What did you experience 6 months in?
That bell or bike person
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: london
Posts: 4,978
6 months , hmm
I think a low mood, depression lifted around then , not a full on depressive episode by dysthymia that had hung around as long as the drinking had .
Physically i was there but my brain was easily fuddled , memory a bit confused and unreliable , that may be to do with being about 40 tho' ..
I think i had quite a few colds in the first few months ,
Keep on with it ,
Bestwishes, m
I think a low mood, depression lifted around then , not a full on depressive episode by dysthymia that had hung around as long as the drinking had .
Physically i was there but my brain was easily fuddled , memory a bit confused and unreliable , that may be to do with being about 40 tho' ..
I think i had quite a few colds in the first few months ,
Keep on with it ,
Bestwishes, m
Administrator
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Australia
Posts: 211,384
Hi Justin
I'm getting the feeling you feel like you're not where you should be?
I feel that way fore a long time, then someone said to me what about if where you are right now is exactly where you're meant to be?
that floored me. I realised how powerful my insecurity was, and how unsettling it was for me to feel ok.
I think at that point I felt more comfortable feeling bad, if that makes sense.
I can't remember any issues from 6 months to a year for me - it was all pretty good, even when I had to move house...I was stressed out but I dealt with it soberly
I think you're doing fine Justin
D
I'm getting the feeling you feel like you're not where you should be?
I feel that way fore a long time, then someone said to me what about if where you are right now is exactly where you're meant to be?
that floored me. I realised how powerful my insecurity was, and how unsettling it was for me to feel ok.
I think at that point I felt more comfortable feeling bad, if that makes sense.
I can't remember any issues from 6 months to a year for me - it was all pretty good, even when I had to move house...I was stressed out but I dealt with it soberly
I think you're doing fine Justin
D
Member
Join Date: Jun 2014
Location: The Northland
Posts: 600
At seven months I'm finding my highs are a little higher, lows a little lower, and I have recurrent anxiety and insomnia. I think that's the way I am. These states of being cycle through and they're fine.
Member
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 1,552
Everything really leveled out at 6 months. I started connecting more with people. I began to accept the fact that I'm not a very talkative, outgoing person. I had to up my recovery plan because I felt so serene I became a bit complacent. My brain started telling me I was all better and could drink again. I went back and read all my early posts. I became happy, content and accepting of the hurdles thrown at me. The "poor me" attitude disappeared.
Jennifer
Jennifer
Trudgin
Join Date: Jul 2014
Posts: 6,348
Congrats!!! 6 continuous months of sobriety for people like us is indeed remarkable - good for you
At 6 months a flood of memories started to come back. I became capable of recalling a lot of details about events from years past - or at least my recollection of those events.
6 months put me squarely into the Christmas Holiday with family. I attended some events and had family around. These events reinforced the fact I did not drink and could have fun while not drinking!
Amazing
Glad you're here, thanks for the thread!
At 6 months a flood of memories started to come back. I became capable of recalling a lot of details about events from years past - or at least my recollection of those events.
6 months put me squarely into the Christmas Holiday with family. I attended some events and had family around. These events reinforced the fact I did not drink and could have fun while not drinking!
Amazing
Glad you're here, thanks for the thread!
Member
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Baton Rouge, La.
Posts: 15,236
The first 6 months as I recall it still
seems like yesterday even with 24
yrs. sobriety only because I have been
living one day at a time for so long.
August 11, 1990 was my first full day
sober as I began my recovery in a 28
day instay rehab facility.
After completing that leg of my recovery
I continued on at home with attending a
6 week aftercare program.
The next months sober I attended many
many AA meetings because that was
the program taught to me and had no
information about other recovery programs.
So this worked for me.
The months ahead of me were October,
November, December, January all with
holidays in them to share with my little
family.
I armed myself with AA tools and knowledge,
cooked, took care of my little ones, and will
never forget how music never sounded soooo
good.
6 months with no alcohol, my heart, mind
and soul filled with determination to do
whatever I needed to do to remain sober
no matter what because I had the fellowship
and support of my recovery program to
guide me, care for me, understand me each
day I remained sober.
The next 24 yrs living in recovery has
been a journey of many changes, challenges,
growing, maturing, learning, as today its
just me and my new husband of 6 yrs.
My recovery journey I share with many
here in SR and continue to share my own
ESH - experiences, strengths and hopes
of what my life was and is like before,
during and after alcohol so that I can
continue to enjoy the rewards of the
promises as written in the pages of our
Big Book of AA.
Recovery is about the journey we
each take in life without being under
the influence of a controlled substance.
seems like yesterday even with 24
yrs. sobriety only because I have been
living one day at a time for so long.
August 11, 1990 was my first full day
sober as I began my recovery in a 28
day instay rehab facility.
After completing that leg of my recovery
I continued on at home with attending a
6 week aftercare program.
The next months sober I attended many
many AA meetings because that was
the program taught to me and had no
information about other recovery programs.
So this worked for me.
The months ahead of me were October,
November, December, January all with
holidays in them to share with my little
family.
I armed myself with AA tools and knowledge,
cooked, took care of my little ones, and will
never forget how music never sounded soooo
good.
6 months with no alcohol, my heart, mind
and soul filled with determination to do
whatever I needed to do to remain sober
no matter what because I had the fellowship
and support of my recovery program to
guide me, care for me, understand me each
day I remained sober.
The next 24 yrs living in recovery has
been a journey of many changes, challenges,
growing, maturing, learning, as today its
just me and my new husband of 6 yrs.
My recovery journey I share with many
here in SR and continue to share my own
ESH - experiences, strengths and hopes
of what my life was and is like before,
during and after alcohol so that I can
continue to enjoy the rewards of the
promises as written in the pages of our
Big Book of AA.
Recovery is about the journey we
each take in life without being under
the influence of a controlled substance.
Member
Join Date: Nov 2014
Location: Midwest USA
Posts: 630
Hi mrjustin,
I am a little bit ahead of you, about 6.5 months.
I have to say I feel pretty darn good! I don't have any cravings for alcohol, and the AV has been pretty quiet.......
Every once in a while I feel a pang like something is missing, but it is so fleeting that it is easy to ignore....that has lessened a lot in the last few months.
I keep pretty busy.....probably way too busy! For a while there, I had a lot of anger and frustration when I would get too busy ....and that has subsided also.
Not sure if it is the alcohol free time, or more likely taking up meditation......and a little yoga..
As far as growing and healing, I expect that to be a lifelong experience.
I definitely feel that the effects of 30+ years of alcohol will take a while more to really be eliminated from the body. I am thinking at least 2 years.
But I definitely feel like it is getting better and better....
What are you experiencing?
I am a little bit ahead of you, about 6.5 months.
I have to say I feel pretty darn good! I don't have any cravings for alcohol, and the AV has been pretty quiet.......
Every once in a while I feel a pang like something is missing, but it is so fleeting that it is easy to ignore....that has lessened a lot in the last few months.
I keep pretty busy.....probably way too busy! For a while there, I had a lot of anger and frustration when I would get too busy ....and that has subsided also.
Not sure if it is the alcohol free time, or more likely taking up meditation......and a little yoga..
As far as growing and healing, I expect that to be a lifelong experience.
I definitely feel that the effects of 30+ years of alcohol will take a while more to really be eliminated from the body. I am thinking at least 2 years.
But I definitely feel like it is getting better and better....
What are you experiencing?
EndGame
Join Date: Jun 2013
Location: New York, NY
Posts: 4,677
This is long, and I learned that while I was typing that I was writing all this out for my benefit. It's possible that it may help someone else.
At six months following my relapse, I had a very narrow existence. (I add the qualifier "following my relapse" since the first time I got sober for the long term, I had different challenges, being as I was relieved and grateful that I no longer needed to drink.) OP treatment during the day, and then early evening, individual counseling at the OP facility once each week, and AA at night. I was also doing volunteer work on Saturdays. I'd been working with my sponsor for about two months at the time, reading through the Big Book with him and working through the Steps. I'd made a written amends to my XGF at five months, and promised to start making a financial amends once I started working, which I did about eighteen months later. Otherwise, she and I have had no contact, which is what she'd asked of me.
It seemed to me that, most days, I was going through the motions. I dealt with daily, intense cravings, usually most of the day. Though I knew that I needed as much help as I could get, a very strong part of me still wanted to drink after six months, and I'd grown pessimistic that this would change. That's originally why I started working with my sponsor.
I ate twice a day, sometimes watched TV following my nightly meetings, and read myself to sleep most nights. Each day blended into the next, and it was difficult for me to imagine that I would find a purpose in life beyond getting sober. There was no joy for me in this prospect, but the alternative was unacceptable. (Just as conventional wisdom tells us that we will find a life partner only when we're not looking for one, purpose and meaning in life often arrive when we least expect it. Yet despair always makes this seem impossible.)
I'd burned and buried several bridges in my personal and professional life. I drank myself unconscious into the emergency room on several occasions, and was told that I would probably die were I to continue drinking. I was unemployable, fired from every job I had, and I had, for all practical purposes, become homeless. My loving and supportive family were unavailable as long as I did not seek help. I was suicidal but without the dark comfort that clinical depression often provides. So when I finally reached out for help, which was not due to my wanting to get sober, but the consequence of my no longer being able to function on my own, I had few expectations that my life would improve in any meaningful way. Yet there was still a very small, virtually unnoticeable flame burning inside that, at some point, I could no longer ignore.
I cannot attribute this shift for me to any particular event, but after about eight or nine months of participating in treatment, I was no longer the same person as I was when I had one day sober. I don't at all discount the tremendous amount of support I got during that time; I do know that I could not have achieved sobriety without it. I wasn't aware of SR at the time, so all my support was face-to-face. I got stronger, my ambitions to live a better life returned and, in a partly conscious partly unconscious way, my thinking, behavior, and my values had changed radically.
I was one of those people who didn't like "the God stuff" in AA, yet I was aware enough to know that facing either death or a lifetime of misery was a powerful tonic for any philosophical beliefs (which were killing me in their execution) that only became obstacles to my healing. I also cast a jaundiced eye towards OP treatment, and towards the addiction treatment industry generally. But for me, indulging my prejudices and clinging to beliefs and values which had only gotten me to a place of all-consuming despair in life was a childish excuse not to get the help I needed. This was a tremendous and necessary revelation for me which has continued to inform the way I live my life.
Six months, man. I was content to accept working part-time in CVS or Walmart as a career. I'd projected that I'd live in some dump in some sketchy part of town with one or more roommates. That I'd recede into the background, that my greatest contribution to the larger society would be making a price check on deodorant. Or M&Ms. But, given my history and the amount of damage I'd done to my mind and body, what else could I hope for without losing what was left of my sanity?
So many problems with sobriety, it's easy to find an excuse to go back to drinking. You feel like crap, and stay this way, often for a long time. It requires patience, support and work. "What?! More work?! I know a guy who got sober by blah, blah, blah...just putting down the booze..." Your thinking is shot, and you seem to be under attack from your own feelings. Wreckage all around you. Guilt, shame and remorse; the depressive trifecta. Nobody cares, no one loves you. When you get support, you either don't recognize it for what it is, or you dismiss it due to pride or some other willful character trait, the same character trait that played a role in getting to where you now are in the first place.
It also takes time to achieve sobriety. So many people just give up when life doesn't get better according to their expectations, expectations that have been contaminated by years of drinking and by a conviction writ-in-stone that there can only be one way for me, even though, and again, destroying my life has demonstrated in dramatic ways that this conviction is nothing but a destructive fantasy, an equally delusional reality that replaces the altered state I lived in for so many years.
Six months is crucial because you still and always have the rest of your life ahead of you. Someone in Robby's thread was commenting on "living life to the fullest while dying." In alignment with my own way of thinking, Robby's response (and I'm paraphrasing here from his comments and my own thinking) was along the lines of "living life to the fullest while dying" is something we either pick up or we avoid all through our lives. For we are always and ever dying. And, after all, what's the alternative to living life to the fullest?
The crucial element, or question, is at what moment do you make the choice to start the clock?
At six months following my relapse, I had a very narrow existence. (I add the qualifier "following my relapse" since the first time I got sober for the long term, I had different challenges, being as I was relieved and grateful that I no longer needed to drink.) OP treatment during the day, and then early evening, individual counseling at the OP facility once each week, and AA at night. I was also doing volunteer work on Saturdays. I'd been working with my sponsor for about two months at the time, reading through the Big Book with him and working through the Steps. I'd made a written amends to my XGF at five months, and promised to start making a financial amends once I started working, which I did about eighteen months later. Otherwise, she and I have had no contact, which is what she'd asked of me.
It seemed to me that, most days, I was going through the motions. I dealt with daily, intense cravings, usually most of the day. Though I knew that I needed as much help as I could get, a very strong part of me still wanted to drink after six months, and I'd grown pessimistic that this would change. That's originally why I started working with my sponsor.
I ate twice a day, sometimes watched TV following my nightly meetings, and read myself to sleep most nights. Each day blended into the next, and it was difficult for me to imagine that I would find a purpose in life beyond getting sober. There was no joy for me in this prospect, but the alternative was unacceptable. (Just as conventional wisdom tells us that we will find a life partner only when we're not looking for one, purpose and meaning in life often arrive when we least expect it. Yet despair always makes this seem impossible.)
I'd burned and buried several bridges in my personal and professional life. I drank myself unconscious into the emergency room on several occasions, and was told that I would probably die were I to continue drinking. I was unemployable, fired from every job I had, and I had, for all practical purposes, become homeless. My loving and supportive family were unavailable as long as I did not seek help. I was suicidal but without the dark comfort that clinical depression often provides. So when I finally reached out for help, which was not due to my wanting to get sober, but the consequence of my no longer being able to function on my own, I had few expectations that my life would improve in any meaningful way. Yet there was still a very small, virtually unnoticeable flame burning inside that, at some point, I could no longer ignore.
I cannot attribute this shift for me to any particular event, but after about eight or nine months of participating in treatment, I was no longer the same person as I was when I had one day sober. I don't at all discount the tremendous amount of support I got during that time; I do know that I could not have achieved sobriety without it. I wasn't aware of SR at the time, so all my support was face-to-face. I got stronger, my ambitions to live a better life returned and, in a partly conscious partly unconscious way, my thinking, behavior, and my values had changed radically.
I was one of those people who didn't like "the God stuff" in AA, yet I was aware enough to know that facing either death or a lifetime of misery was a powerful tonic for any philosophical beliefs (which were killing me in their execution) that only became obstacles to my healing. I also cast a jaundiced eye towards OP treatment, and towards the addiction treatment industry generally. But for me, indulging my prejudices and clinging to beliefs and values which had only gotten me to a place of all-consuming despair in life was a childish excuse not to get the help I needed. This was a tremendous and necessary revelation for me which has continued to inform the way I live my life.
Six months, man. I was content to accept working part-time in CVS or Walmart as a career. I'd projected that I'd live in some dump in some sketchy part of town with one or more roommates. That I'd recede into the background, that my greatest contribution to the larger society would be making a price check on deodorant. Or M&Ms. But, given my history and the amount of damage I'd done to my mind and body, what else could I hope for without losing what was left of my sanity?
So many problems with sobriety, it's easy to find an excuse to go back to drinking. You feel like crap, and stay this way, often for a long time. It requires patience, support and work. "What?! More work?! I know a guy who got sober by blah, blah, blah...just putting down the booze..." Your thinking is shot, and you seem to be under attack from your own feelings. Wreckage all around you. Guilt, shame and remorse; the depressive trifecta. Nobody cares, no one loves you. When you get support, you either don't recognize it for what it is, or you dismiss it due to pride or some other willful character trait, the same character trait that played a role in getting to where you now are in the first place.
It also takes time to achieve sobriety. So many people just give up when life doesn't get better according to their expectations, expectations that have been contaminated by years of drinking and by a conviction writ-in-stone that there can only be one way for me, even though, and again, destroying my life has demonstrated in dramatic ways that this conviction is nothing but a destructive fantasy, an equally delusional reality that replaces the altered state I lived in for so many years.
Six months is crucial because you still and always have the rest of your life ahead of you. Someone in Robby's thread was commenting on "living life to the fullest while dying." In alignment with my own way of thinking, Robby's response (and I'm paraphrasing here from his comments and my own thinking) was along the lines of "living life to the fullest while dying" is something we either pick up or we avoid all through our lives. For we are always and ever dying. And, after all, what's the alternative to living life to the fullest?
The crucial element, or question, is at what moment do you make the choice to start the clock?
Member
Join Date: Mar 2014
Location: canada
Posts: 748
I have ups and downs. I don't think much about alcohol in my routine daily life. My memory is still impaired but I start to remember more and more. Some of the memories come with guilt and shame.
I've led a sheltered sobriety which hasn't included much socializing, recreation or dining out. As I'm starting to slowly venture into those areas I have new "first time sober" experiences that trigger me and cause some bumps in the road. I'm starting to accept that I'm a life long addict without attaching moral judgement or negative connotations to it.
Friends and acquaintances have slowly caught on, and I'm still getting used to them advising me when a dessert has alcohol in it or asking me if its okay they order a drink at a restaurant. The accountability is starting to feel real, and I suppose that's a bit scary because it closes more loopholes.
The longer I'm sober and the more I accept my own condition the less confident I feel on my own strength and the more I realize I need support whether that be formal or informal.
In many areas I've grown by leaps and bounds. I feel like a man fully engaged in life which is a new feeling for me. My career is advancing, my sense of self is growing, my finances are improving and my marriage relationship is deepening.
Overall I'm very grateful for sobriety but now it's more in a quiet sense than a euphoric or ecstatic feeling I had earlier on.
I've led a sheltered sobriety which hasn't included much socializing, recreation or dining out. As I'm starting to slowly venture into those areas I have new "first time sober" experiences that trigger me and cause some bumps in the road. I'm starting to accept that I'm a life long addict without attaching moral judgement or negative connotations to it.
Friends and acquaintances have slowly caught on, and I'm still getting used to them advising me when a dessert has alcohol in it or asking me if its okay they order a drink at a restaurant. The accountability is starting to feel real, and I suppose that's a bit scary because it closes more loopholes.
The longer I'm sober and the more I accept my own condition the less confident I feel on my own strength and the more I realize I need support whether that be formal or informal.
In many areas I've grown by leaps and bounds. I feel like a man fully engaged in life which is a new feeling for me. My career is advancing, my sense of self is growing, my finances are improving and my marriage relationship is deepening.
Overall I'm very grateful for sobriety but now it's more in a quiet sense than a euphoric or ecstatic feeling I had earlier on.
Member
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 5,785
I hit a rough patch at a little over 5 months that was similar to early sobriety, but after that patch, I felt like I was healed/renewed. Seems like the mental obsession with alcohol is more background noise versus being at the forefront when issues crop up.
Member
Join Date: Sep 2014
Posts: 481
Originally Posted by EndGameNYC 
This is long, and I learned that while I was typing that I was writing all this out for my benefit. It's possible that it may help someone else.
At six months following my relapse, I had a very narrow existence. (I add the qualifier "following my relapse" since the first time I got sober for the long term, I had different challenges, being as I was relieved and grateful that I no longer needed to drink.) OP treatment during the day, and then early evening, individual counseling at the OP facility once each week, and AA at night. I was also doing volunteer work on Saturdays. I'd been working with my sponsor for about two months at the time, reading through the Big Book with him and working through the Steps. I'd made a written amends to my XGF at five months, and promised to start making a financial amends once I started working, which I did about eighteen months later. Otherwise, she and I have had no contact, which is what she'd asked of me.
It seemed to me that, most days, I was going through the motions. I dealt with daily, intense cravings, usually most of the day. Though I knew that I needed as much help as I could get, a very strong part of me still wanted to drink after six months, and I'd grown pessimistic that this would change. That's originally why I started working with my sponsor.
I ate twice a day, sometimes watched TV following my nightly meetings, and read myself to sleep most nights. Each day blended into the next, and it was difficult for me to imagine that I would find a purpose in life beyond getting sober. There was no joy for me in this prospect, but the alternative was unacceptable. (Just as conventional wisdom tells us that we will find a life partner only when we're not looking for one, purpose and meaning in life often arrive when we least expect it. Yet despair always makes this seem impossible.)
I'd burned and buried several bridges in my personal and professional life. I drank myself unconscious into the emergency room on several occasions, and was told that I would probably die were I to continue drinking. I was unemployable, fired from every job I had, and I had, for all practical purposes, become homeless. My loving and supportive family were unavailable as long as I did not seek help. I was suicidal but without the dark comfort that clinical depression often provides. So when I finally reached out for help, which was not due to my wanting to get sober, but the consequence of my no longer being able to function on my own, I had few expectations that my life would improve in any meaningful way. Yet there was still a very small, virtually unnoticeable flame burning inside that, at some point, I could no longer ignore.
I cannot attribute this shift for me to any particular event, but after about eight or nine months of participating in treatment, I was no longer the same person as I was when I had one day sober. I don't at all discount the tremendous amount of support I got during that time; I do know that I could not have achieved sobriety without it. I wasn't aware of SR at the time, so all my support was face-to-face. I got stronger, my ambitions to live a better life returned and, in a partly conscious partly unconscious way, my thinking, behavior, and my values had changed radically.
I was one of those people who didn't like "the God stuff" in AA, yet I was aware enough to know that facing either death or a lifetime of misery was a powerful tonic for any philosophical beliefs (which were killing me in their execution) that only became obstacles to my healing. I also cast a jaundiced eye towards OP treatment, and towards the addiction treatment industry generally. But for me, indulging my prejudices and clinging to beliefs and values which had only gotten me to a place of all-consuming despair in life was a childish excuse not to get the help I needed. This was a tremendous and necessary revelation for me which has continued to inform the way I live my life.
Six months, man. I was content to accept working part-time in CVS or Walmart as a career. I'd projected that I'd live in some dump in some sketchy part of town with one or more roommates. That I'd recede into the background, that my greatest contribution to the larger society would be making a price check on deodorant. Or M&Ms. But, given my history and the amount of damage I'd done to my mind and body, what else could I hope for without losing what was left of my sanity?
So many problems with sobriety, it's easy to find an excuse to go back to drinking. You feel like crap, and stay this way, often for a long time. It requires patience, support and work. "What?! More work?! I know a guy who got sober by blah, blah, blah...just putting down the booze..." Your thinking is shot, and you seem to be under attack from your own feelings. Wreckage all around you. Guilt, shame and remorse; the depressive trifecta. Nobody cares, no one loves you. When you get support, you either don't recognize it for what it is, or you dismiss it due to pride or some other willful character trait, the same character trait that played a role in getting to where you now are in the first place.
It also takes time to achieve sobriety. So many people just give up when life doesn't get better according to their expectations, expectations that have been contaminated by years of drinking and by a conviction writ-in-stone that there can only be one way for me, even though, and again, destroying my life has demonstrated in dramatic ways that this conviction is nothing but a destructive fantasy, an equally delusional reality that replaces the altered state I lived in for so many years.
Six months is crucial because you still and always have the rest of your life ahead of you. Someone in Robby's thread was commenting on "living life to the fullest while dying." In alignment with my own way of thinking, Robby's response (and I'm paraphrasing here from his comments and my own thinking) was along the lines of "living life to the fullest while dying" is something we either pick up or we avoid all through our lives. For we are always and ever dying. And, after all, what's the alternative to living life to the fullest?
The crucial element, or question, is at what moment do you make the choice to start the clock?
At six months following my relapse, I had a very narrow existence. (I add the qualifier "following my relapse" since the first time I got sober for the long term, I had different challenges, being as I was relieved and grateful that I no longer needed to drink.) OP treatment during the day, and then early evening, individual counseling at the OP facility once each week, and AA at night. I was also doing volunteer work on Saturdays. I'd been working with my sponsor for about two months at the time, reading through the Big Book with him and working through the Steps. I'd made a written amends to my XGF at five months, and promised to start making a financial amends once I started working, which I did about eighteen months later. Otherwise, she and I have had no contact, which is what she'd asked of me.
It seemed to me that, most days, I was going through the motions. I dealt with daily, intense cravings, usually most of the day. Though I knew that I needed as much help as I could get, a very strong part of me still wanted to drink after six months, and I'd grown pessimistic that this would change. That's originally why I started working with my sponsor.
I ate twice a day, sometimes watched TV following my nightly meetings, and read myself to sleep most nights. Each day blended into the next, and it was difficult for me to imagine that I would find a purpose in life beyond getting sober. There was no joy for me in this prospect, but the alternative was unacceptable. (Just as conventional wisdom tells us that we will find a life partner only when we're not looking for one, purpose and meaning in life often arrive when we least expect it. Yet despair always makes this seem impossible.)
I'd burned and buried several bridges in my personal and professional life. I drank myself unconscious into the emergency room on several occasions, and was told that I would probably die were I to continue drinking. I was unemployable, fired from every job I had, and I had, for all practical purposes, become homeless. My loving and supportive family were unavailable as long as I did not seek help. I was suicidal but without the dark comfort that clinical depression often provides. So when I finally reached out for help, which was not due to my wanting to get sober, but the consequence of my no longer being able to function on my own, I had few expectations that my life would improve in any meaningful way. Yet there was still a very small, virtually unnoticeable flame burning inside that, at some point, I could no longer ignore.
I cannot attribute this shift for me to any particular event, but after about eight or nine months of participating in treatment, I was no longer the same person as I was when I had one day sober. I don't at all discount the tremendous amount of support I got during that time; I do know that I could not have achieved sobriety without it. I wasn't aware of SR at the time, so all my support was face-to-face. I got stronger, my ambitions to live a better life returned and, in a partly conscious partly unconscious way, my thinking, behavior, and my values had changed radically.
I was one of those people who didn't like "the God stuff" in AA, yet I was aware enough to know that facing either death or a lifetime of misery was a powerful tonic for any philosophical beliefs (which were killing me in their execution) that only became obstacles to my healing. I also cast a jaundiced eye towards OP treatment, and towards the addiction treatment industry generally. But for me, indulging my prejudices and clinging to beliefs and values which had only gotten me to a place of all-consuming despair in life was a childish excuse not to get the help I needed. This was a tremendous and necessary revelation for me which has continued to inform the way I live my life.
Six months, man. I was content to accept working part-time in CVS or Walmart as a career. I'd projected that I'd live in some dump in some sketchy part of town with one or more roommates. That I'd recede into the background, that my greatest contribution to the larger society would be making a price check on deodorant. Or M&Ms. But, given my history and the amount of damage I'd done to my mind and body, what else could I hope for without losing what was left of my sanity?
So many problems with sobriety, it's easy to find an excuse to go back to drinking. You feel like crap, and stay this way, often for a long time. It requires patience, support and work. "What?! More work?! I know a guy who got sober by blah, blah, blah...just putting down the booze..." Your thinking is shot, and you seem to be under attack from your own feelings. Wreckage all around you. Guilt, shame and remorse; the depressive trifecta. Nobody cares, no one loves you. When you get support, you either don't recognize it for what it is, or you dismiss it due to pride or some other willful character trait, the same character trait that played a role in getting to where you now are in the first place.
It also takes time to achieve sobriety. So many people just give up when life doesn't get better according to their expectations, expectations that have been contaminated by years of drinking and by a conviction writ-in-stone that there can only be one way for me, even though, and again, destroying my life has demonstrated in dramatic ways that this conviction is nothing but a destructive fantasy, an equally delusional reality that replaces the altered state I lived in for so many years.
Six months is crucial because you still and always have the rest of your life ahead of you. Someone in Robby's thread was commenting on "living life to the fullest while dying." In alignment with my own way of thinking, Robby's response (and I'm paraphrasing here from his comments and my own thinking) was along the lines of "living life to the fullest while dying" is something we either pick up or we avoid all through our lives. For we are always and ever dying. And, after all, what's the alternative to living life to the fullest?
The crucial element, or question, is at what moment do you make the choice to start the clock?
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