Relapsed after 6 1/2 yeras sober
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Thread Starter
Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Florida US
Posts: 296
Relapsed after 6 1/2 yeras sober
I have now been sober for one week and it's beginning to feel great. The cravings are gone which is the worst part. I had never relapsed before so this relapse has taught me that staying sober is a whole lot easier than getting sober.
i am grateful and new to this forum,
Nataile
i am grateful and new to this forum,
Nataile
Member
Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 861
Welcome Natalie! I'm glad you found this forum.
I drank after many years of sobriety too. I totally agree that it is much easier to stay sober than to get sober. I was very surprised by that when I initially got sober again.
I'm very happy that you got sober again and that you are feeling well.
I drank after many years of sobriety too. I totally agree that it is much easier to stay sober than to get sober. I was very surprised by that when I initially got sober again.
I'm very happy that you got sober again and that you are feeling well.
Member
Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: UK
Posts: 80
Originally Posted by NatalieN 
this relapse has taught me that staying sober is a whole lot easier than getting sober.
Member
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Texas, a state of mind
Posts: 380
Well congratulations on the week!! You are well on the way back to sanity.
I have done just the same thing, and left myself wondering "What the heck?" When things were going so well, some weird impulse led me to the liquor store. I can remember smiling as I loaded the (heavy-laden) bag into the back of the car. Here goes nothing! Literally.
I did some reading about relapse prevention and found several good things. The common point is that a relapse grows out of some emotional and physical work not getting done, and that it begins to be prepared long before that moment when you park at the liquor store. It begins to prepare itself when you first start to perceive yourself getting a little jumpy, frazzled, blaming, short-tempered, poor nutrition, no exercise, nagging worries, and don't do anything about these things but let them slide. Tick tock.
Best wishes to you for a solid return to health and happiness!
I have done just the same thing, and left myself wondering "What the heck?" When things were going so well, some weird impulse led me to the liquor store. I can remember smiling as I loaded the (heavy-laden) bag into the back of the car. Here goes nothing! Literally.
I did some reading about relapse prevention and found several good things. The common point is that a relapse grows out of some emotional and physical work not getting done, and that it begins to be prepared long before that moment when you park at the liquor store. It begins to prepare itself when you first start to perceive yourself getting a little jumpy, frazzled, blaming, short-tempered, poor nutrition, no exercise, nagging worries, and don't do anything about these things but let them slide. Tick tock.
Best wishes to you for a solid return to health and happiness!
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Thread Starter
Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Florida US
Posts: 296
Thank you guys for the warm welcomes. I am glad sharing my experience was helpful to some of you.
I am sure there was something I did or didn’t do that precipitated my relapse; however, I choose to view it as a very valuable learning experience. Once thing I’ve learned is that regret is a worthless emotion that can and will poison if we let it. I had forgotten how cravings felt like and it was very humbling to feel them again. It’s great to be here and to be sober.
I am sure there was something I did or didn’t do that precipitated my relapse; however, I choose to view it as a very valuable learning experience. Once thing I’ve learned is that regret is a worthless emotion that can and will poison if we let it. I had forgotten how cravings felt like and it was very humbling to feel them again. It’s great to be here and to be sober.
Member
Join Date: Jan 2011
Posts: 1,126
Thanks for posting, Nat. I was in a meeting of AA a few months ago and three visitors came. One had 20 years, one 12, and another about eight or nine. All three had relapsed at those milestones.
But their sharing about how they came back to sobriety, and how they fought shametot come back to AA and share their experience demonstrated enormous courage, just as your post reflects.
But their sharing about how they came back to sobriety, and how they fought shametot come back to AA and share their experience demonstrated enormous courage, just as your post reflects.
Re-Member
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Colorado Springs, Colorado
Posts: 7,583
I thought I was a lazy drunk but it turns out I was just lazy! I have 15 months and appreciate your posting. I find sobriety gets easier with time. Drinking as an alcoholic gets worse with time. Thanks for the share. I honestly thought that you were going to say that you fell for the I can drink normally now trap. I will remember not to forget that it IS easier to stay sober than get there. There is my laziness, I like learning the easy way.
Member
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 225
NatalieN - I completely understand where you are coming from. I had just shy of 11 years of sobriety and drank again. It's now been 6 years of trying to get sober. I don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out why I relapsed, fact is I did. I could beat myself up about it and go round and round ad nauseum trying to come up with the reason. I choose to look forward instead. This is a great site and I'm glad you're here.
Member
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 14,937
Welcome NatalieN!
I relapsed after 5 1/2 years so I sorta know what you're feeling. I hadn't worked any program before I stopped. I got pretty complacent and I thought I could just have a couple of beers in a nice resturant like normal people, after all, it had been so long.
I found out that I could, except that later on when I was alone I wanted to drink more beer and crack open the vodka. Once I relapsed, it was harder to stay quit. I struggled for about a year before I finally got desperate enough to try AA. Now I've got a pretty good chunk of sober time and a program and support system that I can use to stay sober. I didn't have that the first go 'round.
So what are you going to do to stay quit this time?
I relapsed after 5 1/2 years so I sorta know what you're feeling. I hadn't worked any program before I stopped. I got pretty complacent and I thought I could just have a couple of beers in a nice resturant like normal people, after all, it had been so long.
I found out that I could, except that later on when I was alone I wanted to drink more beer and crack open the vodka. Once I relapsed, it was harder to stay quit. I struggled for about a year before I finally got desperate enough to try AA. Now I've got a pretty good chunk of sober time and a program and support system that I can use to stay sober. I didn't have that the first go 'round.
So what are you going to do to stay quit this time?
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Thread Starter
Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Florida US
Posts: 296
Thank you all for the congrats and well wishes.
“So what are you going to do to stay quit this time?”
It’s not what I am going to do, it’s what I am already doing.
1. I attend weekly Smart Recovery meetings which are facilitated by a doctor who specializes in addictions.
2. I am very active in the WFS forum (Women for Sobriety) founded in 1976 by Jean Kirkpatrick, a doctor and recovered alcoholic, and read this program’s acceptance statement # 1 every day, which states: “ I have a life-threatening problem that once had me. I now take charge of my life and my disease. I accept the responsibility”.
3. I joined and participate in this forum.
4. I am in daily contact with friends from my old AA women’s meeting. We get together once a month for dinner and chit chat.
5. I study/practice non-duality (known as Advaita Vedanta in the East). I am active in a couple of forums dedicated to this ancient philosophy.
6. I make a daily pledge to be aware of my negative thinking as I understand thoughts dictate emotions, and emotions dictate actions. My experience is that if I become a witness to my negative thoughts (conscious awareness) and follow them all the way through, from their birth until they disappear from my mind, they fail to thrive and ‘prosper’.
7. I started meditating again.
I slacked off on 4, 5, 6 and 7, which are the foundation of my recovery, and I am new at 1, 2 and 3.
Thanks for asking.
I agree this is a great forum.
Natalie
“So what are you going to do to stay quit this time?”
It’s not what I am going to do, it’s what I am already doing.
1. I attend weekly Smart Recovery meetings which are facilitated by a doctor who specializes in addictions.
2. I am very active in the WFS forum (Women for Sobriety) founded in 1976 by Jean Kirkpatrick, a doctor and recovered alcoholic, and read this program’s acceptance statement # 1 every day, which states: “ I have a life-threatening problem that once had me. I now take charge of my life and my disease. I accept the responsibility”.
3. I joined and participate in this forum.
4. I am in daily contact with friends from my old AA women’s meeting. We get together once a month for dinner and chit chat.
5. I study/practice non-duality (known as Advaita Vedanta in the East). I am active in a couple of forums dedicated to this ancient philosophy.
6. I make a daily pledge to be aware of my negative thinking as I understand thoughts dictate emotions, and emotions dictate actions. My experience is that if I become a witness to my negative thoughts (conscious awareness) and follow them all the way through, from their birth until they disappear from my mind, they fail to thrive and ‘prosper’.
7. I started meditating again.
I slacked off on 4, 5, 6 and 7, which are the foundation of my recovery, and I am new at 1, 2 and 3.
Thanks for asking.
I agree this is a great forum.Natalie
Member
Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Canada
Posts: 153
Hi Natalie,
Kudos on getting "back on your feet" so quickly after your relapse. I am very impressed with your action plan and the many tools available to you for your recovery and personal growth.
As a student of Sanskrit Mantra, and Vedic and Buddhist practices II am very curious about how the study and practice of non-duality (advaita vedanta) has assisted you, and is assisting you, in your journey, and would love to learn more.
Kudos on getting "back on your feet" so quickly after your relapse. I am very impressed with your action plan and the many tools available to you for your recovery and personal growth.
As a student of Sanskrit Mantra, and Vedic and Buddhist practices II am very curious about how the study and practice of non-duality (advaita vedanta) has assisted you, and is assisting you, in your journey, and would love to learn more.
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Thread Starter
Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Florida US
Posts: 296
Hello Frankie12:
I just wrote a long post on another thread and will paste it here. I think it will give you an idea about the events that lead to my current interest in non-duality. May be interest is not the right word. I will return to this thread tomorrow to tell you a little more about my practice. More than a practice is a living realization, a constant awareness.... a witnessing even.
Here is my previous post:
"..........at my worst, I was having six drinks at happy hours and then a half pint to a pint in the car, mixed with coca cola. I would get home and pretend everything was fine, make a pathetic attempt at fixing dinner, and pass out over the soup. My two then teenage kids witnessed this most nights. I couldn’t deal with the guilt the morning after, and that’s what drove me to my knees, literally. I am not a praying person.
I would open my eyes and enjoy those few moments of blissful stillness we all wake up to, before our memories of the prior night’s events start playing on our mind’s screen. Three or four minutes into the horror movie was all it took for me to collapse from anguish and guilt. I’ll stop here since I am easily turned off by drunklogues and sense others may be as well.
My inability to cope with my emotions the morning after was what made me seek help. Fortunately, there were no DUI’s, job losses, divorce, etc.
I went to AA not knowing there were secular means to recover. Only ‘worked’ the steps once in the 5 years I was there (I stayed sober another year and a half after leaving AA). The abdication of responsibility to an outside ‘authority’ and the throwing up of hands were foreign concepts that felt wrong to me. I resisted the steps and the prayers the entire 5 years I was there, but the fellowship was very helpful, as are most groups of like-minded individuals who support each other to achieve a common goal. Just last night, I read a post on a different thread where someone compared AA's requirement of prayer to a supreme being to being asked to change one’s sexual orientation. It really felt that painful, but it kept me sober, although I truly felt like a foreigner in a strange land. I never felt home.
Two years before leaving AA, while reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, something shifted. I can’t say what, but there was, for the first time in my life, a ‘knowing’, a certainty that there was more to my life than the roles of mother, wife, accountant, recovering alcoholic, daughter, etc; that these roles were not what made me ‘me’. That simple realization set me on a path that I can only describe as life transforming. I fell in love with meditation and yielded to a strong attraction for a certain eastern philosophy. Gone were the constant doubts, trusting my intuition felt very natural, my resistance to and fondness for certain life events vanished, and for a couple of years I lived in perfect union with what was. I still don’t believe in a supreme being and sense I never will. At this point in my ‘journey’ AA meetings became too painful to attend and the support of women who wanted to stay sober was eliminated from the equation.
But even this state of constant bliss started to feel ordinary. My mind started to label things again and I started slacking off at meditation, my eastern spirituality and philosophy books accumulated dust on virtually every table of my house. I became inactive at forums dedicated to the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and other similar spiritual teachers. My 'spiritual' activities came to a gradual halt.
Then, one day, after 6 ½ years without a desire to drink, at some airport, I decide to order an alcoholic beverage, and did. No prior planning, no physical craving for booze in 6 ½ years. I just ordered and had that one drink as it was the most normal thing in the world. A week later I had another, two more the next week, three drinks a few times after that, and four once or twice. I may have even had five one night. I am not sure. I continued this pattern for approximately five months, without a drop of guilt, as if I never had a problem before, until I noticed an increased preoccupation with booze, an all too familiar anticipation that felt very very wrong. That’s when I ‘knew’ I had to quit, and did, ten days ago. This ‘knowing’ came as an overwhelming certainty that was humanly impossible to ignore.
The first few days my mind, more than my body, craved those drinks. It was a psychological craving that proved too much to bear a couple of times. I remember buying a pint one night and having to touch it while still in the bag, as I walked to my car. The psychological comfort that touching that cold, golden glass bottle gave me was truly baffling.
Here I am now, ten days sober, no cravings of any kind.................
..........try something new, something different, whether you believe it will work or not, the Mc2 method, a Smart Recovery meeting, an AA meeting, taking a different route home, one without liquor stores. I don’t know......your inaction will only perpetuate your misery."
I just wrote a long post on another thread and will paste it here. I think it will give you an idea about the events that lead to my current interest in non-duality. May be interest is not the right word. I will return to this thread tomorrow to tell you a little more about my practice. More than a practice is a living realization, a constant awareness.... a witnessing even.
Here is my previous post:
"..........at my worst, I was having six drinks at happy hours and then a half pint to a pint in the car, mixed with coca cola. I would get home and pretend everything was fine, make a pathetic attempt at fixing dinner, and pass out over the soup. My two then teenage kids witnessed this most nights. I couldn’t deal with the guilt the morning after, and that’s what drove me to my knees, literally. I am not a praying person.
I would open my eyes and enjoy those few moments of blissful stillness we all wake up to, before our memories of the prior night’s events start playing on our mind’s screen. Three or four minutes into the horror movie was all it took for me to collapse from anguish and guilt. I’ll stop here since I am easily turned off by drunklogues and sense others may be as well.
My inability to cope with my emotions the morning after was what made me seek help. Fortunately, there were no DUI’s, job losses, divorce, etc.
I went to AA not knowing there were secular means to recover. Only ‘worked’ the steps once in the 5 years I was there (I stayed sober another year and a half after leaving AA). The abdication of responsibility to an outside ‘authority’ and the throwing up of hands were foreign concepts that felt wrong to me. I resisted the steps and the prayers the entire 5 years I was there, but the fellowship was very helpful, as are most groups of like-minded individuals who support each other to achieve a common goal. Just last night, I read a post on a different thread where someone compared AA's requirement of prayer to a supreme being to being asked to change one’s sexual orientation. It really felt that painful, but it kept me sober, although I truly felt like a foreigner in a strange land. I never felt home.
Two years before leaving AA, while reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, something shifted. I can’t say what, but there was, for the first time in my life, a ‘knowing’, a certainty that there was more to my life than the roles of mother, wife, accountant, recovering alcoholic, daughter, etc; that these roles were not what made me ‘me’. That simple realization set me on a path that I can only describe as life transforming. I fell in love with meditation and yielded to a strong attraction for a certain eastern philosophy. Gone were the constant doubts, trusting my intuition felt very natural, my resistance to and fondness for certain life events vanished, and for a couple of years I lived in perfect union with what was. I still don’t believe in a supreme being and sense I never will. At this point in my ‘journey’ AA meetings became too painful to attend and the support of women who wanted to stay sober was eliminated from the equation.
But even this state of constant bliss started to feel ordinary. My mind started to label things again and I started slacking off at meditation, my eastern spirituality and philosophy books accumulated dust on virtually every table of my house. I became inactive at forums dedicated to the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and other similar spiritual teachers. My 'spiritual' activities came to a gradual halt.
Then, one day, after 6 ½ years without a desire to drink, at some airport, I decide to order an alcoholic beverage, and did. No prior planning, no physical craving for booze in 6 ½ years. I just ordered and had that one drink as it was the most normal thing in the world. A week later I had another, two more the next week, three drinks a few times after that, and four once or twice. I may have even had five one night. I am not sure. I continued this pattern for approximately five months, without a drop of guilt, as if I never had a problem before, until I noticed an increased preoccupation with booze, an all too familiar anticipation that felt very very wrong. That’s when I ‘knew’ I had to quit, and did, ten days ago. This ‘knowing’ came as an overwhelming certainty that was humanly impossible to ignore.
The first few days my mind, more than my body, craved those drinks. It was a psychological craving that proved too much to bear a couple of times. I remember buying a pint one night and having to touch it while still in the bag, as I walked to my car. The psychological comfort that touching that cold, golden glass bottle gave me was truly baffling.
Here I am now, ten days sober, no cravings of any kind.................
..........try something new, something different, whether you believe it will work or not, the Mc2 method, a Smart Recovery meeting, an AA meeting, taking a different route home, one without liquor stores. I don’t know......your inaction will only perpetuate your misery."
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