Freshstart1111

For all who quit...Did any of your friends/family express concern for you? Was there anything that they said or did that influenced you quitting? How can we help as concerned friends and family?

GroundhogDay

My husband was concerned, but that is not what got me to quit for good after a couple of tries. I woke up one day feeling nauseated along with my hangover and just thought to myself "this is stupid." And that was it! That one thought.

Vino88

Because 3 hours of heavy drinking left me with 3 days of suffering. Puking, shaking, sweating, headaches, racing heart ... I literally became afraid of alcohol.

Lpg

Freshstart yes my mother & sister expressed a great deal of concern, they got alot of phonecalls from my partner when I was on a bender to come get me & help him.
​​​​​Poor guy had to put up with alot on his own I'm glad he had their help eventually.
I used to think my partner was controlling me by telling me not to drink but when other family members where 'in the know' about my drinking it helped me see i was so wrong.

wholeself

I was sick and tired of that person. The person who didn't remember the night before. The person who was sad the whole next day as I was full of regrets. I also want my health to stay in tact. I want to be with my family for as long as possible. I also can't handle the brain fog that happens for days after a drinking weekend. I want to be 110% at my work. I could go on and on. I just know there is something better out there for me!

Mizz

I've tried to come up with some knowledgeable in depth answer for days now
Its pretty simple.

Mizz and Alcohol= Muy Mala
Mizz and no alcohol = Asombrosa

prettiekittie

I was 30 and I quit because I was pretty sure I was dying. I had gone on an epic bender after several years of binge drinking and blacked out (normal) and broke my nose. Several friendships ended during that time and I my body ached constantly. I wanted to die. I probably would have if I had kept it up.

MissPerfumado

My father (recovering alcoholic himself) would, every now and again when I visited him, broach the subject. I told him I was fine and my drinking was under control.

My mother had gently said something years and years before, about the fact that I seemed to drink a lot. I had brushed it off.

No-one else said anything that I can remember. In my social group, drinking heavily was normalised. I also did my worst drinking alone at home.

I don't think any one of my friends or family could have influenced me to stop. If someone at work had taken me aside and said something, that might have pulled me up. Even so, I doubt it. Reflecting on it, I would say that if you really want to say something, Freshstart, make it hard-hitting and strike at the denial aspect of drinking. Let the alcoholic in your life know that they aren't getting away with it. Let them know that others can see they have a problem. And leave it that. It may or may not have an effect.

BornSurvivor

Not really i hid it pretty well but my parents were ready to cut me off because I kept asking them for money and missing important family togethers due to me being too hungover from partying night before.

WaterOx

My quitting alcohol revolves around health but just as important I know I can't go on like this in life and grow at the same time.

duane1

I quit because I started to feel an ache in my liver area. Still took me 6 months to quit from the pain starting. Before that happened, I wasn’t even contemplating quitting even though my life was falling around me fast.

BornSurvivor

Yeah I used to get that too. It was scary. Since I quit I've never gotten it once!

MythOfSisyphus

I'm a chef and in the restaurant culture drugs and alcohol are rampant. I probably couldn't have gotten away with my drinking if I did a different job. There's really no peer pressure to get sober since everyone I worked with drank every night. Of course, as I got older they stayed the same age. At some point it's silly to drink like a 21 year old when you're 41. I could see it in my face, I could feel it in my body. There's no other way to describe it than to say I felt like I was dying. I think what really got me to decide to stop was that feeling that I'd become a slave to the bottle. In the past I at least thought that I wanted to drink, that I was making a choice. Eventually though I watched the clock with a sense of foreboding and dread; even if I had decided in the morning that I wouldn't drink today the pressure would build as I watched the cutoff to buy get closer and closer. Ultimately I would always cave and make a run for booze even though I hated myself for it. Drinking was crowding out everything in my life; friends, family, girlfriends, etc. You couldn't count on me at all, I always made it to work but if you called me more than two hours after I got off I was already drunk. Life was passing me by as I sat on the sidelines drunk, watching it go.

I'm not sure that there was one single pivotal moment that made me stop. It was just the accumulation of decades of misery. When my dad died in 2011 I kind of went off the rails and my drinking got way worse. There was a span of a couple weeks where I just couldn't ignore the signs anymore. I summarized the epiphany in my sig line, but I realized that I had maybe two or three decades of life left in me, or a few more years of drinking. But not both, it was going to be one or the other.

George Carlin once said that in the beginning of drinking and drugging there's very little pain and a lot of pleasure, but that as time goes on it's a little pleasure and a lot of pain. At age 43 the math had flipped and it wasn't worth the pain of the physical symptoms and the misery of being enslaved by the bottle. At that point the choice became pretty clear.

Sober45

I quit because I had reached the point where I felt sobriety can't possibly be any worse than the self-loathing and anxiety I was experiencing. In my drinking days, the thought of being sober made me cringe because it looked like a void of nothingness where I would be left miserable all the time. Thank God I was wrong...sobriety is wonderful.

FlyingDutchMan

It became apparent to me that I kept making promises to myself and I kept breaking them. Over and over again.

Surrendered19

I quit because I was nearly dead. And one morning the small lit coal in the deep reptilian part of my brain told me that I still had life left to live, but this was it. I could never prove it, but I have a deep conviction that if I had drank that day, I would have died that night or very soon after. I am grateful for every day.

snitch

My last drink turned into a 10 day binge where I was drinking from the moment I opened my eyes till I passed out only to come to and start drinking again. I was lucky to survive it because I had a fall into the basement of a flat and could easily have killed myself or the very least broken my back or neck. I got up , went gome and washed down a xanax tablet with a large wine to knock me out for the night!! When I came out of that binge I had no idea what day it was, I had spent days in blackout and I was black and blue all over but I was alive and I knew if I didnt get help and stop this madness I was going to die and I realised I didnt want to die, I wanted to live and I wanted to live sober.

I havent had to pick up a drink since then. 2 years and 8 months ago ODAAT. Truly grateful

🙏♥️🙏

BornSurvivor

If you look at these posts, including mine, it is absolutely insane we kept drinking after what alcohol had done to us and our lives. Obviously we have a disease or whatever you want to call it but it's a real eye opener these posts. Excuse my language but Alcohol treats us like **** and frankly that is putting it mildly.

That's why they say in AA continued drinking can lead to insanity because it truly is insane to continue to drink after all the damage it does yet we do it or did it.

Addiction really is a crazy disease. Thank God for this site and AA because, for me at least, active addiction was a living hell. But I wouldn't change a thing. It made me the person I am today and I'm proud to be me.

Keep fighting guys sobriety is so worth it.

msl999

I wanted to trust myself again.

DrunkenDonuts

Sick of not being trusted.

Sick of worrying that I'd do something stupid like drink and drive (again).

Sick of spending all my money on alcohol.

Sick of being sick.