Alcoholism is ruining my life

Amen!

get_married wrote:

Become a Christian ... live well.

John 3:16

John 3:16New International Version (NIV)

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Romans 10:9

Romans 10:9New International Version (NIV)

9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

The only small minded person is you.

AA works for me. Sober 7 years, 10 months, 20-something days. I don't actually count the days--just know my anniversary is late next month. And I haven't been to an AA meeting this year. I think I went to one last year to get my 7-year coin but the meeting I chose didn't hand out coins. I might have got my 6-year coin. Don't remember.

At the start, though, I was in in-patient rehab for two weeks. Then a six-week intense outpatient program (IOP) as well as 90 AA meetings in 90 days. Carried a book to every one to get a signature attesting to my presence.

I miss AA--wish I could go regularly, but my schedule is pretty busy. I understand that it's not a great fit for everyone, though. And to be honest, I was pretty much fed up with drinking when I quit. My problem was I was scared to quit--afraid I'd get the DTs or something, so I needed rehab to cope with the withdrawal. It's possible that I could have finished rehab and not gone to AA and been fine. That said, I had a lot of fears and so much sh1t to unburden the sharing really helped.

I was ready to quit, though. First kid on the way, sure disaster looming if I didn't get sober. Maybe you aren't ready. Hard to be sure.

Sounds like my brothers life, with some variations. Not sure how old you are, but better to quit now before you end up like he did. After decades of ETOH abuse, failed marriage, lost jobs, disowned by his kids, etc, etc, he hung himself at age 58. Don't be him.

Don't stop drinking all at once, you could literally die. No joke

I was able to reduce the amount I drank every day by having one non-alcoholic beer between every real beer. I also started to choose real beers that had a lower ABV. This reduced the amount of alcohol I consumed to one half of what I was drinking. It's not a cure. It's just one small step to drinking less. Good luck

vivitrol

After 10 years trying all the usual, and in my opinion idiot ways to quit (AA, etc.), I read about Naltrexone and Campral, swallowed my pride, went to a damn shrink, got a prescription for both, and changed my life. I've read it doesn't work for everyone, but within a week on Naltrexone, any desire to drink was magically gone. That awful internal debate running around my head EVERY day for 25 years (some of you know what I'm taking about), was gone. Booze became an afterthought, something I could rationally look at and make a rational decision about - which is always No. Amazing stuff, I HIGHLY recommend trying Naltrexone, and if that doesn't work, try Campral.

The Button Downed Mind of....

Great stufff.

I am almost five years sober thanks to AA and highly recommend it. If you would like to talk, let me know and I would be happy to discuss via email or the phone. There is hope, my friend.

Try this and also see if you can get in to a medication assisted program with an addiction medication specialist. Vivitrol might work for you and there are other alternatives such as gabapentin or acamprostate. This will only work if you do this in conjunction with intensive addiction therapy. The judgmental posters earlier in this thread know very little about addiction, Keep trying!

I wouldn't recommend an addictive substance to take instead of an addictive substance….thats not helpful

I work in addiction medicine. excellent recommendations! I highly recommend as well.

Fortunately I can't relate to this because I don't like alcohol. But I have seen how devastating it can be. Two friends of mine in Las Vegas drank themselves to early death. They would sit in the sportsbooks all day and take one free drink after another from the cocktail waitresses. Only recently have the casinos changed the policy on that to some degree, requiring tickets to get a drink.

I also have a sister who married an occasional wine drinker. It became more than occasional. They used to kid me about not participating with them, as they celebrated New Year's or eventually anything. He had a serious health condition and was told to stop drinking. He did. My sister could not. He tried every remedy he could think of, including sending my sister to the famous clinic in Mississippi where Tiger Woods went for sex addiction. That facility is hugely expensive and treats addiction of all types. My brother in law tricked my sister into believing she was going to visit a friend. Instead there was someone on the plane who took her to the addiction facility. She stayed three months. Instead of a huge help she felt insulted and betrayed, never letting him hear the end of it. She relapsed lest than a month later. He moved out and eventually divorced her.

My sister still hasn't gotten over it while he has happily remarried. She got the house in the divorce but subsequently lost the house since all she did for years subsequently was collapse on the couch and drink. My sister doesn't work and basically thinks she doesn't have a problem. Every time she is persuaded to try AA or similar she doesn't last more than two sessions because she thinks she is so far superior to everyone else in that room

I am not her favorite, to say the least. She can fool others when she is drunk, but not me. When she hides bottles around the corner, I notice. When she tries to steal my money to pay for her addiction, I notice and take action. It has gone to that extent several times. She'll try to guess my passwords and take over my accounts.

This is how bad her addiction can be: My sister couldn't drive after a police officer pulled her over and her license was suspended. She asked me to drive her to Publix to get a few things and she promised she would not return with any bottles of alcohol in her bag. Well, she had a plan to avoid that action. Instead she went to the aisle with the alcohol and literally opened a bottle right there in the store itself and started guzzling. Another customer watched in dismay and ran to summon store employees. Next thing I know the manager and several other employees are escorting my sister to the car, while describing to me what happened.

My sister ended up feeding her alcoholism through Amazon. It got so bad I had to try to get Amazon to shut off her ability to purchase alcohol. They told me it was an unprecedented request and didn't know how to handle it.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the time she started guzzling Listerine by the case full, after she found out Listerine has plenty of alcohol.

I'm not pretending these anecdotes have any great meaning or are leading anywhere, other than to depict how bad it can become. My sister has gone through various types of supervised and self detox at least 40 times over 15 years. That's probably conservative. We've estimated the expenditure at $350,000 and that doesn't include losses like her marriage and the home.

My sister fares best when she has some type of new interest or goal. That aspect has been spotlighted by others already, and it would be my advice as well. Unfortunately it always ended the same way: Some new variable enters the equation, whether positive or negative. And my sister uses it as a new excuse to drink. She'll drink because she remembers something that made her happy long ago. She'll drink because she is worried about something that will make her unhappy tomorrow.

The rest of the family has basically given up on her but my father before he died in 2012 asked me to promise that I would continue to try to understand her, and help. Not easy, to say the least. We have basically nothing in common. There is no payoff to helping her because she is either a snob when sober or a puddle when drunk.

I am very concerned that my sister will continue to negatively impact my life She is quite the schemer. I have already seen a lawyer -- at my father's advice before he died -- and provided that lawyer the details and also a written record of her addiction history.

Best of luck. Stories are all I have. Maybe they will trigger something, for the good.

Went to AA the first time four years ago. Was off and on and began to think there was no hope. Alcohol was destroying my life and I was utterly panicked I couldn't stop it.

I'm now over 80 days sober (I drank about twenty beers a day through the 4th of July and realized I might die if something didn't change). I just quit cold turkey and it stuck so far, no AA, nothing. I know I could relapse any day, so am taking nothing for granted... but for now, that stupid old cliche about taking it one day at a time is working.

Having gotten away from the constant hangovers, cravings, and shame, I can say sober life truly is better than you ever imagine when you're in the thick of it. I promise you. Just quit for one day. Then one more. Etc. it might take a few weeks, but life will eventually become worth living again.

I think that your friend is mostly correct, but I think that his useful rejection of much of what AA has to offer has led to a wrongful rejection of the idea that addiction, per se, doesn't exist, Maybe he just means that when the undisputed physical phenomenon of addiction has run its course -- naturally or through a formal medical detoxification -- then the idea of "powerlessness" as preached in 12-step rooms is a grave mistake. And I agree.

Usually, there is a "reason" or even a pile of them that people take refuge in booze. Reality sucks. It also sucks for pretty much everyone at various times, but most people thankfully lack the physiological machinery to become dependent on alcohol. There are people who could never become alcohol-dependent even if you paid them to try; their bodies simply refuse to accept more than a few drinks without rebelling. Then there are those who have the same natural "talent," at the level of liver enzymes, that a lot of East Africans and others have for distance running at the level of cellular oxygen processing.

The upshot is that most people could probably benefit from some sort of one-on-one and group therapy, with those who abuse drugs and alcohol needing this especially because of the price they pay for reacting negatively to the stresses and emotional swings of everyday life (that is, they drink to dangerous and destructive levels rather than "merely" becoming highly anxious or depressed and stuffing this angst into some other psychological pit).

There is no one answer for a drinking problem. In my observation most people require a multimodal approach -- some mix of meetings, meds and therapy. And hobbies. They need to radically accept that they cannot drink anymore, at all, if they want to live and live in a fruitful, relatively happy way. Later, after the booze is further in the rear-view mirror, they can come to treasure life itself more, and with hopelessness fading in favor of hope, their chances of "making it" rise considerably.

Like I said earlier in the thread, consider reframing addiction as ritualized compulsive comfort seeking behavior. It's a different, more compassionate way of looking at it than thinking of yourself as less than for not being able to overcome a disease or addiction.

Whatever "intensive addiction therapy" means, this is not true at all. Drugs like Campral and Naltrexone can eliminate alcohol cravings completely, making it completely unnecessary to go to AA meetings, and proclaim yourself defective, and engage in all kinds of wishful thinking exercises with a "higher power." There are revolutionizing the prior idiotic response of the medical community to addiction.

vivitrol wrote:

Try this and also see if you can get in to a medication assisted program with an addiction medication specialist. Vivitrol might work for you and there are other alternatives such as gabapentin or acamprostate. This will only work if you do this in conjunction with intensive addiction therapy. The judgmental posters earlier in this thread know very little about addiction, Keep trying!

Whatever "intensive addiction therapy" means, this is not true at all. Drugs like Campral and Naltrexone can eliminate alcohol cravings completely, making it completely unnecessary to go to AA meetings, and proclaim yourself defective, and engage in all kinds of wishful thinking exercises with a "higher power." There are revolutionizing the prior idiotic response of the medical community to addiction