I'm safe
 

Up high. Nothing can touch me. Why can't I feel this good sober?

You can if you give it a chance Lizella. You yourself mentioned having a great time at a work party sober just a short time ago. And with the high you know the low is eventually coming...and it gets lower and lower and lower every time.

Because it isn't real...

When you feel good sober, situations and people and thoughts are definitely touching you emotionally, because that's where the good feeling comes from.

When you're blissed out chemically it's happiness without cause, so of course nothing can touch it. It's a mirage...

You can feel good sober,far far better than you can ever feel drunk.

Sobriety has to be stuck at to feel the benefits.

Good tune...Massive pink fan here lol....I'm feeling better now after 6 months sober than I have ever felt before....Stick with it Lizella.

I used to feel the same way Lizella.
but it wasn't real and I knew it - which led me to take more drugs and drink more to banish that little bit of disquiet....

and when the money eventually ran out and I came down and sobered up, and felt bad, and I felt dirty and ashamed, and I looked at whatever mountains of wreckage I had to clean up today, the only thing I wanted to do was get back up there.

It was the most vicious of vicious cycles....until, as it will, even that stopped working for me.

No matter how much I drank I couldn't get my bliss...that was the lowest of the low, Lizella.

I finally worked out you can't live your life in a bubble.

Lifes not about locking yourself away. It's about experiencing things, good and bad, and getting through them, and growing through the experience - that's why they calling it growing up and growing old :)

There's a serenity I feel now that's different to that 'noone can touch me' feeling but it's real - I know it will still be here tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.

It took a lot of work sure - but what really worthwhile thing doesn't? :)

D

I disagree with those who say you will eventually feel this good once you get sober. There are very few things in life that can match the somewhat sustained euporhic high that comes when using alcohol or other substances. Even an orgasm only last a few mintues.

So Lizella, you will never feel this good sober. You will have to accept that. But the price for those few hours of that euporhic high is enormous: you will seriously damage your mind and body; you will hurt family and friends; you will do shameful things you would never do sober. And you may eventually die from substance abuse. And in time, if you become addicted, you will no longer feel that euporhic high; you will end up needing to use a substance to just feel normal.

So ask yourself if those few hours of "feeling good" are worth the price?

Ah, Dee. As usual, you've said it better than I could ;)

But the high from drugs is pretty short lived... few hours at the most... And after using over and over multiple times a day for years, you don't even get high anymore. You just get to baseline... maybe a little above baseline. And when you return to sober, you go under baseline and feel like ****... But if you stay sober and work on sobriety... you start to feel way better than you ever could from substances.

LazyBonez, your first two sentences are what I said in my post. So we are in complete agreement on those points.

Our only disagreement is that while we can feel good, even great when sober, we will rarely experience the euphoric high that a chemical substance can give us. Dee described sobriety correctly IMO when he said, "There's a serenity I feel now that's different to that 'noone can touch me' feeling, but it's real".

A sober "high" is different. We shouldn't kid ourselves and expect that with sobriety we will walk around feeling that chemical, euphoric high we had when we first started using a particular substance. That's an unreasonable and unrealistic expectation.