scaredofchange

my life is going SO good except for when this happens. I've been working hard, playing music, hanging with family. then I have too much to drink one night and I just feel sooooo bad and guilty. I hate blacking out. I hate being the last one up or the last one drinking at a party.

scaredofchange

this is the only outlook I have for my problem right now. I'm too scared to even consider anything else.

strategery

What is going through your mind when you reach for that first drink?

scaredofchange

that is a great question. I can't speak for everytime but I know on Saturday I actually said something along the lines of " I want to get f***cked up". it's irrational! if I imagine my nephew ever doing that or even my brother, who i have seen like that, I get sick and scared. I wish I could feel that way for myself (besides the day or two after).

thanks for talking with me

ClearMind

Sounds familiar! I find it's easy to swear off alcohol the day after a bad drunk, but it is definitely more difficult after a few days have passed and it's a sunny Friday or Saturday and the lingering effects of those Facebook photos or those cigarettes or whatever else aren't in the fore front of your memory. Like someone else suggested, it would probably be a good thing to save your post and put it somewhere easily accessible, like your phone or your email, and read it every day for a while, just to keep those reasons you want to quit fresh.

strategery

I completely get where you're coming from since I was a craft beer person too and my goal was usually to get annihilated as well. However, where is it coming from? I had a lot of different triggers that would make me want to pick up and had to learn to recognize them. Many of them were based on emotions or feelings of discomfort, stress, and annoyance.

However, I had to disengage allowing myself to drink alcohol. It's hard, but you know the weird thing? I found my stress level decreased significantly when I quit drinking. I no longer had to worry about picking up alcohol, where I was going to drink next, what I was going to drink next, when I could do it, or the aftermath of drinking too much alcohol.

scaredofchange

now that you mention it.... I was playing a gig which I always get a bit anxious for. then after the gig it felt so good to be done... I just had this feeling of I NEED to let lose and not worry. I have anxiety issues as well as OCD and I think subliminally drinking quiets down those "voices" for lack of a better term.

Dee74

You can totally let lose and not worry, or even celebrate an achievement, without alcohol too

If you want change it's possible, but it requires effort.

Posting here every so often is a good start but it sounds to me like you need more effort to tackle this problem successfully?

D

scaredofchange

thank you. I know you're right. I'm so scared of change like my name says. the thought of never being able to drink again with family or friends is scary!! not as scary as me blacking out and doing something stupid but my brain won't let me comprehend that even as im writing it.

I am going to Los Angelas for work Wednesday and it'll be the trip where I'm going to try and not drink at all. co-workers and customers, etc. can be quite persuasive but I'm going to keep this app on my home screen and check in when I'm traveling!!

thanks for reading and your support.

nymets86

I feel the same way. So hard to picture life without alcohol. Realistically, it's just those first two or three drinks, where things are lucid and maybe a bit of anxiety goes away. But it almost never stops there and winds out with blackouts, which the shame and guilt take a long time to recover from.

I'm sort of just getting over mine which was about 3 weeks ago and my AV is kinda saying that drinking again in the future will be fine. I need to keep reminding myself that I'm not really quitting drinking, I'm quitting hangovers and blackouts.

Dee74

It is hard to picture a life without alcohol, but it can be done. There's hundreds of people here as proof

D

nymets86

Thanks Dee. Right now, I'm just taking it one day at a time. This is a weird phase for me as I've gotten sober for this long quite a few times. This is definitely the hardest I've worked at it though, and I'm happy for that. I think when I got sober last summer for a month, I kinda forgot to check in here or think much about how I'd stay sober after the shame/embarassment of the binge I'd had wore off (still the worst ever at 3 nights in a row of blackout and then a 4th night of getting very drunk).

This time I'm thinking a lot about it and last week, it didn't seem that hard to stay sober forever since the pain was still so raw. Now, 20 days in as of one minute ago, I still don't want to drink at all, but in the long term, I keep thinking about times when I want to drink. I'm doing whatever I can when those thought pop in to get rid of them, or think about that future event and then think how much better the day after will be if I'm not hungover

itstheone

are you ready now? Jump on!

Dee74

When those thoughts came, and they did, I simply accepted that if I wanted a different outcome, I needed different decisions to be made.

I would never have believed I could bare, and outlast, a craving...but I did it...and every time I did it it got a little easier.

Whatever happened in the past is not always the best predictor of what might happen now - we're different people now

D

MelindaFlowers

I had many evenings like that, especially the posting videos to facebook stuff and waking the next morning frozen with embarrassment. Why were the videos so embarrassing? I don't even know. I guess I just worried that people knew I was drunk.

I am glad to report that all of that crap stops when we stop drinking. It feels good to have control over what we do and say in person and online. The online thing was particularly traumatic for me as I could be in a blackout and post stuff that I couldn't delete til I woke up the next day at noon.

I couldn't live my life anymore with so much humiliation and you don't have to either. Welcome.

scaredofchange

thank you