tomsteve

ok, so, sourbaby, this is what im reading:
you have social anxiety and low self esteem. you drink to feel better about yorself and be comfortable around others. youre struggling with whether youre and alcoholic or if alcohol is a problem yet say this
" It got substantially WORSE as time went by. I could have nipped it in the bud back then but I was in for twenty more years of ever increasing craziness. Until I drank every day almost all day."

so, what i read ya saying is you definatly have a problem with alcohol, social anxiety, and low self esteen yet are contemplating going to an alcohol themed party.

dont ask to be led from temptation then walk into it.

imo i think ya ought to skip out and hang with the crazy sober individuals here!

tomsteve

imo, what ya should do is work the steps.
helped me love myself and they will you,too.

you belong and deserve to love yourself. start showing you love yerself by staying home tonite.
now, go to your bathroom, look in the mirror.not at dust bunnies on yer shirt or how yer hair looks. but right into your own eyes.
and tell yourself you love you.

Berrybean

Night night Sourbaby - I'm off to bed now, and it will be 2016 in 40 minutes here. I intend to be snuggled in bed with a good book when all the pandemonium lets loose. Hope you feel better after the festivities have passed, and that there's a good meeting you can get to soon.

Wishing you all the best for 2016 xx

teatreeoil007

Ya know, sourbaby-it doesn't really matter WHEN the party is: tonight or in a few weeks...

It all still comes back to this essential "thing" that is with you *every*single*day*> Yourself. You are with you! There, I said it. When you wake up in the morning, you are with you. As you go through each day, you are with you. Yes, there are times when you are with others, but ALSO with (you guessed it) YOU. No matter what it is that you decide to do from here on out, you've got to get things 'settled' with yourself. If you don't like yourself, how can you escape feeling miserable[whether drinking or not].

But I don't think drinking is going to make you like yourself and it's not going to make the people who really matter like you more. And if you'll give sobriety a decent shot, you will start to 'see' things from a sober perspective. The sober perspective should open MORE avenues for you to be able to explore why you don't really like yourself and what you can do about that.

We're here for support, regardless!

MIRecovery

A very good friend of mine caused an accident that caused someone to lose their leg. He got real miserable real quick and he was drinking .

Alcoholism is progressive things only get worse never better

blueberry2015

Personally I would avoid it like the plague! If your gonna go you need to seriously commit yourself to sobriety. If you go, then you are in antibiotics, be the designated driver if you drive too. Good Luck, this will be a test for you thats for sure x

PurpleKnight

There's a huge part of Sobriety were you gotta take a leap of faith, I used to come up against these 2 issues, I went round the alcohol merry-go-round for a long time, but there has to be more and there is!!

The word patience is not in the alcoholic dictionary, but we have to somehow try and take one day at a time, follow the journey in front of us.

It's almost like putting only 1 piece of a jigsaw together each day, at the start you'll not see very much, if anything, just random unconnected pieces spread out, and then as the pieces come together maybe a glimpse of sunrise, a mountain, a lake, something to hang onto, a feeling that it's all coming together, a sense that there is something really there.

Then in time the jigsaw will have been completed, and we'll realise that those pieces that didn't mean much of anything at the start actually now make sense, they were part of something wonderful and beautiful, something bigger, but we won't have that perspective at the start or even in a few months!!

Once I cracked this concept, the merry-go-round finally stopped!!

least

So are you going or not? How important is your sobriety to you?

EndGameNYC

Given your history, this makes sense to me.

As you once wrote, you were constantly trying to get high -- to not feel what you were feeling -- even before you knew what getting high was. You've taken all kinds of pills to change or avoid what you were feeling during the course of your life. Anything to escape your mother's unrealistic and abusive demands to be perfect according to her version of what you should feel, what you should do and who you should be.

Not "feeling good" (i.e., not feeling what you're feeling at any particular moment), has become your way of being in the world. There's no safe way for you to feel because each feeling is temporary and therefore unreliable. The next pill, the next drink, the next new amazing experience is your solution but only makes things much worse for you by virtue of it's temporary nature and your corresponding inability to tolerate the discomfort of just being you.

The goal of therapy is not to feel good, but to help us become who we are. To get to know ourselves as we truly are. To work through the obstacles in life that keep us from reaching our potential, to work through the destructive thinking and behaviors that leave us feeling empty. Or worse. If there is no discomfort in therapy, then there is no progress, and when the therapist is working harder than the patient, something needs to be done.

So many people drop out of therapy, or avoid it completely, for this very reason. "My therapist couldn't help me." "I got nothing from my therapist." "I tried therapy, but it doesn't work." "There isn't any kind of therapy than can help me." To be sure, there are bad therapists, but this reality only serves as an additional excuse to avoid getting help.

We all carry resistance to change. And when that change is about us, it leaves us terrified. We concoct hundreds of excuses to not get help in order to avoid anticipated annihilation. And nothing gets better. Therapy at its best is a joint venture in which the tacit or spoken agreement is to be as honest as we need to be in order to get to a better place. And this involves work.

There are few lasting treatments or solutions for emotional or medical problems that don't involve discomfort, sometimes for months and years. The last thing most people want to sacrifice is that which is most familiar to us. It's no small irony that I'm typing this out on a site called "Sober Recovery."

Getting sober is difficult. My experience was that it didn't make me "feel good" either. Yet I couldn't continue living the reliably miserable life I was living. When drinking, I didn't "fit in" anywhere except the worst imaginable places on the planet and in my being. It isn't sobriety that makes us better, but what we do while we're getting sober that makes the difference, just as what we do in our lives becomes or reveals itself as an important part of who we are. Getting sober required drastic changes for me to live a better life. One would hope that this would be enough to commit to sobriety, but it often isn't.

Getting help, for you, probably threatens everything you've learned about how to survive, about everything that currently makes up who you are. As most of us have come to learn, this isn't about a wine-tasting party at all. It's about how you're going to work through the rest of your life without also destroying yourself. And you're right. No one can talk you into living a better life when so much is at stake for you.

I honestly don't see you getting sober for the long-term without getting additional help. Your comments are at one time a desperate plea for help and an adamant refusal to get the help you need. But you need to start somewhere, and time is never on our side.

If you want to feel comforted and loved, then you need to start loving yourself by making a commitment to at least set up an appointment to get some additional help for yourself. There are many good therapists out there who are very willing to help. You don't need to impress them or please them. You don't need to be anything other than who you are.

I hope you can start right now. You don't believe it, but there's so much more out there for you. Your story is heartbreaking. But living the rest of your life with the knowledge that you never truly gave yourself the opportunity to live a better life might just kill you before the alcohol and drugs do, if a broken heart doesn't do it first.

Ruby2

SB, I hope you're doing OK tonight. You asked if it's alright to sit home and binge on Netflix. I'm sitting at home myself tonight and I'm really content with that.

And this is to tomsteve, It was me, Ruby, that felt insecure and drank during my 20s until it got substantially worse and I was drinking every day.

sourbaby1986

Endgame - thank me for such a thoughtful and real reply. I will message you privately.

Everybody else: I talked to my temp sponsor last night. I called her and told her that I was probably going to drink tonight (last night) because I feel ****** when I'm sober. She reminded me that the goal of recovery is not to make the bad feelings "go away". It's to learn to handle them. So...the bad feelings will get better (she said). But I might always have thoughts like this, I might not always feel peachy. But I will be okay anyway.

New concept. Mind blown.

Thank you everybody for all your comments. For a while, I'm going to have to remind myself of step 1 every day. That's just how it's going to be. I need to be honest with myself and with those around me about recovery concepts I believe and those that make me uncomfortable. That's okay.

I spent last night with my boyfriend, we cooked chicken parm from scratch, sampled three kinda of cake and watched "making a murderer" on Netflix. His two best friends also stayed in for New Years. One was in bed by 10 (and she is "cool"). I guess I am okay as I am.

Today, my two best girlfriends decided that they were going on a 3-4 month cleanse that involves no alcohol. I was pretty shocked. But happy to eat clean, exercise and avoid alcohol. This lead me to thinking "I'm fine! This puts off having to drink for a while!" But I recognized that in early recovery - I may have these thoughts. That maybe I can drink like a normal person. Or that it's ok now by to drink because they aren't. But these are just thoughts. When they come up, I will remind myself of powerlessness and unmanageability, and I will make the decision that sobriety is the best thingfor me.

I have always felt "bad" or "flawed" or "like a fraud" for having these thoughts of "I'm fine!" But today for some reason, I can see that as just a thought. I don't have to listen. Is my delusion that I can drink like a normal person TOTALLY SMASHED?? No. But that's where I am at today.

Thank you everybody for your support.

Berrybean

Great post Sourbaby. Really honest about where you are right now, and highlighting some of the dangerous thoughts that could get you to take a drink. That whole fear around what others think of us and our motives does ease up as we become more confident in our recovery, and understand our own flawed thinking. It always strikes me that magazine articles and advertisements really play on those fears and their main aim is to offer us the key to being acceptable and desirable in the eyes of others. I now avoid reading / watching these things like the plague. Their messages are insidious and unsettling, even when I see their BS for what it is. It was a strange, and scary new feeling when I made the decision to walk to the beat of my own drum, and do what I know is good for me, and run the risk of others disapproval. Mostly that feared disapproval has not materialised - and when it has done it has been in the form of drunken rants from other people who are close to me, who miss having their booze-buddy.

TBH I think I'm getting to the stage now where I actually have the level of confidence and being comfortable in my own skin sober that I needed to drink to get before. It did take a while though - and it wasn't always comfortable, but it was worth it .

Mel12

teatreeoil007

Thanks for the update, sourbaby.

The Chicken Parm. sounds delicious!