PeteGibbons

Great suggestion - thanks. Just did this - was a great excersize... obviously the Cons of drinking far outweigh the Pros for me.

rascalwhiteoak

Welcome Pete. Someone asked me once why I quit drinking; my answer was simply "moderation had begun to escape me." I had always been a drinker/weekend warrior, so I don't know how "moderate" it ever was.

As some live hand-to-mouth financially, I was living hand-to-mouth emotionally I suppose, and all it took was one bad life event to push the ol' alcohol use disorder into hyperdrive. Definitely be aware the risks involved.

Broncosys

I have to leave the "forever" thoughts out of the equation or it starts to loom. It is so much more peaceful and makes so much more sense when I conclude that I can always drink tomorrow if I want to. I'm just not going to drink today. That's it. I finite time period I can deal with. I am nearly two months in and the "forever" ******** my AV squaks at me on occasion is fading away. Just today is all I need to worry about. Ever again. A comfort to me.

WaterOx

Health was the main reason I've gone down the abstinence road. I started to have this right side ache under my rib cage, exactly where my liver is. Despite numerous blood tests and ultrasound, my doctor says everything looks fine.

Nonetheless, it really scares me.

If it were not for that, I might still be happy go lucky, drinking my 1.5 bottles of wine every day. Like you, I have always been a low key drunk. I like to think I never got very drunk, at least not to make many incidences. Just a constant low level buzz......all day every day.

In some ways I'm glad the symptoms manifested as they did. It would only be a matter of time I got a DUI or worse. More important, alcohol was consuming my life. Forget health and DUIs....I sat down and crunched some very "sobering" numbers and figured that at a very MINIMUM, alcohol was costing me 3 hours every day. That is 21 hours a week. That is a part time job, my friend.

What would you do with an extra 21+ hours a week?

JustTony

That’s an excellent way of looking at it. I drank seven days a week and from about 6pm to 1am on average. That is seven hours a day for seven days a week. That’s 49 hours per week.

OMG.

AtomicBlue

Pete, another thing to consider. Who’s in control? You or the alcohol? Do you find it harder and harder to wait for people to go to bed before you drink? Or for you it sounds like it’s getting harder to stop by 1AM. Do you spend a decent amount of timing planning when you get to drink? Maybe trying to decide how much you can drink today. You might have an important meeting tomorrow should try to cut back a little, but you’re for sure going to drink...


Have you started putting a few liquor stores into the rotation yet? Can be a little embarrassing buying so much alcohol all the time.


My drinking habits were similar to yours. I would drink every 3rd day. Try to wait for family to sleep. Try to limit to 10 drinks on a work night. It was starting to become very hard for me to go 3 days without drinking. I made a couple of attempts to quit on my own and lasted 2 weeks. It started becoming difficult for me to squeeze life in with my drinking. Couldn’t recover from hangovers like in my 20’s.


As MindfulMan posted, this is how I related to step 1:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol (I concluded that I really had no control anymore)—that our lives had become unmanageable. (I could no longer do the things I loved, be the person I wanted to be and continue drinking. One of those had to go)


Quitting drinking (forever) will probably be one of the best decisions you’ll ever make. It was for me.

Eddiebuckle

Alcoholism is a progressive disease. If you can look back over the years of drinking and see a trend of needing more alcohol to "do" what you want from it, you may be an alcoholic. If you struggle to "stay stopped" - that's another flag … non-alcoholics don't need to manage their drinking, they simply don't if they choose not to. Non-alcoholics don't have health issues from their drinking, because they don't drink the quantities that would cause them to occur.

When I ultimately got sober, I harbored the same questions. It took a long time for me to accept that I could no longer drink. For me, I think it wasn't so much uncertainty of whether I was an alcoholic that I resisted, but rather the prospect of not drinking. To everyone around me, drinking was the problem but to me it was the solution - and giving up "the solution" was a scary prospect.

FeelingGreat

Welcome Pete. If you can make it through the first year you'll feel so much happier you won't want to go back.
I suggest you set a goal of 12 months to start with so your focus is longer. Make sure you have lots of other drinks around the house, and snacks. Try deep breathing for times when cravings hit.

Mac4711

The ‘forever’ part is difficult, hence the ‘one day at a time’ or setting a specific date.
When I stopped, I did not have a specific timeframe in mind. All I knew was that I could no longer go on living the way I did. After a couple of months I decided I was going to do this for six months or so. Once I got there, I added another six months. After a year the prospect of never drinking again was no longer scary - on the contrary, what a relief it is to know that I will wake tomorrow and remember what I did the day before!

MLD51

I was afraid of the forever word at the beginning. Deep down, I knew it needed to be forever, but I didn't think about that much when I was just starting out. I just decided to do one day at a time. After a few months the idea of forever didn't seem like a big deal anymore. When I was about a year in, someone I know as a fairly good acquaintance noticed I hadn't been drinking. He asked me if it was forever. I happily said, "that's the plan." It felt good to say that.

And as for step one - that is an AA thing. (Full disclosure, I do AA, but also add other modalities to my plan.) But even if you don't do AA, it's a very important step. I think it's pretty near impossible to quit without a full surrender to the fact that you do not have full control over your drinking anymore. The word powerless bothers a lot of people. We don't like to admit we are powerless. But in the case of alcohol, I was truly powerless. That does not mean I am powerless in other ways. I'm only powerless over alcohol if I take that drink. Then all bets are off. And then life becomes unmanageable.

PeteGibbons

Thanks, RascalWhiteOak. I think I might use that explanation when asked.

P.S. Looks like we are both fans of Office Space!

Fearlessat50

Hi Pete, I’m just now catching up on this thread. Glad you have come here.

I was like you. While I was heavily drinking, I was a high functioning career professional, mom and wife. Nothing horrible happened when I decided to stop. Actually I had several close calls which gave me an incentive to stop for a while. But I always went back and forth, every time stopping because of another close call (a fender bender which could have been a DUI or worse, a big mistake at work, a little slip down the stairs, vomiting blood, etc). Every time I went back to drinking after a period of abstinence, my drinking got worse with more blackouts and scary things. Every subsequent time I stopped, my withdrawals were worse (Kindling/Paws).

My final stop was a high bottom (or was it?) I woke up one day with the worst hangover I had ever felt, the lowest point of my life emotionally ever, and severe pain and tingling in my hands and feet (likely alcoholic neuropathy). The latter symptom lasted for 3 months after quitting. I thought it would never go away.

I stopped trying to answer the questions “am I an alcoholic” or “what is an alcoholic”. Why define it? It doesn’t matter. The term alcoholic, in my opinion, is archaic. It is t even used in medical field anymore. It’s been replaced with “Alcohol Use Disorder” which is now part of the DSM of psychiatric disorders. You can search this and find an online self test.

The fact that you are questioning your drinking signifies a problem. Most folks who develop a problem will not be able to return to moderate drinking because of the brain chemical changes that happen once the scales have been tipped. Maybe moderation can be accomplished initially, but not likely long term.

Someone here said that we are like pickles. Once we’ve become pickled, we can no longer go back to being a cucumber. I think it’s so true!

It doesn’t matter to me anyway because now that I’ve been sober for a while, I love my sober life and wouldn’t want to go back to even a small amount of alcohol even if I could. I am much healthier and happier.

Hope to see more of you here. This is a great support community!

Horatio48

Six weeks in here. Forever is a mighty long time. I can't get my head round it. Still romanticising liquor a bit. Dreams of a long flight where I get nicely drunk over the course of eight hours. Even imagining exactly what I would drink (2 champagnes, 2 reds, 2 whites, 2 stiff single malts). The problem is the ending. The ending is not good. I think it's trying to recapture something that I can never have. Alcohol without bad consequences. But it's hard to say goodbye forever. To something that you have loved. I know I am in danger territory when I feel I have said au revoir but not goodbye. In that mode, I said none today.

PeteGibbons

To address some of these questions: Sometimes I was in control; sometimes not. I was not consistently in control. I would have 1 or 2 or 3 drinks prior to family going to bed, but yes, secretly I was sometimes anxious for them to go to bed so I could have more without them seeing me.

Yes I have at least 5 different liquor stores within 1 mile of my house so it was natural to use multiple stores. But you are right that I was self-conscious about buying alcohol - hoping I would not bump into anyone I knew.

FreeOwl

How would you like to turn your above statements into something like:

"I have a wonderfully successful life, am present and alive in my marriage and career, don't have to worry about 'managing embarrassing incidents' and feel my life growing, deepening, expanding in ways that I am grateful and joyful for"?

What would the YOU who lived those words look like?
How would the YOU who honored that vision live?
What things would you let go of....
More importantly, what things, behaviors, practices, values would you embrace.

It has been my experience that it's not only possible - but incredibly powerful - to re-author our own story by envisioning a different version of ourselves as sober, present, alive.

You can!!

lessgravity

Re moderation - those who need to can't, those who can don't need to.

dwtbd

Consciously not applying the 'never' standard, suggests that the Cons of drinking may outweigh the Pros of drinking, but they do not yet outweigh the Cons of Not drinking.

Something is affecting that calculation to keep the possibility of more booze in the future because the Cons of Not drinking weigh heavily.

PeteGibbons

Wow! That is an extremely perceptive and challenging comment; you really made me really think with that one. Thank you.

I do believe that my cons for drinking do outweigh my cons for not drinking.

My main Con for Not Drinking is around my fear of missing out on some of the good times I had while drinking (e.g., tailgating before football games, drinking beers while golfing, and other such social events that I enjoyed that always had involved heavy drinking). I am an introverted person when sober. My main concern is whether or not I will be able to figure out how to have fun sober like I used to have when drinking. This is probably why I was resisting to accept the "forever" part of quitting. But I am trying not to worry about that for now.

doggonecarl

If all the good times you'll miss out out on involve drinking, then it's drinking you'll miss, not the event.

And that's fine to admit. For those of us who quit while we still enjoyed drinking, yes, we missed it. But that in itself is a delusion...that alcohol and drinking was integral to "having fun" or "enjoying" ourselves.

There is life after sobriety, and a fun-filled life.

I couldn't have said the same thing about life after sustained alcoholism.

least

When I quit drinking, I wondered how I'd fill my time sober. Turns out my time is filled with the little things that make life good. Don't worry about missing out. It takes a while to get used to a sober life, but waking up feeling good every morning is a great incentive to stay sober.