daveglass1

Im new so humour me please. I see that is widely held that once you reach a position of sobriety , and I suggest that that is a subjective position , you are in recovery. This recovery shall be never ending for you were once addicted to a poison that was foisted upon you at some point by differing means and accepted for a variety of reasons.
We therefore treat alcohol addiction differently to illness , even life threatening illnesses. For example - if I had stents fitted to widen an artery after a heart attack - would I never be considered recovered as a result of the intervention. Or a broken leg that gets pinned and Im back playing tennis in months - is the leg not recovered ?
Do I assume that as there is a mental aspect to alcohol addiction that it is impossible to ever recover?
Your thoughts would be appreciated as usual.
Regards
Dave 🤠

columbus

I think it's more a matter in being in recovery of your soul, your spirit, your mind, your body, your relationships, yer money, your family, your....

;-)

Anna

Being in recovery just describes the journey of my life. It's how I live my life.

D122y

dave,

for me...recovery is a term used to remind.

The addiction is for life. Folks regret relapse after decades of sobriety.

Addiction is a mental illness because booze causes irreversible brain damage.

The way I understand it...As I healed over the last 2 years, my brain had to rewire around parts of the brain that are dead forever. Those parts are in the frontal lobe. Areas that used to provide happiness. That is why I was a dull bore for a while after I quit.

The promise is continued healing or nearly immediate return to the hell I have left. That is what SR has taught me.

It is sort of faith based. I am into that so it works for me.

Booze is a highly addictive neurotoxin that alters our central nervous system. imo...folks that drink more than a few drinks a week are addicted for life.

Booze is govt sanctioned drug that quells the masses and offers billions of dollars in taxable goods and services from a large population from their cradle to grave.

Thanks.

Dee74

Hi Dave - there are many different ways of looking at it - each to their own.

For me recovery is something more than being simply sober or abstinent - it's about my life as a whole as well.

I don't mind the term recovering as to me that signifies there's always more miles to travel on my journey..and it (usually) keeps me humble.

Disease or not? doesn't matter to me..I addressed my problem and I'm not suffering any more

D

Andante

Brains don't heal in quite the same way as broken legs do, so that's actually not a great analogy.

Imagine instead that you spent years repeatedly breaking your leg by hitting it compulsively with a hammer, over and over again, because you found it oddly pleasurable. Finally one day your leg was such a mess that you had enough and called it quits with the hammer. Your leg might heal over time and regain most of its functionality, but if you were to resume hitting it with a hammer, it would give way again very quickly. That's kind of how alcoholism works.

For some of us, that compulsion to resume hitting the leg with a hammer has a weird way of recurring unexpectedly no matter how long we've been away. Being "in recovery" means taking constructive action on a regular basis to make sure we never give into that compulsion. It becomes a lot easier to manage with time and practice, but yes, it's essentially a lifetime endeavor.

PurpleKnight

I think there's the initial recovery period, as in how do I stop drinking? how do I make that work? as for me that took a lot of energy and time to just make Sobriety happen, daily effort, a plan and the execution of that plan over and over again, and that was due to the mental nature of alcohol, I wasn't healing anything, I was changing my outlook of everything I had ever known up to that point.

But there comes a point when Sobriety becomes the new habit, the new routine, when life starts to happen again, and we can look forward to building a new future on the strong foundation of Sobriety, it becomes different in many ways.

Once I focused solely on not doing something, alcohol, but now I focus what can I do, in Sobriety!!

daveglass1

I do read them all when Ive got a bit of spare time. I live in a little bubble of limited human contact. Great to know theres so many bright people out there.
Regards
Dave 🤠