On The Road

Hi all:

I'm curious to hear your experience with sobriety. Is it motivated externally (ie someone telling you you need to get sober) or internally (ie you telling yourself you need to get sober)? What are the pros and cons with each approach, in your opinion?

IOAA2

Hi.
In my case I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Each AM I’d promise myself no drinking today and the next AM crushed by having to say the same thing every day. As time progressed I started to hug the hopper and upchug a bloody mess which caught my attention and scare me into getting honest with myself about my drinking and accept the theory I cannot drink in safety. I being non religious said a short prayer like please help me stop drinking. From that moment many years ago I’ve been sober.
This was not a work free handout as much change was needed which frightens so many who are unsuccessful.

BE WELL

Soberwolf

Towards the end mrs sw would say things like can you not go a day without drinking ? my brother asked a few times and towards the end my dad said to me to stop before i die

None of that worked i had to be brought to my knees to see what i had become & even then it took another 3 months to finally stay sober

Not sure about pros & cons but if YOU want to get & stay sober it will be YOU that gets & stays sober & were here to help you along the way

Hypernova

It was a bit of both for me, I knew I was heading down a slippery slope and knew where I was going to end up. I wanted to quit but could never get motivated to really want to, I tried many times. The look of disappointment and a heart to heart from my Daughter was the outside push that I really needed.

sleepie

I hate to say it but I think I have a "I quit it, or it quits me" situation.
It just feels worse every time I drink.
I guess the pro is I won't die today, just this minute.
The con is I cannot enjoy the taste and relaxation anymore. I have no reprieve.

zerothehero

Almost entirely internal. Even my wife (who has been sober for years) didn't think I had a drinking problem. I hid it pretty well, I guess. The bottom line was I was unhappy and needed to start taking better care of myself. Now, Buddhism and mindfulness are my main motivations for abstinence. Drinking and drugging are just incompatible with my current path.

NestWasEmpty

I wanted to quit for years , I knew I was making a mess out of my life & family . If I had stayed away from one of the biggest triggers . My drinking friends I really think I could have stopped sooner . I didn't have the strength to stop on my own , until I got very ill , & had to go to the Hosp .
When the Dr gave me 6 months to live if I kept drinking I would be dead at 53 . Needless to say - That conversation gave me the Strength To Live .

EndGameNYC

I imagine that everyone agrees that living sober has value. We can debate what freedom means, or whether or not it even exists, yet we can also agree on its value. This leaves us with a conundrum: If we agree that both sobriety and freedom have value, why is it that so many of us run from both?

Working in a career that pays well but which we despise, suffering through a loveless relationship for fear of being alone, or living someone else's life because the alternatives are frightening are compromises I'm unwilling to make. No one had to teach me this, and it was only through suffering that I learned what is most meaningful in my life.

Fear can be a great motivator, but happiness or fulfillment is a very high price to pay for the illusion of safety and security. Though it seems to be in our nature to look outward for what we desire, the most important life events always transpire within ourselves. Everything else is an accumulation of what other people have done.

We are always free to choose.

NuttieUK

For me it didn't matter how much people told me I had to stop, it was only when I decided that for myself that I could stick to it. I feel like I had to make the choice, had to want to quit for it to stick and work for me.
I had people try to make the decision for me (hiding alcohol etc) but I think I'd always rebel against it if I didn't have full control.

least

For me, it was internal, tho I knew my kids didn't like me drinking. I just got sick and tired of waking up feeling like death and hating myself.

Hevyn

Hi On The Road.

I was humiliated & embarrassed by my behavior, & ashamed when others questioned me. Instead of it motivating me to quit - I actually drank more, in an attempt to hide from the whole mess. Like Soberwolf, I had to be brought to my knees with nowhere to turn. I had to be angry and disgusted with myself.

Deckard

The realization that I had to stop drinking was definitely internal... But even though I knew in my heart what I had to do, I still stuck with drinking for a while. And it was actually something external that gave me the final push. One night almost 1000 days ago my wife looked at me with such a mixture of contempt and disdain that it truly shocked me. I don't know why, but right at that moment I accepted that the jig was up. I just didn't want to be that person anymore.... It was like she was holding up a mirror to me, and I could finally see.

CaseyW

While I've had plenty of external reasons to sober up over the last thirteen years (DWI, family wanting me to stop, other legal issues, etc.), it's only when I finally decided to stop for internal reasons 81 days ago that recovery really started for me. I was just tired of living a life centered around alcohol. Tired of feeling awful all the time. Tired of telling lies and then having to remember all the lies. Life is much easier now that I'm not drinking.

Serenidad

Great thread! I was sober from 2008-2013 because I got a DUI in 2008 & it scared the heck out of me. I stayed sober for the court, the judge, my husband, kids, family, friends, neighbors etc. for 5.5 years. (By the way, I was on non-drinking probation for the first 18 months of my sobriety so I was forced by the courts to stay sober or risk jail time. I also had to go to AA and get slips signed etc). My biggest motivator to not drink was fear. I was NOT happy during those 5.5 years because deep down in my heart I really didn't want to be sober. I wasn't even sure I had a problem! I just thought I needed to stop driving when I drank! (Kinda funny now). Anyway...I drank again after all that time sober and THIS TIME is different for sure.

THIS TIME no one is telling me to quit drinking or forcing me to. It took me over a year and a half to finally get here, but I finally got to a point where I have fully accepted that I am an alcoholic (which is actually very freeing) and it's NEVER gonna be fun again. It's always gonna bring nothing but pain and misery for me. At the end, every time I drank all I did was think about suicide. That's how NOT fun drinking was for me. :-(

Anyway, THIS TIME "I" made the decision to quit. No one forced me. THIS TIME I am finally at peace with the fact that I am an alcoholic and can't drink. Actually...I CAN drink, but that would be like stepping back into hell. Alcohol was just holding me back from my own life. I wasn't even living. I was just existing. I was a shell of a person living in a very dark world. It was truly awful!

So....that's my story. I agree with others who said they didn't stop until THEY were sick and tired of being sick and tired. For me it was an "inside" job.

MelindaFlowers

Internal. Another vote for "sick and tired of being sick and tired." I was sick every day. It was the hangovers that made me stop.

That's not to say there were plenty of external factors including a medical diagnosis, my family was scared, and my blackouts were alienating friends.

I have to say the biggest external factor was my career. I had worked hard through graduate school and I was simply going through the motions, trying to hide my hangover and bloodshot eyes. Every day I had this sense that I was about to be caught, at any moment. I looked like a very tired, sick person. I am honestly shocked I was never talked to at work or questioned. Shocked. I looked absolutely terrible.

I was skating on thin ice with the whole work thing. I would black out a few times a week and forget to set my alarm. Somehow, I would always wake up at 4 or 5 am still clothed and set my alarm. I had a terrible fear every day that I was going to sleep through my alarm. Some jobs you can be late to every now and then but not mine. I was responsible for unlocking the door in the morning and letting in the clients. The ice was getting thinner and I was showing up two, three, four minutes "late" and often they were waiting at the door. The boss wasn't there yet and the clients always laughed it off as I ran up to the door but man, I was ONE tardy away from serious consequences.

I was living in constant fear of dropping the ball and knowing that it was all because of my drinking.

So, I guess it really was a mix of internal and external factors.

PurpleKnight

There came a point when I really wanted to be Sober, now don't get me wrong it took well over a year to figure out how to actually achieve that, but there was something inside myself that had made the decision that I needed to do this for me.

There had been many comments and worries from other people, family, friends, but that just washed over me throughout the years, but when the penny finally dropped inside my own head about where alcohol was leading me, that was the moment when it got serious.

MelindaFlowers

Yep. It has to be internal. When it was external pressures, I planned my drinking away from those people and places.

FeelingGreat

Definitely internal for me, but I'd also had the first hints of other people noticing (I'd kept it pretty quiet for a while). Also although it came from me, I reached out to others for support.

On The Road

Thanks for all your responses. My experience was that when I "tried quitting" in the past when my wife pointed out my drunken behavior, I found creative ways of hiding it AND drinking MORE! It wasn't until I finally looked in the mirror and said the words "I'm an alcoholic and I have a f***ing problem" (not metaphorically, BTW - I actually did it!) did it begin to stick with me. And when I made that choice, I was (and am) fully vested fully in my OWN recovery.

So for me, external factors never helped me, in fact sometimes they made things worse. It wasn't until I made the choice (internal) did things start getting better.

I hope others reading this thread struggling in their journey can see from the various posts here that here is hope, and breaking free from addiction starts from within.

Aellyce

Interesting thread.

Definitely internally motivated. But for me not only getting and staying sober, I'm very much like that with nearly everything: strongly self-motivated. When this suffers, it's pretty much an indication that I am not in a good place, depressed or whatever else. It's like there is a source within that I have been very familiar with and explored since my childhood, something that I typically feel a strong connection with when I am healthy -- I felt a profound disconnect from this when I was drinking heavily, especially in the last year of it. This created a cognitive dissonance for me that was extremely painful and difficult to experience, sort of like losing myself and wandering in a dark, desolate, unfamiliar space.

There has been a factor about the areas with strong external components though... I had a few "larger than me" things in my life very seriously affected by my drinking (eg. work, relationships) that was very painful (to say the last) for me to see and experience. And in general, my ability and motivation to contribute to things in life that go beyond just the self. Of course in its origin, the drive to contribute, be involved in relationships etc is also an internal interest and motivation, which gets externalized when I feel connected to the world and interact with it the way I like. So, it's kinda both, but definitely primarily internal.