Shealy

Nothing, as it turns out.

I have read so many of these threads over the last month. So many people who have a few good weeks of recovery and boom, relapse.
I can totally moderate my drinking, they say
I've been sober for a month, surely this means I don't have a problem!

Well, now I get to join those of you whose AV convinced you to pick up the bottle. I feel ashamed and stupid, but that's probably a good thing and I've learned from the experience.

Here's what happened. Sunday afternoon, glorious day outdoors. [trigger warning] I'm feeling strong, healthy, relaxed. [trigger warning]. My husband and I had an uncomfortable conversation earlier in the day [trigger warning]. Husband mentioned his cravings. [trigger warning]. All these signs that I've dealt with individually, but not really all at once.

At first I thought, "wow wouldn't it be nice to have a G&T" and it was like something in me just gave up. I knew at that moment that I was going to drink. I thought at first I'd just have one or two, of course that turned into like 5 or 6. And here's the thing, I didn't even enjoy it all that much. I woke up the next morning with a splitting headache, half-assed my way through work, and kept thinking about how I could have been on day 27 but here I am on day 1 again. Ugh. Husband joined me in the drinking, he was at three weeks sober. I know it is difficult having both of us in recovery at the same time, in one of my earlier posts I mentioned how we can be enablers to one another, but for the most part we are one another's biggest support systems in recovery. We just need to be hyperaware of our triggers and honestly maybe just go our separate ways for the day if we are in danger of enabling the other to drink, which is basically what happened on Sunday.

It's day 3 now. Here's what I am going to do differently- plan an activity outdoors for Sunday afternoon (Sunday afternoon seems to ALWAYS be a real challenge for me). I made a list of all the things that were positive about my drinking (there was only one... a couple of hours of numbness and artificial happiness) and the negative things (twelve...including the fact that I also woke up with an absolutely awful cold that still has me flat out)

I'm also going to try not to dwell on the number so much. A one-day relapse doesn't cancel out my previous four weeks of sobriety, but it will if I continue to do it.

Really not wanting to post this, but I know I will get some good, honest advice. Thanks team.

Coldfusion

Here is my experience. Seven years ago, my wife and I quit drinking. We went to ninety AA meetings in our first ninety days sober, and we feel this gave our sobriety a solid foundation. I still go to two or three meetings a week and post here daily, but she does not.

silentrun

Identifying triggers like that will really help. Do you have a plan if you get into a situation again where the next thing you will do is drink or (plan a)? It helped me to use this website as a place to out myself. Is there someone you could call, not necessarily to talk you out of it but just to confess to? If your AV is like mine it hates for other people to know what it's up to so just the threat of telling on it will usually shut it up.

Dee74

I'm a big believer in plans.

Its great you can identify triggers - but that awareness is only useful if you can use it to change the usual outcome of those triggers?

Having to plan to address what you might do the next time you feel unsteady or vulnerable is a great idea

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...ery-plans.html

D

SoberRican

In my case its fear. I am spooked to even think of relapse. Therfore I have to stay on top of my sobriety. I guard it. My life depends on it. I just live one day at a time. If my boozer senses smell a trigger. I put that fire out.. With water. Lol. Not booze. ✌

DriGuy

To feel good and to feel normal is the goal of recovery, and it's wonderful to feel that way, but it can be dangerous too. The closest I ever came to a relapse was from feeling good. At 6 months or so into recovery, someone offered me a convivial glass of wine. She was a good friend and knew I had quit and that I had to gone to great lengths to do it. She was pouring wine for guests at dinner, and asked me, "Would you like a glass of wine, or are you still not drinking?"

It was asked in the innocent manner of a normie who did not understand relapse, kindling, or addiction, and thereby encouraged me for a second to adopt her perception that alcohol was no longer a problem for me and I might want to have a drink. And then it scared me more than I had ever been scared in sobriety before. What scared me was the total innocence of the idea, and how innocently logical and safe it seemed for that short moment, until all the knowledge I had picked up in meetings hit me. Yeah, yeah, I had learned that one drink will lead to another and would take me back to the nightmare in short order. I had the intellectual capacity to understand that, but at the emotional level, I was still susceptible to believing that con-man, my AV, had my best interests at heart.

I was given the chance to experience that common fail point in recovery where a person thinks he can drink again and does so in spite of the wealth of information that says he can't. It's a thought cloaked in total innocence and safety, without a hint of malice or defiance. It's a classic logical fallacy. It makes no sense at the intellectual level, but it has a seducing appeal that we accept as true, until we take the time to test it's merit using tools of logic.

I can see why alcoholics fall for it. Idiotic as it may be, it can appear so harmless and safe.