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Are you an alcoholic?
Comments
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I actually feel like something has me in its jaws and won't let go and actually really for the first time I'm seeing that I have no control whatsoever. Always before I had a notion that if I started I could stop again in a few days. I knew and accepted I was alcoholic but I was under an illusion that I had some control over the magnitude of disaster that would happen if I drank.0
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I actually feel like something has me in its jaws and won't let go and actually really for the first time I'm seeing that I have no control whatsoever. Always before I had a notion that if I started I could stop again in a few days. I knew and accepted I was alcoholic but I was under an illusion that I had some control over the magnitude of disaster that would happen if I drank.
Great mtg tonight in the resource centre Ballyfermot at 8pm. Good sobriety and mix of new comers,old timers, intermediates and people who have slipped more than a few times.(LIke me!!).
You answered yourself in the previous post, and it's great that you are not still shackled with that degree of 'self'. I fully understand where you were at because I have done it myself- self being the operative word!
Today, I am free of that bondage, but only for today. I used to go for my drinking, now it's for my thinking, and you illustrated perfectly how 'off the wall ' our thinking can get.
But we can be free of it- you know that yourself.
Whatever you do, get to a mtg and talk to another member, post soon.0 -
I actually feel like something has me in its jaws and won't let go and actually really for the first time I'm seeing that I have no control whatsoever. Always before I had a notion that if I started I could stop again in a few days. I knew and accepted I was alcoholic but I was under an illusion that I had some control over the magnitude of disaster that would happen if I drank.
How are you getting on?0 -
Two days sober0
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Alcoholism is a complex topic that can be better understood when it is studied and assessed via the four alcoholism stages. And keep in mind that when the term "alcoholism" is used, this also means "alcohol addiction," "alcohol dependency," or "alcohol dependence."
Alcoholism: The First Stage
In the first stage of alcoholism, drinking is no longer social but becomes a means of emotional escape from inhibitions, problems, inhibitions. Stated differently, during the first stage of alcoholism, drinking is, in many instances, a psychological attempt to escape from reality. For instance, early in the disease an individual starts to depend on the mood-altering effects of alcohol.
Another observable characteristic of the first stage of alcoholism is that a slow and gradual increase in tolerance develops, meaning that more and more amounts of alcohol are needed for the individual to "get high" or to "feel the buzz." For example, it is common for problem drinkers in the first stage of alcoholism to start gulping one or two drinks before attending a social function and then to increase social drinking to 3 to 5 drinks per day.
Alcoholism: The Second Stage
In the second stage of alcoholism, the need to drink becomes more powerful. For example, it is common during this stage for the problem drinker to start to drink earlier in the day.
As tolerance increases, furthermore, the individual with the drinking problem drinks not because of psychological tension or stress relief, but because of his or her dependence on alcohol. During this stage of the disease, even though the "loss of control" does not occur on a regular basis, it is, nevertheless, starting to become more noticeable by others such as relatives, family members, neighbors, friends, and co-workers.
Also during this stage of the disease, the problem drinker may begin to feel more concerned and embarrassed about his or her drinking. Often during this stage, problem drinkers are unsuccessful in their attempts to stop drinking.
In this stage, physical symptoms such as hangovers, blackouts, hand tremors, and stomach problems increase. Interestingly, instead of seeing their drinking as the root of the many problems and issues they experience, however, drinkers with a drinking problem in this stage frequently start to blame others and things external to themselves for their difficulties.
Alcoholism: The Third Stage
In the third stage of alcoholism, the loss of control becomes more severe and more observable. This means that problem drinkers are unable to drink in accordance with their intentions. For example, once the individual takes the first drink, he or she commonly can no longer control further drinking behavior, in spite of the fact that the intent might have been to have just "one or two drinks." It should be stressed that an important aspect of this stage of the illness is the following: the drinker often starts to experience more serious drinking problems as well as alcohol-related employment, relationship, financial, and legal problems.
In the third stage of alcoholism, it is common for the problem drinker to start avoiding friends and family and to show a lack of interest in activities and events that once were fun or important. Also typical during this stage are "eye-openers," that is, drinks that are taken whenever the problem drinker awakens. Eye-openers are taken mainly to "calm the nerves," lessen a hangover, or to quiet the feelings of remorse the individual occasionally experiences after a period of time without consuming a drink./>
As the drinking increases the individual with the drinking problem starts to neglect most things of importance, even necessities such as food, water, personal hygiene, shelter, and personal interaction. And finally, during this stage, the drinker often makes half-hearted attempts at getting professional medical assistance.
Alcoholism: The Fourth Stage
The fourth and last stage of alcoholism is characterized by a chronic loss of control. In the earlier stages of the illness, the problem drinker may have been successful in maintaining a job. Due to the fact that drinking during this stage frequently starts earlier in the day and commonly continues throughout the day, however, few, if any, full-time jobs can be maintained under these conditions.
In the earlier stages of the illness, the problem drinker had a choice whether he or she would take the first drink. After taking the first drink, the drinker typically lost all control and would then continue drinking. In the last stage of alcoholism, however, alcoholics no longer have a choice: they need to drink in order to function on a daily basis.
During the fourth stage of alcoholism, benders are typical. More to the point, in the fourth stage of alcoholism the alcoholic frequently gets helplessly drunk and may remain in this predicament for a number of days or weeks. The unattainable goal for the drinker while engaging in his or her bender is to experience the "high" they he or she once experienced.
In the second or third stages of alcoholism the drinker's hands may have trembled slightly on mornings after getting drunk the previous night. In the fourth and last stage of alcoholism, conversely, alcoholics get "the shakes" whenever they attempt or are forced to refrain from drinking.
These tremors are an indication of a serious nervous disorder that now affects the drinker's entire body. When "the shakes" are combined with hallucinations, furthermore, the result is known as "the DTs" or delirium tremens. The DTs are a potentially deadly kind of alcoholism withdrawal that almost always takes place unless the alcoholic receives immediate alcoholism treatment. It may come as no surprise that after an attack of the DTs, more than a few alcoholics promise to never drink again. Sadly, most of them do not and cannot fulfill their promise. Consequently, they more often than not return to drinking and the alcoholic drinking patterns and drinking problem start all over again.
From the information discussed above, it can be concluded that the four stages of alcoholism paint a bleak picture for individuals who are alcohol addicted. Perhaps learning about the destructive and damaging outcomes and the unhealthy nature of alcoholism may not make a much of an impact on most individuals who are already chronically alcohol dependent.
It is hoped, however, that by exposing the facts about alcohol dependency and about the stages of alcoholism to our youth BEFORE they start consuming alcohol in an abuse and irresponsible manner will prevent many of our teenagers from experiencing the drinking problems and the unhealthy and devastating realities suffered by most alcoholics
Finding a quality treatment program can be a difficult process. That's why it is important to log on & post here daily and of course other forums or organisations like this,
copied from web.0 -
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Long term alcoholic. From 11 years old to treatment 5 years ago. Stayed sober for 4 of the best years of my life. Fell off the wagon this year after the death of my father and a nasty breakup and court battles over kids.
Life is a disaster again and I will be getting on top of it again soon but for now I am firmly entrenched on the pity pot and my drinking is out of control.0 -
My condolences on the death of your father.
I am going to say this out of experience though, so take it as just that: my experience.
I used to believe my drinking had to do with external circumstances, but discovered (after a few relapses) that it was not. I just love drinking, like REALLY LOVE it, and my alkie mind would use anything, and everything, to build up a narrative where I could drink again.
The Big Book's Chapter 3 called "More About Alcoholism" outlines this peculiar trait ( termed the mental obsession) in "real alcoholics" in devastating fashion, and when I could accept deep down that this described me.......things got s lot simpler.
I am back sober now many years, but not much changed until I understood and accepted this:
http://anonpress.org/bb/Page_37.htmIn some circumstances we have gone out deliberately to get drunk, feeling ourselves justified by nervousness, anger, worry, depression, jealousy or the like. But even in this type of beginning we are obliged to admit that our justification for a spree was insanely insufficient in the light of what always happened. We now see that when we began to drink deliberately, instead of casually, there was little serious or effective thought during the period of premeditation of what the terrific consequences might be.
Our behavior is as absurd and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink as that of an individual with a passion, say, for jay-walking. He gets a thrill out of skipping in front of fast-moving vehicles. He enjoys himself for a few years in spite of friendly warnings. Up to this point you would label him as a foolish chap having queer ideas of fun.
Luck then deserts him and he is slightly injured several times in succession. You would expect him, if he were normal, to cut it out. Presently he is hit again and this time has a fractured skull. Within a week after leaving the hospital a fast-moving trolley car breaks his arm. He tells you he has decided to stop jay-walking for good, but in a few weeks he breaks both legs.
On through the years this conduct continues, accompanied by his continual promises to be careful or to keep off the streets altogether. Finally, he can no longer work, his wife gets a divorce and he is held up to ridicule. He tries every known means to get the jay-walking idea out of his head. He shuts himself up in an asylum, hoping to mend his ways. But the day he comes out he races in front of a fire engine, which breaks his back. Such a man would be crazy, wouldn't he?
You may think our illustration is too ridiculous. But is it? We, who have been through the wringer, have to admit if we substituted alcoholism for jay-walking, the illustration would fit us exactly. However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane. It's strong language - but isn't it true?
This is just a snippet, but the whole chapter is worth a read.
Anyways, I will be sending good thoughts your way.
Many of have had relapses and come back, you can too0 -
Thanks amazingfun.
I remember that chapter well.
I haven't read my big book in ages but I'll be picking it up again soon.
Good call.0 -
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Worth a read, I believe.
The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety
by Bill Wilson
Copyright © AA Grapevine, Inc, January 1958
I think that many oldsters who have put our AA "booze cure" to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA—the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.
Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance—urges quite appropriate to age seventeen—prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.
Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.
How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living—well, that's not only the neurotic's problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.
Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious—from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream—be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden "Mr. Hyde" becomes our main task.
I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones—folks like you and me—commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back - ed.] depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I've had with depressions, it wasn't a bright prospect.
I kept asking myself, "Why can't the Twelve Steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer..."It's better to comfort than to be the comforted." Here was the formula, all right. But why didn't it work?
Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence - almost absolute dependence - on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.
There wasn't a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.
Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what Grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever.
Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life.
Plainly, I could not avail myself of God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.
For my dependency meant demand—a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.
While those words "absolute demand" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.
This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can't flow until our paralysing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.
Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case says "To the devil with you," the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn't feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn't feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance) then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product—the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.
The really stabilising thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.
In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet this work kept me sober. It wasn't a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.
Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.
Of course I haven't offered you a really new idea—only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own "hexes" at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.
Copyright © The A.A. Grapevine, Inc., January 1958
In practicing our Traditions, The AA Grapevine, Inc. . The Grapevine®, and AA Grapevine® are registered trademarks of The AA Grapevine, Inc.0 -
Good post aabarnes1.,
I find by helping other folks like myself helps me in my strength to continue to stay strong.0 -
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Four days now. And on Monday morning I thought all was lost and I'd never stop again and what is the point being alive like that, its not a life at all. So I prayed and prayed and have been meditating every day and it has made the world of difference.
That really is great to hear.
I fully and truly understand where you are at, having been there myself- on several occasions.
To be able to get off that merry-go-round of hell is fantastic, it gives us hope for the 24 hours ahead- that's all we need to focus on, the day ahead.
God(of your own understanding of course), could and would if he were sought.
Did you manage a meeting or to talk to another AA?0 -
That really is great to hear.
I fully and truly understand where you are at, having been there myself- on several occasions.
To be able to get off that merry-go-round of hell is fantastic, it gives us hope for the 24 hours ahead- that's all we need to focus on, the day ahead.
God(of your own understanding of course), could and would if he were sought.
Did you manage a meeting or to talk to another AA?
My partner is a member so I live with one! I went to one Sunday night (drank after it) and I'm going to one tonight, prob Aungier St or I may try the Ballyfermot one.
I really was sick of AA at the end so I'm finding it hard to go back. The one I went to on Sunday was a very sick meeting (although I was the sickest one in the room) but not recovery and all how everyone is hanging on by their teeth for another drink but they wouldn't do it! The reasons I left are still there and always will be but I have to change my mindset. This is just where I'm at at the moment. Its not great but I'm going to God with it0 -
You are right, you have to hand it over.
I get bored quickly at meetings, so I move around quite a bit. Luckily we have so many to choose from in Dublin.
When i find something wrong in someone or something else, it is usually because I can see it in myself or there is something about me that is not right. So I have to look inward to discover what it is that's getting at me and why is my tolerance so low when it comes to this person/thing/situation. Invariably I find my own character defects are in play again, and I have to address that with 10th step and prayer.
I try, not always successfully, to pray for and remember that others are spiritually sick,especially members who annoy me in the room !
Thankfully there are far more 'well' members than sick ones, if you get me.0 -
Without a shadow of doubt I'm an alcoholic.
I have been alcohol dependant for about 8 years and have known that I have a serious problem with booze for the past five. Been in and out of treatment a number of times and had periods of sobriety followed by relapse. I'm back on the wagon again - it's not easy but it's worth it just for the peace of mind.0 -
Ladygoodman,
Only you can really decide if you have an issue with alcohol, only you can make the choice that you accept that you are alcoholic.
Not everybody who drinks a lot is an alcoholic, some alcoholics drink very little.
It is not just defined by the amount you drink, but more the effect it has on you.
In AA we usually sum it up quite simply by asking ourselves in the beginning, 'can I control the amount I take when drinking?' or 'if when I honestly want to, I find I can not stop entirely'- if either or both are the case then we are probably alcoholic.
There are many other signs as well but these are our guidelines,
You can read the Big Book of AA on line ( I think), and the first 4 chapters describe the issue of alcoholism, how it affects us and the solution.
Best of luck.0 -
I am a recovered alcoholic. i use the big book of Alcoholics anonymous as my guide for living sober. if i can help another alcoholic to recover,i will.0
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Hi all,
I'm just popping my head in, I'm a new poster but was alcohol free a long time (8 years) and in AA. I fell off the year and stayed drinking for a year and its ended in disaster. Still I can't stop drinking. I have no mental defence against the first drink and certainly can't stop once I've had one. Its not life at all.
Just wanted to say hi, looking forward to posting on here. By the way my life was wonderful not drinking so its amazing that I went back to it. And more amazing still I can't stop living in this hell even though I know how good life can be.
How are things with you now,I was trying to contact you by pm and few months ago on another thread.0 -
In my opinion, a lot of problem drinkers agonize too much over whether they are 'really' alcoholics or not. I think the more important question is: whatever I am, would I be better off giving up drinking entirely?0
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