Sharing the Living Pain Realization

When I shared my living pain realization (see previous post) with someone who had lost both parents to booze, she decided to listen intently for a few minutes, until the idea hit home.  Now she won't speak with me, and if forced together in a social situation, avoids me at all costs.  I don't think the fact that we were drinking at the time was unrelated.

Living Pain Better Than No Pain

I was drinking and drinking, feeling pain, sorry, self-pity, and loathsome.  One day I realized something about my drinking, and it was very simple, perhaps even elegant, but extraordinarily ugly: I was holding on to my own dead Father by drinking.  Damn.  Trying not to feel the pain of his death by replacing it with drinking, somehow subconsciously allowing the drinking experience that I had been subject to as a child to intercede into my inability to grapple directly with my loss, and intensifying the drinking so that it, and only it, could provide my relief from utter terror and ambush.

Tip #7 - Friends

Friends are funny people, in that they've probably been people you have had drinks with, both bad and good.   So you have to try to navigate the friend aspect of not drinking with the least bit of pressure, and many good friends will allow you to do this, and support you.  But without drinking, the dynamics between you and your friends will probably change a little bit.  For one thing, you should have more energy, eventually, and that might lead you down different paths.  For another, you probably don't want to go hang out in bars all the time anymore.  Not that they aren't fun, but now they smell a whole lot worse than they did when you were drinking, and the idea of screaming over some loud music to have a mildly engaging conversation--after all, how engaging can it be when you're screaming, and what message would that send in a different context?--that could be had at a nice quiet locale instead.  So yeah, you might find yourself branching out to meet new friends, or re-establishing the types of relationships you have with current friends.

Escapism and Placebo

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What's Shameful About Alcohol Addiction?

Or, does it matter? These folks have decided that anonymity is primary, despite the fact that you'll "know" your fellow alcoholics quite personally over time, should you decide to keep coming back.  Of course, you also need to come to grips with your own reality, in a sense, to enter such a meeting, because you have to identify yourself as an alcoholic.  In this sense, your primary identity is obfuscated not by anonymity but by alcoholism; that, in essence, the drink is bigger than you.  You have to realize this to get to another plateau: that you are powerless against alcohol, so that you may, in turn, supplant your powerlessness against alcohol with subservience to a higher power. Mary Karr did it in Lit, and she did so persuasively (at least to me).  Others can do it too, but you have to swallow your own inability to be conceptually flexible about your identity.  Not an easy task. 

What Happens When You Stop Drinking?

You will feel like crap and need to alleviate this feeling.

If you have been heavily drinking for a long time, and your body is used to it, go see a doctor immediately.  Please. I'm not kidding about this one.  If you insist on not seeing a doctor, let a few good friends (at least one) or parent know that you're not drinking and you might experience physical problems, and make sure you have contact with them scheduled in for your next week.  If your issue is that you don't want to tell someone that you are stopping because you think you've hidden your drinking from them successfully, don't be so smug--they've thought about it, and you will do yourself a world of good by acknowledging it yourself and for reaching out

Trading Up Addictions - Are you Long or Short?

Want to get off beer, wine, whiskey and the occasional mouth wash tempt?

Yeah, well, me too.  But be careful!  Don't jump into something else that offers a substitute for your addiction in the most explicit way.  I'm responding to a recent commenter who spoke about good addictions, like watching a match of a team you've recently become addicted to.  I think that is a reasonable response, and cannot think of a way that it doesn't mimic alcohol.  You might have a craving for it, do it habitually, do it with other people, or need to go do it after a certain confrontation.  It might even provide a new community that could provide a useful alternative, or translate older relationships into new forms.

Tip # 6

Walk around a lot more than you used to.  I know this may sound strange if you don't do it already, or if you don't have a lot of places to walk around physically, but it is extraordinarily helpful for the early days of sobriety.  Walk for 30 or more minutes, enough so that the scenery changes a few times, and you will feel better and more able to tackle whatever task comes to you.

Heritage Drinking 2

So, how many of you suffered from an alcoholic influence, most likely a family member, in your lives before you started to abuse a substance of some sort, whether legal or not?  It is surprisingly, a great way to predict that you'll drink, or have some unhealthy addiction to something.  All I'm asking is the ability to recognize it and keep recognizing it so that I'll have some perspective in the future when waste and neglect and indolence comes knocking, because it used to be my best friend, and you know how familiar best friends are, even when they've been out of your life for some time.

Heritage Drinking

My Dad was an alcoholic.  I wouldn't have called him just a problem drinker, though he certainly was--just that, it wasn't all he was.  I don't honestly believe that he wanted to drink, but this also simply doesn't square with the fact that he chose to drink, to some limited degree, frequently throughout his life, with increasing intensity toward the end.  I also don't think that this meant that he chose alcohol over his life, although that was the eventual outcome.  So what is it exactly that made him drink?

Well, it certainly wasn't about his not wanting to drink, at least not outwardly, and not more than he wanted to see me or my Mother.  At some level in some patch of space, I know that the balance is between one drink, one drinking session, or one drinking night, and keeping his family.  All the while I know that he didn't want to lose us, I know that he rationalized each bout of boozing with some justification that, in the end, proved stiffly incorrect.  He did lose his family, house, job and life to booze.  He also lost his second wife.  I know, for the record, that he began to speak with a college friend about his drinking very early in his drinking and actual career.  He could maintain control, to some degree, but was desperately aware that he could not continue to maintain control.  He drank in excess that I cannot now imagine--well, that's not precisely true; I can imagine it, on some far off plane.  And, while I can't seem to muster enough energy to imagine drinking a 1.75 liter bottle of cheap vodka in one morning, I can and distinctly remember choosing to drink over and above other responsibilities that I should have been attending to instead.  I remember soliciting others to drink with me, and I remember some of the specific others that would form more often than not, meaning that I remember some of my friends for many years in this capacity.  Great, right?  That's probably a bit harsh, I know, but it is at least part of the reality that was my reality when I chose to drink instead of choosing to live some other available reality--not that I wasn't forced to live that other reality, and its increasingly negative slant (because of inattention and drinking)--only that I would drink, in part, because of the increasingly negative slant in the non-drinking reality.  Shame on me, I know, being conscious of both and too weak to drop the bottle and increase the uptake of platonic learning.  Yeah.  Still, I managed to get by.  But I think, looking back, like I said in the first post, my life changed because of it, and yes, I still feel, at some horrible and oft-non-disclosed level, incredible grief and shame for myself.  It could have been.  Could have.  What?  I can never know.  Not that I won't try to realize the potential in front of me now, and not that I cannot recognize the balance of limiting past nostalgia from future fuck up, just that some basic fact will always remain that I cannot undo.

I am also aware that having such a recognition is needed to move forward. To rebuild. I hope I'll have the energy this time around.

Tip #5

Find thirty seconds of stillness/silence, somehow, at some point. 

Mental State

Since we're talking about drinking, we're also talking about one's mental state, which is itself hard to get an accurate grip on generally, no less so because of the infusion of alcohol.  So, what is your mental state when drinking and drunk?  What is your mental state when sober, and the vital link, how does drinking change your normal mental state--does it exacerbate certain themes that don't quite swim to the surface typically, or does it reveal untethered personality traits, novel and jolting?  The answers are not explicit, and you shouldn't expect them to be, despite what I'm sure is a high desire for dependable definitions and succinctly cut categories.  One aspect of this relationship is that it changes over time--.  And that, as a good friend once said, it is a relationship, and not something lacking multiple dimensions, which is precisely the reason that you must, as a potential alcohol abuser (or that I have and attempt constant efforts) think about the relationship your sober self has to your drunk self, and how alcohol changes that black box over time as you or I gain experience with
drinking more regularly and more or less socially. Watch out for people that point out drinking as a simple activity, one that comes with no or little strings attached.  And, however much you desire to drink because it makes you more comfortable, watch out if your relationships  with other people start or end in a bottle.  I'm speaking here about romantic relationships as well, which I'll touch on briefly right now.  Booze may provide you at times superhuman abilities in the sack (at least you may think so), or the ability to charm endlessly, but that chimera will fade over time, and you'll need to be able to face the person you may or may not be physically, mentally, or emotionally entangled with both when you shine and when you're dull, when there's silence, when you disagree publicly, decide that certain friends are not worthy of attention, or when you feel neglected or alone.  I'm not saying that there's no place for a beer or a bottle of wine in relationships--not at all.  What  I'm getting at, though, is fundamentally based on how your relationship with alcohol can translate or be exported to your relationships overall, particularly if and when it is involved in the beginning stages of courtship or romance.  There's a reason not to drink, if you are looking.