Kerbcrawler

Hello, i thought id ask this, after over a decade of everyday drinking, i reached a point in life...were my future looked like it may not be..ie, early death, im a great one for intuition, trusting your instincts, and being kinda of in tune with your feelings, and i guess trying to forsee, the possible consequences of ones actions, personally had a lot of dark dreams,all involving intoxication by drink, and they were not pleasant, my health started to take a turn for the worse, nothing terribly imminent...but you know that way..inside you just know..its not good..also finances in tatters..debt, of course the terrible hangovers..that get worse and harder to shake off,as you get older, and your body isnt as healthy as it should be to deal with the excessive amount of toxins your puttin in...to sum up, everything just came on top, and i knew the time was nigh..how about you?..oh and the thoughts of dying a loser...when i knew within me ive the power to change an do somethin about it...

aasharon90

After another nite at a local
waterhole i returned home
to another confrontation with
my spouse.

I was so tired of argueing and
not being able to control my
actions that i told my spouse
i think ill just end my life.

He said no i didnt and told me
to go to bed.

I called him on his bluff and
after he left the room i hurrid-
ly down some pain pills and
wine hoping not to wake up
the next day.

Sure enough my little ones
tried to wake me up with no
sucess.

However in the far distance i
could hear the phone ringing
which was right next to my bed.

In a groggy, numb almost paralized
state i reached for the phone.

Today I believe it was my Higher
Power calling me to let me know
He wasnt thru with me just yet.

Family stepped in that day and
did an intervention on me sending
me to rehab via the back seat
of a police car.

It was my family doing for me
what i couldnt do for myself.
Getting me the help i so needed
to stop drinking.

Hi im Sharon and Im an Alcoholic.

By the grace of my HP and people
like you here in SR I havent found
it necessary to pick up a drink of
alcohol since 8-11-90.

For that and you I am truely grateful.

eleanor

Just tired of the guilt & shame associated with waking up in the mornings knowing I drank alone another night (weekdays). And on the weekends if I've gone out with friends - waking up with guilt & shame AND wondering what I did or who I may have offended the night before b/c I drank too much.

Plus, thinking of all of the $ I've spent on alcohol over the past few years makes my stomach churn!

Kjell

Consequences, then more consequences, then even more.

I got to the point where I was going to ruin my life (and maybe someone elses) forever, or I was going to stop drinking and stay stopped and recover.

I've now been sober for almost 6 months, mostly b/c of AA. I think I found a way out.

super71

Oh... so, so many things. Hurting others, hurting myself, loss of respect, fear, disgust, self-hatred, embarrassment, lying, etc...

KingsCross

Public panic attacks and the reclusive behaviors that followed. I mean, I hated myself so much before those for not being able to stop drinking, but those attacks were what put me over the edge.

I've about decided they were caused by my brain trying to bring attention to my drinking, like a public admission that I was out of control. If that makes sense.

Thanks, brain. Ya did good.

mercurial me

liver badly damaged from too many years of drinking hard

Time4me2Change

I was a sporadic binge drinker. Went months without a drop. When I did drink, it was until I blacked out. Then in November, something changed... The week before my cycle my heart was beating @ 125 while resting. I was a nervous wreck. Didn't drink & all was fine, until:

January, the week before my cycle, I drank myself stupid three days in a row, the last night I drove my daughter and her boyfriend home from the movies.... I do not remember, in the morning my daughter told me she has never been so scared & I should have let her boyfriend drive like he asked.

February, the week before my cycle, I drank myself stupid four days in a row.

March, the week before my cycle, I drank myself stupid four times that week

April, Two week before cycle went to a physc doc, put me on Welbutrin & Klonopin - week before cycle, drank like a fish for four days.

Forgot, when I say drank for four days, I mean when I got home from work @ night, not 4 days straight.

May, the week before my cycle, the day before Mothers day. I went to a friends @ 9pm. I remember having a mixed drink. Then I cracked open a beer. Then I woke up four days later in ICU.

Apparently, I passed out on the couch. Woke up around 7am and started drinking. I got a ride home and proceeded to take all the Klonopin, some sleeping pills, about 30 Fioricets and who knows what else.

Like Sharon, I tried to commit suicide. My 9 & 16 year old daughters found me. In the Emergency room I had my stomach pumped, put on a respirator and had to have dialysis to clean the toxins from my blood. They told my husband that another 15 minutes I would be dead, and that I might not make it. That if I did, worste case I could have brain damage and best case senario, a damaged liver.

As of right now I am doing ok. I have been sober since then. That is not saying alot since I usually go months at a stretch as it is.

I have since found out the Fed Govnmt issued a warning about 8 months ago stating that people with no psycotic issues are prone to suicide when they take Wellbutrin (or whatever the generic is - Busipone or something) I know it was that, and the alcohol. I have stoped the antidepressant & the drinking and feel alot better already.

Check it out...... Went to Gyno Dr. put on heavy hormone therapy.... Last week was the week before my cycle.... I didn't even know!!! All was well.

One day at a time.

Another

What caused me to stop drinking was seeing first hand what it was doing both mentally and physically to me. An example and significant one at that was when I began to tell myself that nothing matters in life and self control is just a bunch of bologna. While i'm 6 months sober now I know it's just a beginning and that the mental view of myself, faith, and the rest of the world around me has to be a priority to keep in the good to quit forever.

Thanks tremendously for everyone's support here, And know that I'm here for you as well.

ryanmar

I put myself in a position to badly injure or possibly kill other people. I could create a huge list of negative things that alcohol abuse has provided for me in the past 10 years but that one thing is the scariest of all. I never want to be in a position to do that again.

AmericanGirl

These posts are so honest and brave . . . it helps to read them.

I feel like I could answer this question a thousand ways, which is why it's such a good thing to think about -- there were so so many reasons and they reached a critical mass.

What sticks out to me right now is the moment of clarity I had when I was drunk that last night, on many glasses of wine and half a fifth of gin. I realized with startling, sudden awareness that it was an absolute joke--absolutely absurd--for me to continue to insist or pretend that I could drink like a normal person. It was as if this part of me came out and shook me hard and said, in a horrified tone, "you are so b-s'ing yourself right now."

NoelleR

In AA, they talk about the allergy to alcohol, and there's a longstanding joke about this, and it was absolutely true for me.....at the end of my drinking career.....:

Every time I drank, I broke out in handcuffs.....and TX jails are definitely NOT nice (well, no jails are nice, but TX jails are waaaaaay DOWN there.....)


NoelleR

betterlate

Drinking stopped being fun and became more like a chore. Plus at least a little bit of what each previous poster has said here above.

Oh, and "broke out in handcuffs" is great, Noelle!

Ghostly

I like other people before me could list soooooo many reasons I needed to quit. Reasons I stopped.

One of them is the amount it took me to get drunk was getting ridiculous. Amounts that would have knocked me out a few months earlier was barely doing it. Then, the amount of time it took me to sober up was equally ridiculous. Waking up a looking at the bottle in amazement wondering how I could have drank all that. I couldn't go on like that.

The first morning when I woke up and was told the night before I had been walking into bedrooms trying to find the toilet, and didn't remember that at all should have stopped my drinking. Not remembering conversations I had. Waking up in a different place then I went to bed. Drunken texts and e-mails that caused pain and embarrassment to me and others. All that should have made me stop but I let it go on.

I think it was a sum of many things. I'd finally had enough and knew I couldn't go on.

yeahgr8

Honestly...there was no-one left to enable me to carry on drinking...like the emphysema sufferer that takes off their oxygen mask between gasps to have a puff on a cigarette there was no consequence that would have made me stop drinking for long...

Skeeter2

Intense stories. I appreciate everyone's honesty and bravery. For me, alcohol has marred some significant events in my life -- either I passed out (this was before I swore off hard liquor) or I was hung over (the "benefits" of only drinking wine). Sick of feeling like crap in the mornings and sometimes throughout the day after. Sick of spending the money on bottles that I would drink part of and pour the rest down the drain. Realizing that I enjoyed being present -- that social anxiety was actually less when I was sober and knew what I was saying, and remembered what I had said the next day. Realizing that alcohol was a crutched keeping me stuck from moving on in my life -- the evening passes so uneventfully when your buzzed; I got nothing done. Until May, I had nine months sober -- the longest I had gone without drinking since high school. I liked what was going on and want that back for the rest of my life. But I'll take it one moment at a time ... Life is good.

Draciack

Sometimes I wish I knew. I had one of those strange moments--equal doses of desperation and realization where I came to after a blackout, looked around, and said, "What the hell have I done?" And the question, for the first time, was not directed to just my actions that single evening but to the whole four-month bender. I was not a faith guy but that moment...I'm eternally grateful to whatever caused it. Because I didn't have a thing to do with it

spikeman

Which time? I've given up every Monday, 52 weeks of the year for 21 years (since I was 21). I must hold the record the the most attempts at giving up only to be totally blasted by 3pm the following Friday afternoon.

Don't know what's different this time. All I know is I've been off the hooch for 9 days today. Feeling happy about that :o)

coming_clean

I stopped smoking weed because I didn´t feel anything anymore,

Peter G

Stopped because I grew tired of the agony and pain I suffered... and caused. Stopped because I came about as close to death as I could and not actually die - 3 times in 6 months. Stopped because I had destroyed pretty much every meaningful relationship in my life due to consequences from boozing. Stopped because I constantly lived in fear that I would kill someone - or die - in my next drunken brawl.

Stopped because in a rare moment of clarity I witnessed what my life had become as a direct result of booze, and within that moment I hated alcohol more than I've hated anything else in my life.

Stopped because I became irresponsible, hateful, unable to function in any meaningful capacity. Stopped because I was tired of my brain swimming in semi-consciousness.

Come to think about it, this list could go on and on. I guess the biggest reason I stopped is because I finally figured out that the only viable end result from living an alcoholic life - aka being a completely unusable idiot - is to die painfully, lonely, pathetic, and sad.

Short answer is I stopped because the only alternative was a proper suicide.