lein

I have reposted this from my blog, because I wanted to know whether it was just me thought like this when reading addiction autobiographies?

I have read every autobiography, I think, that anyone has ever written on their drinking and recovery.

The strange thing reading these books when I was newly sober (in any one of my million attempts to get and stay sober)
was, when I was reading them, I would live through the misery with these writers. Then I would live through their recovery with them.
Then I would think that it was like I had acheived recovery!
It was sort of like, I was giving myself permission to go back to drinking, because "sometime in the future" I would reach a point, like these people I was reading about, and just "come to" and stop drinking.
I never put any effort into my attempts at abstinence, because it would "just happen" somewhere "down the line"
haha...talk about freeloading!

Now I've finally realised I have to put my OWN effort into my OWN recovery
Here are some quotes from one author that I really identified with so much

Quotes from ― Heather King, "Parched"

“I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn’t understand why the happiness never came, couldn’t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn’t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn’t made me feel good in years.”
― Heather King, Parched

“I had no idea what time I’d left, how I’d gotten home, who’d been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.”
― Heather King, Parched

lein

Funnily enough though, when I watched documentries like Rain in my Heart and The Wet House, and people were dying of alcoholism right left and centre, I never "That'll happen to me"
I thought "That'll never happen to me, I'm not THAT bad"

Why did I think recovery would happen without me doing anything, but death wouldn't?
Selective thinking, I think they call it haha

Ruby2

I never read autobiographies about recovery but your post hit home this morning. I am trapped in living in the future with attendant procrastination. Tomorrow. Tomorrow things will be better. That's the alcoholic thinking process and I haven't had a drink in a long time. Take away the alcohol and I still have disordered thinking. It's just easier to work on the disordered thinking without the alcohol.

lein

I wouldn't blame that too much on having alcoholism, my DIL has never drank more than one glass of wine at a time in her life and she is a master procrastinator haha