Pat Moore Foundation: Guest Post

Here's a guest post from Recovery Rob at the Pat Moore Foundation:

It’s true what they say in the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous, or any alcohol and drug treatment center for that matter – “If you don’t take that first drink, you can’t get drunk.” It seems so basic, so easy, but yet it’s so incredibly hard to stay away from alcohol. Our disease just doesn’t want us to succeed – plain and simple.

Whether we’re newly sober, have some serious clean time, or maybe just considering if we are alcoholics we often find ourselves having a conversation in our heads about how we can just have one drink this time. Just one drink that will take edge off or help make a situation better than it is. But then time and time again we wake up the next day or days later to discover that that one drink turned in to many. We try drinking only certain beers, or only hard liquor, or wine, or only on the weekends, or some other promise that the future waits to stomp all over.

The problem is that when we worked go-arounds to prevent ourselves from getting and staying sober we work hard with the mental and physical gymnastics of keeping what we do, how much we drink, and where we go a secret that it’s just too much to handle. We might even consider taking that ‘needed’ break to prove, “See, I can do it. I can stop any time I want!” But then again, we are right back where we left off – drinking heavily and making our life more difficult than it needs to be.

So, instead of working hard to discover the right combination of what works best – four drinks, on Tuesday, at “such and such” bar, and with our “so and so” friend – we need to remember that we just don’t need to pick up that first drink.

Again, it’s a simple concept and oh so hard at the same time. But you know what? It’s helped millions of people stay clean every day because no matter how much clean and sober time they have they still take their sobriety one day at a time.

Recovery Rob BIO

Recovery Rob is a 48-year-old man who has more than twenty years of sobriety, whose drugs of choice at one time were alcohol and drugs, and he has worked in and around the field of addiction for more than 30 years. Recovery Rob hopes to reach out and continue to help others who work through their process of addiction and recovery. Recovery Rob is a professional writer who has published two novels and is currently working on his third. He has been writing and working as Pat Moore Foundation’s premiere blogger and content writer, which helps keeps Pat Moore Foundation’s drug treatment addiction and recovery blog top-rated.

Over-Confidence

Confidence is actually a fairly amorphous trait.  You know when people are confident. You think you know.  But their internal world may not coincide with what you think you know about them.  Likewise, I could know when I'm confident, and also be cripplingly insecure at times.

Anyway, the point here was supposed to be that drinking obviously leads to over-confidence, but that over-confidence can be particularly insidious. At its most extreme, it is delusion.  Without any confidence, though, deep depression takes over.  So I no longer have a post.  I am not the right person to ask such things!

3 Years

About 2 days ago I passed my 3 year mark.

I've been sober what seems like a long time.

More changes are potentially on the way (good changes).

I'm positive the hardest part of getting sober is the getting sober part.  Staying sober is difficult.  There's not doubt about it.   But the transition to long term sobriety is in a sense harder, because it jumbles up social circles, body chemistry, and everything else that seemed normal.

Time's Not Your Friend -

This is from a Tom Wait's song.

I keep it running on loop in my head.  Almost to my own annoyance.  I've always been that way with music, that is, almost playing what I will internally, back to every little snare catch and bass thrum.  I'm not saying this is a blessing.  It took a few conversations to realize that it wasn't totally normal, i.e. most other people don't have constant playback of sorts going on.  And anyway.

I wanted to pontificate in the medium intellectual realm regarding time's friendliness or lack of friendliness.  I don't think I will. The dice are still flying too wildly for me to make a call.

Day 5 Sober -

Here's a recent comment (below) that may represent a good reason to quit!  I think when your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife asks you to get sober (for however long), it is a pretty solid indication that you have a problem.

And, unfortunately, "proving" to them that you can get sober for a bit doesn't entitle you to go out and get drunk.  It is nice motivation, of course, but it pays to step back and understand why that's motivation, and how circular the logic is.

"Day 5.

Trying to see how long I can go without drinking. I'm 31 years old drinking since 16. I never thought I had a problem drinking. I usually hold my alcohol pretty well almost to the point people do not even know I'm drunk but myself. I was a heavy drinker drinking all those years I had a tolerance for it. My boyfriend gave me a 90 day challenge. I personally just want to see if I can make it to 4 weeks. Wish me luck!"

The Weirdest Weirdo vs. The Viscous Psychopath

To me weirdos are not dangerous.  Psychopaths, though, are.  What's the difference?

Weirdos are predictable.  To a fault.  They don't fit in.  And we know they won't.  They, like nerds, or geeks, have strong preferences that don't match mainstream commercial preferences.

Because comfort in groups really can be indicated by how similar to each other we are, weirdos make us uncomfortable in their atypicality in one or two arenas.

Psychopaths, though, well, they're just plain manipulative as hell.  There is no "knowing" them, and there never will be any knowing them.  They too have preferences that don't match commercial homogenized preferences that might otherwise indicate group belonging.  They are self-involved and strategic, importantly, even in highly personal relationships.  Highly strategic.

But to what end, I ask?  Psychopath?  To what end?  And they will not answer, whereas a weirdo or a nerd would just tell you straight up.

If the question is: What would you do if if you didn't have to do anything else, weirdos and nerds will answer it with something you might not.  Psychopaths would answer it with whatever they think you would.  Much more dangerous, in my view.

Freedom and Suicide

For those of you who have contemplated it--or contemplated contemplating it, at one level of abstraction--there is one sense in which the prospect of suicide is freeing.  It is this.  If you got to a place where you felt that it was all worthless, worthless enough to throw it away, then that stuff that was so heinous as to be worth throwing it all away, must in some way also be worthless, and so.  So it can be a kind of reset, this thinking, this process, this contemplation, though I don't urge it on anyone, and certainly don't want it for the sake of clarity.

Just sayin: if it is worth ending it all, nothing matters.  If nothing matters  . . .  it might not be worth ending it all.

Breaking In The Long View

Sobriety is for me now a long haul game.  No longer quite fashionable or trendy in the sense of being new and exciting and worthy of gossip.  I don't need to go proclaim it.  I don't need to go figure it out.  I have other stuff to figure out.  I'm working through major regret issues, not all related to alcohol, though alcohol fueled many of the regret-based activities.

Regret is a horror.

Yes friends: I had a bad week.  It wasn't  that the events of the week were tied to the experience of the week, either; it was, instead, that somehow I've been experiencing huge waves of regret over the course of my mostly I-can't-complain life.

Being The Best.

The swill of narcissism and drama is cheap.  Its cheapness is likewise seductive.  It's not woken by back pain at four a.m., nor by the sudden scampering of large roaches or what might be large roaches in the still heat of insomniac trill.  No.  It is smooth and clean and the purest sense of authenticity one can grieve for this side of the divide, whatever that means, and it is isolation, simple and sweet like a root beer float at age eight.

It is the capacity to sail excuses into the ether and buy them; because it is cheap, it doesn't matter what you waste.  Cheap means you don't have to give up much to make it go.  And because it is cheap, well, unfortunately, or fortunately, maybe it isn't quite as fungible as I thought it used to be.

It is not competing against singularly minded machine-people and being beat without excuses.  It is certainly not acknowledging a simple fact, and letting the simple fact flail into the wind with new found freedom.

I am not the best.  Not the smartest, or brightest, or best looking, or most popular, or most clever, or funniest.

And I am not the best even with heavy lifts of effort.

And that's because effort cannot be forged from the desire to be the best.  Ego-driven effort does a lot, but it is always somehow lacking.

And this is a simple truth that I've known conceptually since I was into Krishnamurti when I was like 11 years old and graduated from The Hobbit and before Stephen King in my early teen years.

The truth is that winning because of ego driven effort is false, hallow, chimera.  Building a life and having a vision for how things should be means a lot more than being best.  It means being able to stomach other people being the best.  It means being able to say "slow down, too fast for me."

1) Work on something that cannot be mastered (music, language, books)

2) Associate with people who have a bigger conception of the world than Brooklyn pizza and late-night drinking

3) Stick to standards when they are hard to stick to

4) Forgive someone for no reason other than forgiveness, and act selflessly in future relations with that person without once bringing up the forgiveness necessary to partake

5) Forget about large glorious visions of what could be.  Work on practical detail-oriented steps for what is.