were in countries where antipsychotics were rarely used.

Whitaker uses his investigative and historian skills to then analyze clinical drug trials for all psychotropics and the history of the psychopharmaceutical industry and psychiatry in general. It's all very compelling and riveting stuff, and was a real eye opener for me.

I'm not a rapid AAer against psychiatric meds. As I said, I reinstated Trazodone earlier this year. And I think you know you need to stabilize in recovery from booze and probably need to see that doc ASAP to get back on some mood stabilizers.

An aside regarding bipolar is that studies show that most people diagnosed as rapid cyclers were originally treated with antidepressants alone, often in young adulthood or during teen-age years. The prevailing wisdom is that they were simply misdiagnosed. There are new studies questioning if the exposure to antidepressants may have caused the rapid cycling.

Another aside: The director of the National Institute of Mental Health recently reported that the long term use of antipsychotics for schizophrenics may not be the best medical treatment. That's a huge departure from the psychiatric belief that schizophrenics should be medicated for life.

Add that recent reports that serotonin has nothing to do with depression and the whole paradigm of "chemical imbalance" grows pretty murky.

But...I think the cocktail I was on when first sober may have kept me sober, that and fear as well as AA and NA.