Dee74

Keep posting. We're listening

D

EndGameNYC

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0204114246.htm

I'll respond to you directly, noneever, when I have more time to do so.

In the meantime, you didn't mention anything at all about getting any kind of help for your situation. I think you've gone long enough trying to do this on your own. And if you have gotten help, and have committed to using the help you've gotten, aka, you've been working hard to get sober, then it's clear that something needs to be changed.

EndGameNYC

Hi noneever.

What you describe can be extremely painful, and it's very easy to get discouraged when it's our own minds that are torturing us. I lived with that for many years, and virtually all the time when I relapsed for three years. But it can also be managed.

I don't like analogies or metaphors that suggest that there's a "war" or a "battle" that we fight against alcohol, alcoholism or the inevitably negative thoughts and feelings that seem ever-present in our drinking lives. Taking that kind of position is more about willpower than anything that can be useful over the long-term. Ideas around taking a baseball bat to our addictions, beating the crap out of it, setting it on fire, or otherwise destroying our addictions may be well-meaning, and they may reflect what the person using them is feeling, but they are ill-conceived and, to me, naive and unhelpful and potentially harmful.

Addictions don't die, and they don't only fade away. If it is a battle, then we've already lost. Otherwise, we wouldn't need help and support. Staying with that metaphor, early sobriety is more a mopping-up expedition more than anything else, and that's only partially true. You can't kill it, you can't have it evicted from body and soul, and you can't run out of the room fast enough to get away from it. The only thing I found that helped to leave me in peace was to get to know it, to defuse the power in the addictive part of who I am, and to keep my eye on it so as not to be blind-sided by it again.

I've learned that my addiction is much more powerful than I am, and more persistent than anything else on the planet. It will not bend, even when facing the most powerful force of nature. And, so, I have absolutely no problem with the idea that I am "powerless over alcohol." I've proved this time and again, and I see no reason to deny it. And I don't care what that means to other people; I'd much rather save my life, and eventually live a better life than worry over the words I use to get there. I can't win the war, but I can sue for peace.

Racing, negative thoughts haunted me every time I attempted to sleep while I was drinking. It catalogued every failure, every regret, every poor decision, and every screwup I accumulated throughout my life up to that point. So, I did the reasonable thing. I drank until I was unconscious. I woke up exhausted every day, and the thoughts continued until I had a few drinks, usually about ten minutes after I got out of bed. My negative thinking was my motivation to drink, but then drinking only made things much worse. This is part of what I see in your comments. And I was not interested in breaking the chain.

Bear in mind that it is your mind, your thoughts, that are taunting you. It isn't something from the outside. Even though it may not always seem that way. And this is good news. You can exert a measure of control over that which comes from within, but there's little you can do about some untamed, external force.

We all carry both healthy and unhealthy "parts." And, though it may sound surprising, we're not always eager to silence the unhealthy parts. One of the things we can do is to start to challenge the critical, negative thoughts, with the eventual goal to achieve not superiority over them, but to become indifferent towards them to the extent that we can actually tune them out, or at least minimize their influence over what we think and do. This takes a great deal of work and training, and we typically need help in accomplishing this state of being, but the help is there, and it does work.

I used AA, outpatient treatment and therapy to escape the disaster that was my own thinking. I needed to abandon many of my assumptions about myself, the world and other people. More important, I needed to start behaving, to start living, much differently than I had previously. Few people, myself included, are prepared to do such a thing, but I don't see another way out. Yet, and in my experience, very few people even attempt this kind of change.

All the things that people here comment about in terms of their lives improving, in making peace with themselves, in shedding symptoms of anxiety and depression, of living a better life...all true. But, yet again, the unhealthy part within us can be very powerful, and often keeps us stuck in an infinite loop of self-destruction, so great is our fear about not knowing what and who we'll be when we stop drinking and of taking back some measure of control over our own lives. If you want to scare the hell out of an alcoholic, just tell him he needs to make significant changes in order to heal, even when those changes have great potential for making things much better in that person's life.

The thing of it is, though the future often seems dark and frightening for many of us, the past is even worse

DolAndel

Thanks for posting, Noneever. Our brains tend to recoil in horror when we stop feeding them booze. Try not to get too get discouraged. Anna made a great point, our emotional regulation gets better over time as we sober up. Best wishes!