Originally Posted by EndGameNYC

Congratulations on your success, Jeff.

You must have known that I'd reply to your post, so let's both make an effort not to make this adversarial.



Um, you might recall that you've already done this. And the consequences were disastrous.

I believe that your comments refer to, or are the product of, something that you've struggled with from the start: acceptance. Having thoughts that you may be "cured," or that you can "relax with a couple of cocktails" echoes your thoughts from early on and suggests that you haven't fully accepted that you're an alcoholic, or that you cannot drink safely, or that you're not like everybody else with a drinking problem, or that you only need to find a way to drink "normally," or that you're somehow different or smarter than other people who have problems with drinking...These are only a few of the different things that people here have acknowledged (or not) following a relapse since I've been on SR.

The playing field is leveled when it comes to addictive and compulsive drinking. Doesn't matter how smart we are (or tell ourselves we are), how much experience we've had, that we believe that we're a good person or a "nice guy," that we have a good job or career, that we have the perfect marriage or relationship...Nothing matters but the fact that none of us can drink safely.

I too was "curious" when I relapsed for three years following twenty five years of sobriety. But I wasn't at all curious (or certainly not enough) about the eventual outcome, only about whether or not drinking would provide me an escape from the burden of being a healthy and responsible human being. I was lying to myself, and I knew I was doing it while I was doing it. To be clear, I knew that my drinking would eventually take me to a very bad place, and what I thought I knew about it was nothing other than a best-case scenario. It was much worse, and not by a little bit. How could it have been otherwise? I think you're essentially confusing 'curiosity' with 'addiction'.

And, though it doesn't mean that they don't exist, I've never met someone who stayed sober based on the fact that they "would hate to start over." You must know that this is not nearly enough. I mean, you've read it thousands of times here that at some point, staying sober isn't about not drinking; it's about making significant changes that can only be done by becoming honest with ourselves, changes about (or an acknowledgement of) who and what we truly are or are becoming, and that have much less to do with external reality than many of us hope or imagine. Putting a fresh coat of paint on a broken-down car only makes it seem that everything is okay, and can be dangerous as well as deceptive.

"...on occasion I need the reminder that alcohol is a one way street to destruction."

I would argue that no, you don't. Again, you've already gone this route and, unless I'm missing something, you've nothing else to learn from drinking that you don't already know. "Forgetting" what we already know to be true may temporarily (though not in fact) relieve us from the responsibility of the consequences of our actions, but doing so only sets us up for future acts of bad faith. Once we know the truth about ourselves, it is impossible for us to unknow it.

We need to remain mindful until we learn to trust ourselves, usually for the first time in our lives. We've trained our minds to fool ourselves, to minimize the importance of certain things that we say and do, and to override both common sense and sanity. And we receive consent for doing so from all kinds of people and things in the world, willing co-conspirators to keep the fantasy of who and what we believe we are intact so that our own reality dare not encroach upon or displace the illusion. How do I know this? Because those are precisely the things we attempt to do with other people when we don't want them to see the truth of who and what we are, and not only when we're drinking.

After all you've been through, and all the damage that you've done, do you truly believe that you need more convincing?

Originally Posted by thomas11

As is in-line with my addictive personality, at the moment when I think about drinking liquor, I am not thinking about getting a buzz so much as I am thinking about the enormous amounts of pure distilled sugar that would be ingested. Diabetes in a bottle is the way I see it.