Have you fought addiction and won?

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Yay, you!


This feels like sterling advice. Thank you. I got to day 10 this time around and fell off. Building up to next attempt. Now I know the 'small' permission is the destroyer and I am one for whom total abstinence is the only option, dammit. But to know this is a step forward.

Hi I wanted to reach out since this is a topic I know a little something about. I have about 5 months sobriety and have relapsed several times in my drinking. I can only speak for myself personally but the only thing that works for myself is meetings such as AA. I do not want to make out like I represent them because I don't I am just some guy with a drinking problem and those meetings help me stay away from a drink. If I can voice one gripe a lot of people come to AA and think its religious or a cult or something and they get turned off. Heres what I would say about those people. They are losers in life. If you want to get sober, you will do whatever it takes to get sober. I was an atheist for the first 25 years of my life so I have seen both sides of the fence. There are some spiritual undertones to the program. Another thing you will see is people who hate AA because they went to a handful of meetings and had a bad experience with some douchebags. There are good and bad people in AA. There are people in AA who are there to get sober and these are called "Winners". "Stick with the Winners" is a common saying in the rooms. So in short this is a bit of a rant but I'm so sick of people saying AA is a cult and the people in it are buttholes. For me it is just some thing I go to so I don't have to drink. Its not any more complicated than that for me because I have lost a lot to drinking. I don't really give a s- if its a cult, if the people in it suck, I really don't care. I'm there for me and to stay sober and it is the best thing for keeping me sober that I have found.

Thank you for sharing, Ronbrgundy, and doing an honest job of explaining part of how it works for you. I am glad you have found the support you need and wish you well in your journey to contentment.

I don't want a fight here, but do want to try and help you understand in a more nuanced way why for me - and perhaps some others - AA is not an option. Perhaps it is contained most clearly in your own words. I simply do not accept that choosing an alternative route makes anyone a "loser". I have spent much of my life devoted to making everyone a "winner". I have walked an unorthodox path myself in some important ways [did that just trigger your "loser" reaction switch?].

To my core I am convinced that dualistic attitudes formed on labelling, condemnation and outsidering are integral to our greed-and-war-based culture. As "winners" we have almost ruined our beautiful planet and forced miserable lives on countless others. I am almost convinced by what you say that the AA life-raft would demand compromise of my core beliefs. For that reason alone I'm almost certain the method would not stick. But what if it did? What if I were - cynically or genuinely - to adopt an alien worldview just in order to belong? The loss to my identity would, I think, be irrecoverable.

Purely on aesthetic grounds, why invest my wellbeing with people I don't agree with, themselves in fairly desperate straits, who would see it as their mission to turn me into one of them? I'm an Aspie. I'm already an outsider. I f* up a lot with people, especially ones who don't get me and want to correct me. How does that cure anything? How does that not make me even more desperate, and miserable with it, and inclined to grab a drink? How does it stop me seeing myself as a "loser"?

But all of this pales by comparison to the clincher: I live in a conservative country town, population 1700. Putting this out there would be social suicide for a single woman and newcomer like me. It is simply not an option.

So AA is not for me. I know it works for some, and for them it is a great thing. I believe I can get there another way. I understand a great deal these days about how I tick and how addiction works. Until now the missing link has been the all-important step of recognising and acknowledging I need to abstain altogether from alcohol, just as I did from tobacco. That little tempting voice within ("Just the one won't hurt", "Just a couple for social lubricant", "Just cut down") I recognise now, not the voice of reason but the wily voice of addiction. I have recently embarked on a path that is leading me to the happy Aspie within. I am strongly motivated to continue fit and healthy - and slim! - in order to live the life I love throughout the second half of maturity, and know alcohol as the enemy of all three. I have moved on from false friends, the would-be saboteurs.

Experience, and continued immersion in what gives me joy, will get me the rest of the way. It will be a struggle, but it will get easier, and I will get there because now I want to. Okay, so that was the mission statement - very temperate and plausible, don't you think. [ironic moue] Now wish me luck for the reality, please?

Namaste.

A very mature and well thought out answer. There are many ways to get sober. It sounds like you have developed a plan that is working for yourself. I guess the stereotypes on AA bother me because I don't go there for any of them. I don't go there to socialize with the people, although I will handpick one or two here who I really feel a connection with. I don't go there to be brainwashed to do anything other than not drink. I don't go there because I am in love with the people or ideology even. I go there because it works for me. If you are finding ways to stay sober then keep doing whatever works. I wish you the best.

Tobacco - I was halfway through a cigarette about 6 years ago when my brother told me that my dad was going into hospital the next morning for heart surgery from the effects of smoking. i put my cigarette out and have never picked up another since. Didn't even get cravings, I just so wanted to stop there and then.

drink - never been a full on alcoholic but it has certainly done me no good. I seem to be more of a binge drinker addict if anything. i will go 2 weeks without a drink, then will really crave one and when I have it I just neck it so fast and get myself in such a stupor that I am no good for anything. One nights drinking usually turns into about 4 or 5 until i stop for a week or 2 again. 69 days and counting at the moment.

eating disorders - not recognised as an addiction as such but probably the hardest thing I have ever had to break, and one that looms over me constantly, and probably always will,

taken various other illegal drugs over years and while not addicted, the lifestyle was hard to break.

That is something I would wholeheartedly agree with. Find out what makes you do the thing you do and also what would make you much happier, then make a plan to work at it. For me it was just generally very low self esteem so I started doing some things that would make me feel good about myself.

I smoked (cigarettes) for a few years in my late teens & twenties, and to this day, I cannot begin to imagine what went on in my head to make me start. I guess it was because I was desperate to be accepted by my popular peers; some of whom smoked.

I also haven't any real explanation of how I stopped on Nov. 1, 1996, other than I woke up and decided it was a foolish thing to be doing. I happened to be out of cigarettes, and I just never bought any more since. It was a little tough on me to resist the urge for a couple weeks; especially after eating a heavy meal. But quitting was the BEST move I ever made in my whole life, as had I not quit, I would not be in the physical shape I'm in now, and my wife would never have dated a smoker. And a host of other reasons!! !!

Charles

Hey Charles, quitting smoking was a red-letter day for me as well, an unforgettable date in my life calendar. What made me persevere for the several years it took was the unbreakable promise I had made to my young son. It is still one of my proudest accomplishments, as it is for you as well, I think.

PS I know what got me started smoking. I was an angry, rebellious teen, what they now call "acting out", though it would take me half a lifetime to understand why. Alcohol is a harder nut to crack because that is a means of escape from a lonely life but also a fine way of celebrating friendship and cloaked in far more social acceptability. I live in an alcohol-fuelled culture and nothing about it is uncomplicated.

I don't seem to be very susceptible to addiction. I've tried most things, but tobacco is the only thing I've felt like I was actually becoming addicted to. Since switching to lower risk routes of administration that "feeling" has gone away, but I may very well still be addicted. I feel like I could easily quit if I wanted to do so, but I've yet to try, so I may be wrong.

Smoking was a tough one for me, because it was a physical addiction, and a social /stress crutch for a very long time. Alcohol is less of an addiction than a routine for me, but I do feel much better when I don't drink at all.

I think Babybird has a very good idea-finding healthier/ more positive substitutes for unhealthy habits.

How did you do it. - Simply by not doing it.
What strategies did I try. - The strategy that I decided not to smoke or drink alcohol anymore for an certain amount of time. Free of that since June. Sorry, but I am not that much into secrets or tales or whatever. For me its simply that alcohol and cigarettes dont come into my body themselves, but when I decide by will to move my body and arms so that alcohol and cigarettes come into my body. Its not alcohol or cigarettes controlling my arms, telling them to take out a cigarette out of the package and lightning it and smoke it and inhale it, but my brain is controlling that. So if I dont tell my arms anymore, to do that movement, they wont. To prevent me being a bit "stressy" the first two days, I started doing so on a Friday while starting to play a new videogame, so that my thoughts are focused on the game during the first weekend, and so that I dont even have time thinking about that I may want to smoke a cigarette.

Funnily reducing caffeine was for me much harder, because alcohol and nicotine only affected my freetime, that I could easily spend as well another way. While caffeine affected my work effort, so during the first weeks I definitely recognized that around the afternoon, I got really tired, and couldnt show the effort in work as I was used to, which caused me problems, because of forcing me to stay longer in work.

Define "win."

Most people with addictions have them for life. They simply learn to get off of it and how to avoid going back to it, but there is always that part of them that wants it and could put them back there if they give in.

Gotta agree with that to some certain parts. So no probs with the alcohol, but if someone is smoking around me, and I get the smell into my nose, there comes a "Cigarette would be nice now." flash. So my partner and I mostly smoked outside on the terrace, but right now he is totally banned to go outside for smoking, to prevent the house smelling all evening long like cigarettes, and remembering me every minute of cigarettes existences. As well as there hardly is any sense in me stop smoking while trying to get pregnant, when instead I smoke passively his cigarettes. ^^

Funny. Lately, I've been thinking about relapsing into my wicked, wicked ways. I hope that doesn't happen.

I missed this one first time around. Makes perfect sense. I think zer0netgain is right too that if we're addictive we're going to always be addicted to something, so choosing a healthy 'poison' has to be the way to go.

Back on the turps, building up to my next attempt. [not really turps, it's red wine]

I've quit many addictions through life. A couple via jail. Cigarettes was by far the hardest. My wife likes to joke that "we" quit smoking together, even though she never smoked. It caused me to meltdown so easily that she took a lot of my wrath. In the end I used nicotine gum and weaned myself off of that because I had to get rid of the all the hand motions that went with the smoking first. I rubbed the stickers off of two Rubik's Cubes to substitute the hand stuff.

Of all my old addictions smoking that I still put the most effort into not starting back up. Today at an outing some guy pulled out his pack of cigarettes, my old brand, and I started to ask him for one without even thinking. Fortunately, I have problems finding words and wasn't able to speak up fast enough.