YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Yet again, I had too much last night, woke up this morning and finished a beer I had started, and have spent the day just feeling miserable.

I'm coming here to pledge to quit drinking, and I'm hoping that this will remind me to stay sober. Will check back in and post an update from time to time.

I might need a 12-step program, and I might not. Just going to take it slowly for now.

Any and all words of encouragement would be much appreciated.

There is hope.

There are many ways to get sober, and even more ways to live sober. AA certainly is one way, and it keeps millions of people sober today.

Much like Goldilocks, I found the AA porridge/Kool Aid not quite to my taste, but at six years sober next month I am doing something right. (I identify as straightedge, so I won't be singing orthodoxy from the AA hymnal, but I am still sober.)

Some practices you may want to consider:

1. Instead of drinking, pick up the phone and call a sober friend. In fact, you can pick up the computer mouse and pm me. Keep picking up the phone; don't pick up the drink.

2. Were I you, I'd go buy $20 worth of candy: sober people love sweets. I favor the more rich candy (Heath bars, marshmallows), whereas some sober guys prefer the more straight-sugar sweets: Pixie sticks, Skittles.

3. Give yourself six months to 1.5 years for the physical and emotional fog to lift. It took at least six months for both my brain and my mind to clear up. In other words, don't trust your mind. (At least not for a little while

Thank you, Oak. Just getting a response means a lot to me, and your specific suggestions are much appreciated.

One day down... Feeling pretty emotional and disappointed in myself for what feel like an overwhelming number of shortcomings and secrets. Hoping that this feeling will pass.

The thing is, many people think I gave up drinking last summer, after 1 too many bad experiences which may or may not have been caused by alcohol interacting with my meds (Effexor and Adderall). In truth, I just stopped drinking around other people, which has improved my interaction with other people but has resulted in my drinking alone, at home, where my consumption has been much greater than it probably would be around others. So now, how do I admit to people what was really going on? I feel ashamed. I guess the only way to do it is to do it.

As for the Effexor and Adderall, I know that there one line of thinking is that these drugs make us more likely to overindulge in drinking, so I'm considering having an honest conversation with my doctor and my therapist about this issue and asking for advice.

Again, thank you for your encouragement and advice.

It's going to take a lot of time and pain but you can do it. You will start feeling a wave of emotions that you don't want to feel and in the past you would have drank to cover them. You will learn to ride these emotions through them and like oak said the fog will lift. Sometimes it will rain, but you'll have an umbrella to recognize that it is just an emotion and it will pass like all other emotions and thoughts have. I send you strength.

Also, it is very important to detox right. They say that alcohol is the only drug whose withdrawal can kill you. If/when you detox, don't ever drink again. Detox is no joke.

Definitely be upfront and honest with your doctor.

As far as lying to your friends about quitting already, two thoughts:

1. Sober people know when people are drinking.

2. In general people are very tolerant and patient with people trying to quit drinking. Active alcoholics? They don't get much/any respect. But someone who is trying to quit is often given the benefit of the doubt. So don't be too concerned about what you told people, so long as you are moving towards sobriety.

As far as "bad" emotions and disturbing memories, they bubbled up for me about six months in, then after about five years. The trope is that just about everyone's life gets objectively worse immediately after getting sober, but that it is relatively much easier. Such is the trope.

(Take all tropes with a big huge grain of salt. What is "true" for one sober person might not be true for the next. Whatever helps a person stop is all good.)

Lastly, for me the sober life is not about not drinking. It is about so many other things. Not drinking is a wonderful gift, but far down on the list of things I am excited about in life. The sober life is wonderful. It is worth it.

Hello, again. I'm just touching base after (obviously) some time has passed.

Things are definitely better. When I wrote my original post that started this thread, I was pretty much drinking every day (very unusual for me, and not something that had been going on for a long time). For the most part, I'm healthier: running regularly with friends, riding my bike with friends when I can, watching what I eat. However, from time to time I will still overindulge when I am alone; this happens maybe twice a week on average.

The next day I will feel absolutely, soul-crushingly awful. it's not a hangover like when I was in my twenties: headache and nausea. Physically, I don't feel all that bad. But emotionally I am a wreck, and mentally I often cannot think straight.

It's a scary experience, and I really, really want to stop doing this.

Reading back over what I wrote above, I realize that I never made that appointment with my doctor to have an honest conversation about these issues. I'll do my best to make that appointment this week.

I have, however, talked with my therapist about this. I brought up the feelings of shame that wash over me when this happens, that if people knew who I really was (what i was really doing) they would have a much, much lower opinion of me. Her response was a useful one: Do I really think that my friends would be that judgmental? How would I react if I found out something like this about one of my friends? Would I think negatively of them or would I be supportive, sympathetic?

This was useful because, in fact, one of my friends *is* currently working on getting sober, a pretty recent decision on his part. I don't think negatively of him for having a drinking problem. Instead, as oak pointed out above, his decision to do the work of getting sober is something people view with kindness and admiration and support (as far as I can tell). I've sent him a few messages of encouragement electronically, and I gave him some advice about how to deal with insomnia...

So right now I'm working on changing my assumptions about what other people think (or would think) about me. I'm projecting so much negativity on them, but I know (intellectually, if not emotionally) that the person who has such a negative opinion of me is, in fact, me. I'm creating a toxic worldview in which that negative opinion is instead imagined to be coming from other people.

It is so, so hard to get this right. I was actually pretty surprised to realize that I (who have always thought of myself as a positive, optimistic person) am carrying around so much unexamined pessimism and fear. How did I get to this point in my life where I assume the worst about the world, my future, and my friends and family? And how do I get from where I am now to where I want to be: the point where I have faith in the basic goodness of life and of other people?

I'm not feeling as desperate today as I was when I wrote my initial post above, so I'm not asking these questions out of hopelessness. Instead, I'm just identifying what I think needs to be the central goal of the work that I'm doing on myself. It's not so much that the alcohol -- as a substance -- is the problem; instead, it's the thinking that creates the feelings that lead me to turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism. (And then the next-day effects of turning to alcohol just amplify those negative feelings.) This is not to say that I don't want to stop drinking. However, getting better is not going to happen solely by no longer drinking. I get that there's a bigger picture. I'm just having a hard time staying on the track I want to stay on.

Thank you for the messages you wrote last month. They've meant a lot to me over the past few weeks, and the advice and insight they contain has been very helpful.

hi there! i salute you for your decisions made to quit booze. i hope i can find a strength to not drink alcohol again. i am so totally depresses right now about this bad habit i have been fighting for 3 years now, yet can't find a light to quit.

Thanks for writing out your thoughts and feelings. It's cool to see the transition over the years. Hope to hear back from you soon!

hello!


i'm glad that you decided to quit, admitting there was a problem is the first step to recovery. I wonder how you doing this time?

Thanks to all who have offered encouragement and empathy. Things are much, much better than when I wrote my first post that started this thread. I talked with my doctor last fall and decided to go off of my Adderall prescription because I felt it was winding me up and stressing me out, which was making it harder for me to avoid alcohol. Since I stopped taking Adderall, I've felt significant lower craving for a drink and as of today it's been (I think) about 6 weeks with no alcohol whatsoever. I'm not in a 12-step program (or any other support group) and I don't know that I'm never going to drink anything ever again. But the combination of ADD medication and drinking was having a seriously negative effect upon my mental and physical health. The last several weeks have been great, and I'll keep touching base here to contribute to other threads, as appropriate, and to provide any updates (again, as a means of staying accountable to myself as well a way to keep others in the loop).

Again, I'm very thankful for the feedback and support I've gotten here.