George3334

I want to invite more people into our August group to talk... that's all

George3334

To feel free to talk....

George3334

Because... Here's the thing.... I'm a reserved type of person... from a good background and a self-made type... And I just want to feel free to say what I want without judgement... We all cool with that?

Sheknits

Of course you can george. I hope you've never felt judged in this group. I find it to be a very accepting bunch of people.

Venecia

You lucky Oregonians. It's true: the best fruit grows there. When I've visited, I've stopped and bought bags of fresh cherries and eaten them with great enthusiasm. Alas, they do make wonderful pies, too!

George, it is nice to hear from you. We've all been great support for one another as we work on attaining sobriety and living in recovery. We're works of progress, all of us.

George3334

Elseware, Venecia, JDooner, Linnie, Advbike, Dee74, SheKnits, Oceanlady, EternalQ, Kadidee, Foolsgold....

Been following all you since August.... Love your support.

Thank you,
George

jdooner

So I have had some time to reflect on some events that occurred yesterday here. George, I accept your apology but want to elaborate. I felt hurt when I first saw the post about me judging. I am sensitive, as this theme has come up a few times in my life recently and it highlights a weakness and an area of improvement and work that is needed for me personally. However, to be called out openly from someone I don’t know or have a relationship with, caught me off guard and I could sense my fight or flight coming. Fortunately Dee suggested I log off before I went into fighting mode and I did.
I guess I don’t take any of this lightly, in spite of humor being good for the soul because for me I am dealing with life and death. I wanted to die when I was active and so to become active again would be suicide. The only thing that separates me from a psychopath is my empathy, which is the opposite of judgment. I genuinely feel and care for the people in this class and others on here that I have developed a bond with. When FG struggled it hurt me and I reached out to him to help, Else is the same. When you guys post about something in your lives, I feel for you and would do a lot to help.
George, I welcome you with open arms and last night is behind us. If I can help you by sharing my experiences, strength and hope including the unfiltered good bad and ugly I will. In return I ask and expect a mutual level of respect though. I could see myself getting drunk and high and ******* with some drunks and junkies on a sober website when I was active and in my twenties. I was that guy. So it bothers me to see my reflections in others. Anyhow, felt I needed to get this off my chest as it stuck with me all night.

George3334

thanks man... I read you've been going thru a tough time at home lately and I do apologize for stuff I've said.

It's no you, it's me :-)

Sobriety is challenging, man. The first 6-months were easy by comparison.... I'm into therapy and doing the kinds of things I should do to stay sober.... But at the end of the day, the pleasure pathways in my brain seem to cry for that.... whatever it is... hard to pinpoint.

George3334

For example.... Tom Sizemore... Great actor.... He was an A-lister and could've maintained that level for a long time... But then things turned sour. Addiction became a major problem.

He dropped to his bottom.... and now he's been working his way back up...

I heard an interview he gave recently in which he said the Pink Cloud is great at first... The euphoria of sobriety..... And then, over time... Sobriety became a challenge... "It's tough" he said.... "It's really been harder lately than I thought would be"

Sizemore is still sober, far as I can tell. I hope he stays that way... Me too.. All of us.

Elseware

George I agree with you wholeheartedly. The first few months were a piece of cake compared to this. At first I was so happy to be out of acute detox I was on the highest pink cloud around. I could have been sitting on a mound of pills and I would not have touched one. Now it's very hard. Everyday.. No matter what I do or don't do every late afternoon the old AV comes creeping around. Sometimes I pray to a higher power I don't even know if I believe in. Sometimes I walk or watch tv or cook something but every damn day it's the same. That's why I keep coming around here.

There are a couple of threads on which I post poems. I have found this a great outlet for me. I didn't even know I could write poems. It completely absorbs me when I'm writing one. And that absorption is what I need.

George3334

Thanks Elseware....
Yeah.... I'm enamoured with you and everyone else who has stayed sober since Aug. 2013.

I was cool until I let my guard down.... That's when the S*it hit the fan?

George3334

And... Jdooner... For real.... I know you're a great guy..... I was picking on you yesterday and I'm sorry for that.

We're all great people, here, correct?

We came to SR to seek help and friendship... A place where we can be honest about our uniqueness..... I've found so many interesting personalities at SR.

jdooner

George - Sobriety and recovery are two very different things in my book. You cannot have recovery without sobriety but you can be sober and not recover.

In the early days, weeks, months its about one foot in front of the other. This is where I see a major difference between the programs AA and Rational Recovery. One is a lifestyle and the other is a technique, in my opinion.

For me being sober is about living a sober life I want more than a drunk life. I am an addcit before I ever took my first drink or drug, I needed to deal with the roots of my addiction in recovery. This is a process. This is a total psychic change and midset shift. I needed to rip down my ideals and build a new house from the ground up, not just develop a technique to keep me from picking up a drink.

I don't understand the brute force approach - frankly I would not last long, I would go back to drinking if that was what my life would be like. I have gotten to a point where life is really amazing. This past month there has been a shift and it has to do with my faith in my higher power. I would bet my life and do that if I do the right thing and put positive energy into the universe that I will be protected. I tested this is Jackson Hole and continue to test it. You r others may laugh or disagree but I have faith and this faith provides serenity bc I no longer need to look outside myself for happiness.

Thsi is the key to religion too. I never understood it because I never had faith. Its not whose God or whose religion is the best, which is ironic seeing how most wars are over this. Its about the process of believing. Thsi process of believing in something greater than yourself that you would trust your life to it, is where true happiness I think comes.

AA also practices releasing resentments and making amends. The process of making an amends is amazing. Its like asking a girl out for the first time, its terrifying. But afterwards its such a liberating feeling.

Thsi is recovery - the process of wking up and relaizing the whole time I had everything I needed I jsut did not know how to use it. I was the Lion in the Wizard of Oz - I had the courage the whole time and yet I thught I needed the man behind the curtain to give it to me.

Stick around a post...my take is either commit fully or go back to the old life. Pergatory does not sound apealing to me at all!

George3334

Jdooner.... Thank you for the thoughtful response....

I wholeheartedly agree with this... "You can be sober and not recover"

The essence is this.... Why do we humans take mind altering substances?

Is it to forget? Is it to transport ourselves to another place, mentally?

Why does the substance become an elixir for life, even when we know it's wrong?

Why does it have a powerful draw long after we recognize the problems that we see it brings in our own lives?

I don't know the answer.... I do know it's a problem... for me, anyway... That's why I'm here... and why I'm seeking therapy....

I like that I can express my views here... I welcome your challenges to me... It's something I was always fearful of before SR....

Dee... Help? Am I crazy?

Ornithology

I'm seven months into this and I'm thinking about drinking more now than I have been in months. I wouldn't call them cravings, more like nostalgia. I walked by a pub yesterday and thought how nice it would be to sit at the bar and have a pint or two. Far different than the reality of drinking 12-18 beers and going off to bed stoned drunk.
I run 3-6 miles nearly every day to clear my head of these thoughts and I'm on SR drawing strength by reading other's posts.

jdooner

George – try reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, by Gabor Mate. Advbike suggested it to me and really hit home.
It is my opinion that an addict like me takes a substance to pacify what I cannot achieve naturally – past tense. What I craved was to live in the moment but had too much pain to do this sober. So I would get drunk or high to be present and push away everything else in my life. This worked until it did not work. In the end I did not want to die but did not want to live and had no idea how to stop.
It sounds like you stopped drinking but did not build a recovery program to stay quit. I think this is common and why most people struggle. I have developed tools to deal with thoughts. Cravings are physical, thoughts or obsessions are mental. Cravings end week or so when detox is through and thoughts and obsessions can occur for the rest of your life. I realized I was not my thoughts. So deconstructing my “I” was critical to learning how to deal with the mental aspect. I meditate daily, twice actually and this has made a huge impact, subtle at first significant as I look back.
Good luck

kadidee

This really struck a chord with me. Although I don't crave wine now but every so often, I'm still working on healthy ways of dealing with painful or negative emotions. I don't like to hurt or be uncomfortable and struggle with just sitting with the feelings.

It's ironic when you think about it...we drank to be present or 'deal with' things, but we actually escaped any sort of presence or clarity because of the numbing effects of the alcohol/drug. And in my case, nine times out of ten I would create more chaos by acting out in other ways under the influence, and then needing to 'drink to that' as well the next day. Endless cycle.

Dee74

I don't think you're crazy George

Addiction is illogical - it's not logical to do something that we know can destroy us or hurt those we love, so trying to understand it in order to quit is kinda futile.

I think I understand it a lot better now I'm outside the bubble.

Drinking was an easy fix...whatever the problem was beer solved it.

The problem was - it didn't really solve anything, it just pushed problems to one side. When the problems resurfaced, I'd drink again.

Drink enough and you become dependent - if not physically, certainly mentally....and that mental obsession waits there....

It's a lie we're constantly bombarded with...drinking makes you fun...helps you fit in, gets you the girls...manliness is wrapped up in drinking too.

If you forget it's a lie, it's very easy to slip back into old ways.
I did it hundreds of times in 15 years.

Whats worked for me is regularly posting here - I can't forget it's a lie now.
I've also built a life I love, I don't want to escape it anymore not even for a minute.

I also like who I am - I solve problems now, I don't run away from them.

Not sure if all that makes sense, but thats what occurred to me from reading your post George

D

George3334

Jdooner / Advbike... I will definitely read In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, by Gabor Mate..Thank you for this.....

And Dee... Thank you for your response..

George3334

Here's the thing.... I went from August thru mid-Feb without a drink or any sort of mind altering substance. And as the months passed, I would have this internal dialogue with myself that I was working my way toward greater happiness.

And I do believe I felt a higher level of happiness around mid-January... But that was because I felt I had accomplished something. The accomplishment was making it thru the holidays without a drink....

And then.... As the harsh mid-winter doldrums set in, around Feb. 6 to be exact, I just said, "f**k it" I'm good... One drink.... And that's when the real problems began...

Ever hear someone say that their sobriety was great for awhile, and then when they went back to it... their addiction was, like, much more intense? I wonder why that is?

Is it because, through no conscious fault of our own, our synaptic connections between the orbitofrontal cortex and that sweet spot in the amygdala within the core of our brain in the ventral striatum takes over and just says.... "hey man, I been starving in here.. Feed me, Seymour" like the needy plant in Little Shop of Horrors...

HA! SPOILER ALERT......Remember when Seymour fed Mr. Mushnik to the plant? ..

And in this metaphor.... Mr. Mushnik was, what, the alcohol? The Drug?

Seymour wanted to be happy... and he thought happiness was through feeding the plant no matter the cost... But in the end, things went really bad for Seymour.. Memory fades but I think in the original the plant devoured Seymour... So, yeah... There ya go....

Seymour should've known better, and he did know better... but the plant (the drug/alcohol) got the better of him....