Hollydoll

Ghostlight1

Don't be too hard on yourself. There's a guy on here now who wants to relapse after twenty eight years.
Cunning baffling, powerful. We must never let our guard down.

doggonecarl

And I'm sorry that none of the advice you received on your thread about major trigger kept you from drinking.

Guener

I have used alcohol as my reward system, right down to rewarding myself when things weren't so great looking outside, too.

It wasn't the decision that you now would not have wanted to make.

There are doing to be other times when it seems like it would be a good thing to pick up again. Do you have a plan in place to escalate how you deal with those feelings? SR has an app for your phone, assuming that you have a smartphone as most people do, and you can get on here to read or post at any time. It's much better to play the tape back before you drink than afterwards. There are other things to do first, try to keep them in mind.

I've relapsed in the past, I don't want to do that again, either. Good job to come here and to begin again, rather than just continue to drink. The latter just gets worse and worse, we both know that to be true.

Dust yourself off, you have some other really good habits going along with not drinking that you should be happy to continue, too.

Hollydoll

Gottalife

Well done on the 23 days. That is two more than I could manage before my last bender. When I broke out it was meant to be a couple of beers and home, it turned into a four day event.

I hesitate to use the word relapse as I wasn't actually doing anything to recover, aside from passively attending a few AA meetings. What I really managed was to extend the time between drinks from a couple of days (my usual pattern) to three weeks before I was overwhelmed again.

After that experience I got active in AA. I didn't think it would work for me but decided to give it a good bash for three months and see what happened. Notice I didn't say I decided to stay sober for three months - I knew that was beyond my power. I decided to go all in, steps, sponsor , meetings, fellowship. Afterall I had nothing to loose.

Much to my surpise my sponsor called me three months later to tell me I had three months up. I never knew because I didn't take a note of the day I stopped. I was amazed to have gone all that time without ever seriously thinking about a drink, and on top of that my whole life looked much better, I kept going and never drank again. All that happened over 39 years ago when I was 22 years old, and according to my doctor, unlikely to make 23.

DontRemember

If i drink it's not a relapse..It's an intentional choice that I chose to drink no matter the occasion or 'reason'. I had to dumb my stuff down and accept personal ownership..sunny? Vacation town? Others drinking?.. Nah..it's on me to either drink alcohol or not..

Dee74

Hi Hollydoll

I know you've struggled lately - your mom upset you, you were worried about your agoraphobia and now watching other people drink triggered you to do the same.

When I quit I drank for so many reasons everything was a trigger or a reason to drink.

I needed a really good strong action plan to stay sober because I knew left to my own devices or just trying to 'wing it' I'd end up drinking again as a default response.

https://www.soberrecovery.com/forums...very-plan.html (What exactly is a recovery plan?)

a good plan - focusing on changes and support - could deliver you a different outcome, no matter how many triggers you have

D

Hollydoll

DriGuy

Good. This relapse thing has always been a puzzle for me, but you got me thinking. Once I committed to life long sobriety, I quit. I still craved for a week or two, and after that, continued to have fleeting thoughts about how harmless it would be to have just one drink, but I never caved.

But it's not like I'm a stranger to relapse, because that's what my life was like for the last year of my drinking. The idea of getting to 23 days was unthinkable. My relapses occurred anywhere from 1 to 3 days after I "quit". So in recovery, I've always contended that commitment was the magic key, the one size that fits all, but in the back of my mind, I've had doubts about that perception. I still cling to it because it works for me, and I cling to it because I believe it works for others, even to those who attribute their success to other factors.

We hear stories of people that relapse at 23 days, 23 years, and 30 years. So is this a lack of commitment, and if so, how in the world did they make it that far if they never had commitment? That's a reasonable question, and I'd say, maybe they never had it, but more likely (and entirely within reason), they lost it. I think they may even claim they were committed, but I would add on to that, "Yeah, but not at the moment of the relapse." I just can't believe that a committed person will relapse. It's much easier for me to believe that rationalizations from our little alcoholic voice simply nullified the commitment. In other words, commitment wasn't there, at least not all the time, and certainly absent at the moment of relapse.

When I say that the idea of getting to 23 days was unthinkable (I would even own up to this when I really wanted to quit), it was because I never committed to such a thing. It was like I would be OK with never drinking again, as long as I could have an occasional drink when it was perfectly OK. But when I got to AA I made the commitment, not because there is something magical about AA. It was just one of their little rules, and not being a total contrarian, I said, "What the heck, I'll accept that one little rule. I can always back out if I hate it."

So why does our commitment fail us? Here's my 25 cents worth of psychology. Commitment is just a word, which makes it a playground for semantics, and our alcoholic voice thrives in semantic playgrounds. We can make commitments. We can talk about them, but how deeply beyond language do we actually feel them? And in recovery this is the level we are playing at, not at the level of the printed page in a forum, the printed pages of the Big Book, or any other document that offers a solution. There's degrees of commitment. It's a feeling, and subject to degrees of intensity.

Treating commitment as a word rather than a feeling is where one weakness in our recovery may thrive, but there is an opposing force to commitment that can be equally as strong, and it is indeed strong. It's complacency, and it to comes in degrees and affects us at that deeper feeling level where we play the recovery game. It's nurtured by our AV which waits for periods in which we are especially vulnerable, where our vigilance is relaxed, where we feel happy confident and without a care:


Commitment must be supported by unwavering vigilance. Is vigilance part of your semantic interpretation of commitment? If it's not, are you really committed? If you relax in either of these, you can relapse. And it's so easy to relax. Your AV is constantly pleasantly encouraging you quit being such a type A personality, and to lighten up and relax, but it's just a trick we play on ourselves. You can and will eventually relax and learn vigilance at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive, and the more second nature your vigilance becomes, the more you will relax.

Obladi

Holly, I'm sorry that you drank again. You didn't let us down, only yourself. I've been there more times than I can count and understand how terribly frustrating that can be. I always tended to hide away when I did that, so props to you for coming back right away.

Do you see how your first sentence contradicts the next? What does that mean, "as long as possible?" I'm not trying to point a finger at you, just wondering what that means to you. I think DriGuy's post is a really good way to frame the question.

You can do this.

O

DriGuy

That's what jumped out at me, and what caused me to get so lengthy and analytical in my discussion. It was a very good paraphrase of my own precommitment thought: " I would be OK with never drinking again, as long as I could have an occasional drink when it was perfectly OK (or if I really needed it)." Logically this makes no sense. Maybe there is a logical fallacy that it fits under, but to me it's just gibberish. Never-the-less it's what I was thinking, and it prevented me from getting out of my spiral.

Hollydoll

ConfusedGuy

I just want to say thank you for your honesty.

I am only 2 week sober, so I dont know so much as some people here. But I know people here are so supportive. I think maybe I not have made two weeks without this!

Just keep posting, stay connected with SR.

Hollydoll

Gottalife

The first 30 days is longer than the first 30 years, at least that is how it seems. I could also have used the phrase "as long as possible". Why? Because it was evidence based in that all my experience to that point indicated I would fail at this. I always had before.

It took a certain amount of faith that what the members of AA told me had some truth to it, and perhaps I could benefit. Perhaps I treated it as a scientific experiment. The hypothesis was that if I did (exactly) what they did, I would get what they got. If I did something different, I would likely get different results.

Commitment, as DriGuy said, is key. What would that look like? A combination of desire and action? A passage in the big book illustrates it quite well. "Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program".

I had no basis to believe in my own ability to do this, but I had just enough faith to try an approach which had worked with others, and would you believe it? It worked for me too.

DriGuy

It's certainly more intense, more important, and a bigger achievement, I think. I've haven't had a drink for so long that sometimes my sobriety date comes and goes, and I don't even realize it. I'll never drink again. That's just my life now. It's comforting for sure, but it's not as dramatic as my first 30 days, or even my first 15 days when sometimes I would sit back in stunned amazement with a kind of manic pride that I had gone that long and could feel that good about myself. To me 30 days is a big deal, especially when it's accompanied by knowing where you're going, a feeling that was totally new to me in the context of my drinking.