Finalcall

I spoke with my psychologist last week who i have been seeing to help me the ny depression and alcohol problems.
She told me to try and capture/ remember the thoughts i have between thinking about alcohol and making a choice on whether to buy or not.
It is harder than it should be.
Maybe because there is no logic behind the decision to drink?
I would like to hear the opinions of others.
Btw 3rd day sober. Feeling good.
Happy wk end to all

Anna

I think it's an obsessive-compulsive thing. I would think about drinking, quickly begin to obsess about drinking and then the compulsion to buy alcohol would take over. And, for me, the compulsion eliminated any logical thinking.

Finalcall

Good answer. Maybe why for me to stop drinking i have to try and 'forget' or distract myself asap after thinking about it.
Also the habit of always having a drink in my hand may be more than just a habit. Like some people who dont have their phone for 5 minutes.
The more i know the better i can understand.

Dee74

There's as technique called urge surfing that's about observing your thoughts and feelings when you're craving - it takes a little practice but it might help you identify some of the thoughts you want to identify?

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...e-surfing.html

Finalcall

Thanks dee

least

I hope you can come to the place where you want to be sober more than you want to drink. Then you won't have drinking thoughts anymore. Or if you have them, they'll be easily dismissed.

CaptainHaddock

The first time I quit I had “drinking thoughts” several times a day. It was almost like quitting smoking, when I would for example feel my pockets for my pack of smokes before leaving the house, only to remember that I had decided to quit. Fortunately, as with cigarettes, those thoughts became much less obtrusive after about a week or so.

Wishing you all the best, and please keep posting.

MantaLady

In the early days I had urges to drink quite a lot. Many seemed to be auto-pilot ones where I’d think I fancy a drink and it would take me a while to realise that I had thought about it. It didn’t seem related to anything in particular. Like captain haddock some of them were just automatic conditioned response created by doing the same thing over again (smoking). However, when I went to rehab I started to list out what emotions I was feeling when I got a craving and this helped me see that there were definite trigger emotions where I seemed more likely to get a craving from. I had to use a large list of emotions/feelings to choose from as I found it hard to really know what I felt, some on the list I would read and go “oh, never thought of that emotion but that’s how I am feeling”.

Quite often we get detached from how we really feel and think as after a long time drinking all we know is “I feel uncomfortable, a drink will solve that” and we no longer need to know what we were feeling or why and as alcoholics that is all we are looking for, a solution to change/ignore that feeling. x