He said that for him, alcohol had exercised a "Lower Power" over him, in that everything went downhill the more addicted he became.
So found a mental trick to re-frame the "Higher Power" away from its being a deity but simply into its being Sobriety in itself. Every time they read the affirmations/statements, he told himself that he would just focus on the goodness of Sobriety.
He said that since he had gotten drunk because of someone else's belief systems , he wasn't now going to make the same mistake. He stuck with the AA meetings, determined not to let some founder-members' personal belief systems get in his way of getting sober.
On another point even with my crappy German I was accepted for a rehab program here in Switzerland, so I need to decide if I want to go ahead with it.at least I got an option I didn’t think was possible before.
I cannot imagine what it's like. But you got the whole EF rooting for you here. It may be presumptious to claim so, but I think so. You can always write here, not only when you need support, but just to share. I am sure it will help a bunch of other folks, too. Thumbs up! Write away. Check on with us.
What will influence your decision?
What would be good, or bad, for you, about going to that specific (or any) rehab programme?
Right now I am sober for 24 days and feeling quite good with no real desire to drink so I ask myself do I need to go.
On the other hand I have been at this stage many times and due to stress or situations I drank or not even stressed, it can be due to being sober and I feel confident and then you feel ok to drink. When I do drink then it could be a week or it could be 5 before I find the control to stop and begin the sober path again.
The difference this time to other times is I see therapist regularly and engaged with my doctor for some craving medication.
What pushes me towards accepting this opportunity is that it may help me deal with situations and avoid relapsing. Maybe if I say I’m ok now then I can be back in six months at the same crossroads.
I am fully functioning but in last 2-3 years I felt I went from heavy social drinker to definite alcoholic, and if I continue this path I will no longer be fully functioning in another undefined period of time.
So at moment it is a decision,do I go with the hope this good period continues and perhaps it can be different to past attempts due to working with therapist now or do I just say what the hell go for it.
It is quite an experience to sit in a psychiatric hospital and talk to a doctor to say yes I need to check into the mad house perhaps but I found it quite a positive experience, not really what I thought it would be.
I will take this weekend to decide what to do.
Of course I can't really know how it is for you, but here are some ideas. Just ditch them if not applicable.
You've been sober for 24 days. Congratulations! Sobriety, long-term, solid, reliable sobriety happens, after all, one day at a time. In fact, one non-drinking moment at a time. From several of your posts, it sounds to me like you've managed this before (perhaps a bit longer, perhaps a bit less), and then got back into drinking because you thought you were stable enough to be able to manage "just one" (but then you weren't and drank too much again), or you felt stressed by external or maybe internal pressure (and reached for a drink to get you through that).
About the first :
It seems to me that each person has to sort out, emotionally, for themselves, whether the effect their drinking is having on their lives is fine (no problems resulting from alcohol use, ever, so no need to change anything about what they do or don't drink), or slightly troublesome (a bit annoying sometimes, but not so serious, need only a little discipline or some distraction to make it easy to stick to just one drink a week, or so), or destructive enough (causing serious problems, be they personal and relational, psycholocial, social, financial, to do with employment, to do with physical health) to warrant ditching alcohol for ever. Although I've read success stories from methods to pull back and reduce the amount on drinks, and then learn how to drink in moderation, (and that may indeed work for some!), personally I've never yet met an alcoholic who has been successful at just reducing. Not reliably and consistently so. Those alcoholics I know and who are wonderfully sober and confident of their permanent sobriety have all STOPPED consuming alcohol. Completely. Zero.
About the second:
You might be able to sort a lot out, while living at home, given that you have the support of a therapist, and medication, that you didn't have before. However, I doubt that it is possible to be you , just as you are now, only minus alcohol. I think it is more likely that, apart from changing your drinking-behaviour itself, you'll be needing to learn different ways of being you . You'll need new ways of either avoiding the stressors, or facing them more constructively, so that they no longer tend to set you drinking again.
I'm sure one can learn some of this in individual therapy. Yet in a good clinic, with a mix of group-therapies and individual therapies, and also through the conversations in the evenings, with the other patients, you get offered a kind of "buffet" of methods. You can try out activities you might not have done for years, or ever, and see whether any one or several of them can equip you to cope. Then, when you're back in Real Life, when faced with a situation that would formerly have triggered you to drink, you can, instead, pluck one of the methods you've learnt, (like a secret laser sword) and use that instead.
@doropfiz, thanks for taking time to write your thoughts and it is clear from this post and on the other thread that you have a lot ok knowledge about this subject and you really hit the nail on the head.
Like everybody who faces this situation I have in the past tried moderation and I could manage it a few times but unfortunately this is short lived and after a few successful attempts then back to old ways.
I spent a lot of time at the slightly troublesome phase but it moved onto the destructive phase but even at that I would not say I am the most destructive drunk around but aware that the situation is deteriorating after every relapse.
One thing I managed to learn a bit recently was not to compare myself to others or the stereotypical alcoholic hiding bottles at home which I don't do or drinking a bottle of gin for breakfast which I don't do.
When you use this comparison you will always mange to find a worse case than you and think your not so bad and avoid the reality. So then after a fairly recent relapse and struggle to get back to the sober world and some advice I stopped comparing myself and asked why am I going to AA, seeing therapist , asking myself have I a problem then things become easier to rationalize.
As you say I can achieve so much by myself and with a therapist etc but to really learn how to deal with triggers going to a proper treatment program will give me hopefully better ability to do this in the long term.
Anyhow I decided yesterday to go ahead with the treatment as I am afraid if I don't do now I will be back in six moths asking myself the same questions.
So once I sort out some paperwork and other things I hope to begin the middle of August with it.
Do you have questions about the paperwork, that perhaps we could help you with?
He will do on Monday to get ball rolling as I may be able to start there middle of August if everything goes according to plan so let’s see and hopefully it goes ok.
If, however, it is not, at first, do not fear. Then the psychiatrist (and perhaps your G.P.) will need to write a report in which they state diagnosis progression till now suitability of treatment program prognosis with the hospitalisation what could be expected/feared if treatment is not undertaken.
It is often this last point that makes things happen.
I was wondering as I have not really needed to get medical attention in Switzerland if it is straight forward or not but let’s see.
Thanks for the info
In regard to the God thing. One of the major issues people have who are addicts is anxiety. People who have anxiety have a hard a time to let go and trust especially in themselves. So with God you can let go. Maybe eventually you can learn to trust in yourself and let go to yourself.
Also many addicts in the begiining will come up with many issues as a form of distraction. Amazing the games our brains can play on us. When I was in univerrsity studying for an exam I would begin to clean and convinced myself that it was needed to be done at that time. I know now it was a distraction from what I needed to do. The only thing a reecovering addict should focus on is not drinking. Some addicts even decide to quit smoking shortly after but the stress becomes too much and they slip.
I was sitting on a park bench, completely sober. The weather was fine, and there were many other people around. Idyllic.
A couple approached, the man very evidently drunk, the woman looking nervous and afraid. The man pushed her aside, planted himself in front of my bench, swaggered, swung his shoulders and thrust his finger towards my face and barked: "I wanna ask you something!" I looked up and said: "No. I just want to be alone."
The woman said: "Oh, Darling, let's just go, please, please, let's just go."
He pushed her out of his way, about arm's length, and hissed at me: "You! I said I wanna ask you something." I shook my head, but didn't speak.
The woman said: "Come, Treasure, please let's go." Here eyes were wide and fluttering and her voice squeaky. She was afraid. She looked gaunt and exhausted. It looked like she had been there many times before.
The man, perhaps because he found that I wouldn't participate, or perhaps because he had achieved his aim of frightening the woman, or perhaps because he actually had wanted something and would now look for it elsehwere, suddenly turned away from me and followed her. As he left, he spewed out insults at me.
The costs? To me, not that much. It was definitely very unpleaseant, and I was shocked and shaken, but immediately moved to sit a little closer to some other, sober-looking people. I've recovered and, as it was, it was a relatively minor incident. But what if the man had deemed any part of my behaviour as warranting a dangerous response by him? What if the woman had not been guiding him? The whole matter could quickly have become larger and louder and perhaps violent. And since I was in a park, any escalation would almost certainly have involved other people, too, coming to my rescue.
The costs to the woman's health must be considerable. She was like a nervous bird, in pain, with clipped wings. Today, her intervention was probably what kept me safe. So she was paying the price of the social navigation of his drinking. It was really sad. It made me hope they don't have children, somewhere.