Acetaminophen will shred your liver and ibuprofen will bleed your stomach, basically.

Hey all, just a little reminder that this thread is intended to support people whose lives are being negatively affected by alcohol and drugs. Please don't stray too far from that idea, and if somebody else does, please just ignore them. Thanks!

So last week I returned to St. Louis and graduated from college. It was an awesome experience, more meaningful than I thought it'd be - I had already done the work, but I'll be damned if getting the actual piece of paper didn't end up being important to me.

I also had the opportunity to sit down with a person from my past who I harmed. I'm going to skip the details, it's just TMI for an OOT thread, but if anybody in the program wants to hear more please reach out. It was pretty incredible.

So over the past three months or so I've paid my father back a chunk of money I owed, got my degree, and made a particularly difficult emotional amends. Part of me is surprised that it's taken this much time (three and a half years) to feel like I really am finally clearing away the wreckage of my past, but if I say something like that to an old-timer they just laugh. So I think I'll just keep taking the next indicated action and leave my judgments out of it!

Congrats LFS.

Sounds great LFS, and congrats on your new piece of paper!

I'm not much of an AAer, although I do think it has a lot of good points. The making amends bit is something I've always found really hard, even though I know it's for my recovery, and, in the long run, will probably make me much happier.

That's worth a big gorilla chest thump. I do them spontaneously when the spirit calls for it, but always on New Years Day morning when I wake up feeling healthy and strong. Today I did one after reading your story LMS (you should do one too if you haven't already). Good job.

It's definitely hard. I think everybody's approach to the amends is different. I'm sure there are people who would think the meeting I had last week was unnecessary.

I can say that I personally have felt like I've had a number of things hanging over my head for a long time. Putting them to bed feels pretty good, I think anyone can relate to that. I also think that it's likely that I have things put away in the guilt/shame bank that I don't even really remember, or at least don't acknowledge as being meaningful to me. My whole M.O. in the past was to avoid feeling much of anything, and my instinct to isolate/wall myself off emotionally is still strong and effective. So, for me, I think a somewhat ritualized process where I address harms that I've done is worthwhile.

I would also say that I would never be able to do this step, halting as my progress has been, without doing the ones that come before it thoroughly.

First off I just got my old user name back thanks to quite a bit of help from a green. I was posting under the name of SimpleSolution.

I recently celebrated 2 years of sobriety.

I am by far the most content than I ever have been in my life. I had reached the end of the road depressed beyond belief, consumed by thoughts of drinking, wanting to stop drinking, but always succumbing to the beast.

I had gone from having pretty much everything society says makes you successful to homelessness. Now I have very little as far as what society says makes you a success. But I am a free man today. I am free from the physical addiction to alcohol and my mind is at ease as I no longer obsess of drinking or trying not to drink. It's amazing how much more efficient I am when I don't consume myself with the above issues.

I remember calling LFS drunker than **** wanting help. There was nothing he nor anyone else could do until I was ready.

I'm now in a position where my goals are normally associated with helping others. I was given the gift of desperation and now I'm free.

This thread is awesome and I thank you all for it.

Rnr, good for you. And if you literally called LFS when you needed help, and he was there for you, good for him, too.

This is so awesome, man. I'm so happy for you. Keep coming back!

IIRC he left me a VM. I believe I called him back, but I don't think we spoke. If that was a little over 2 years ago that means I was around a year and a half sober. I was pretty scared of newcomers at that time because I definitely did not feel like I had anything to offer. But through advice and experience I now know that I can't do any harm to a newcomer because 1) I can't make them any worse and 2) they aren't really listening anyway! It isn't about me or my opinion, it's about being a conduit for the same information that was given to me. Pretty easy now.

LFS - it's funny you say keep coming back. That a something we say to regulars in the group who say something really ****ed up.

Also, we may have never spoke as I'm sure I was pretty drunk. I do remember I was sitting on the toilet thinking I might puke for the first time in a decade. I didn't puke by the way.

Rnr,

Way to go, congrats man.

Nice one Rnr!

For people who aren't a fan of groups, this is helping me a ton.

Rational Recovery

Ha, I say that to everybody. Things going great? Keep coming back. Struggling? Keep coming back.

One of my main themes lately is that it's not the stuff I know that keeps me coming back, it's the stuff I don't know. I have learned from experience that I am very capable of perceiving things in a 100% completely ass-backward way. When it comes to me, my life, my relationships, etc, my perception sucks. I don't think I'll ever completely trust it, and will always want some other brains involved, because they can point it out when there are things in my blind spot.

I'll bump this thread since it's a great help:

So 25 years ago, I started drinking, mainly because I was single and lonely. Drinking was a coping mechanism. After a beer or two, the buzz would show up and say "a woman or relationship is too much work. Just enjoy me, I'm cheap." This would happen every time in the 90's when I'd go to a bar to "pick up women". Never found anyone, but at least got a nice buzz. And for many years, alcohol was my Friday and Saturday night "date". Then sometimes Thursday and Sunday. Then it became a challenge to get four sober days a week.

Fast forward to 2016. I'm dating a woman who looks great, is fit, is smart and successful (nurse practitioner) and all her kids are grown. She says she's not had a lot of luck dating, really likes me and sometime thinks I'm too good to be true (I should really say the same about her.) The irony is she had alcoholics in her family growing up, and her previous bf also was an alcoholic. Now that what I've wanted is finally here, I don't want to screw this up by drinking too much. The times we have gone out I've limited myself to two drinks, but she doesn't know my history when I'm alone. Las night for example, I drank an entire bottle of wine. This concerns me. I don't want to **** this up, but at the same time, I don't want to go completely sober.

It doesn't sound like you have the self control yet. You might be able to front for a little bit but it's all going to come out eventually. You should just be forward with her about your drinking problems. If you choose not to, just know that you are being selfish and inconsiderate to her. If you're fine with that, continue as played.

Imo, you should choose the girl over the booze. Abstain 100% and tell her why you're not drinking. She's had negative experiences with alcoholics in her life, and now she's dating a problem drinker who is hiding it from her.

That really doesn't sound like a very good plan, and thinking that you can just moderate and become a social drinker because you have a good thing in your life that you need to protect is pretty idealistic thinking.

Ask yourself what you have to lose by giving up booze? You may find out that you will lose nothing and gain a lot. Anyway, it's just another option that you should at least consider. Good luck.

When you say you don't want to go completely sober, does that mean you still want to be able to have a couple of drinks socially, or you also want to be able to drink an entire bottle of wine (alone?)?

You have no ****** clue what you are talking about. Yeah a FA has his **** together. You think a functioning alcholic's only difference between a sober person and them is one drinks and the other doesn't? I don't know one alcholic that isn't a dick or that their job wouldn't be performed a hell of a lot better if they were sober or who has a good relationship with a wife/gf/boyfriend.

My friend is a FA and he is an ******* but he believes he is the nicest guy in the world. His relationship is poor and his chick would leave him if she had somewhere to go. His work got worse and worse until he was let go.

The longest I've gone without alcohol is 16 days (happened 5 years ago). I'm not sure I'd want to go through that again. Although I could possibly pick 5 days out of the week to be sober, I feel I would need at least one day of the week to get a little buzz, hopefully just two drinks. Quitting alcohol indefinitely seems like to big a goal.

However, I think I should and will share these issues with her.

Ideally I'd like to be happy with 2-3 drinks, a couple times a week. Maybe I could just make a rule where I'm not going to drink home alone.

FYI - I'm not saying it isn't possible, but every alcoholic I know has tried and failed by setting different "rules" for their drinking.

Well here goes...

I just recently found and read this thread. I've been going back and forth in my head debating if I wanted to post in it or not. OOT doesn't know me, but I do have 2p2ers in my social circle. It's much easier to hide something than to admit to it.

I wish it wouldn't of taken so long, but I finally got the wake up call I really needed and I am on day 12 with no alcohol. Which is the longest I've gone without in at least 5 years.

Im 33 years old and I don't know when I became an alcoholic exactly but I've always had some sort of crutch. I tried weed and alcohol for the first time at 17 and I became an everyday smoker and an occasional drinker. I kind of wandered through life. I went to college, but rarely showed up didn't finish. I played poker and worked only if I had to.

At 25 I got lucky and met the girl of my dreams, moved in with her,she knew I was a pothead and she wasn't a fan. I snap quit because being with her was better than being high. We would go drink socially, but most of the time we were sober and I was happier than I'd ever been before.

Fast forward a bit, I made some bad money management decisions and we had to move to my parents house and I had to get a job. Moving from where she was from back to where I was from was the start of the downward spiral. I got a job working with a bunch of guys that liked to drink and reassociated with my old friends whose whole lives were based around drinking and weed.

I had a decent job and we got our own place, I was finally growing up. I just wasn't mentally prepared for the stressors of real life and turned to drinking as a method to avoid reality.

I went from being a guy that was fun to drink with and knew when to stop to a guy who was always drunk and angry.

Travelers became an everyday thing after work to try to hide my drinking. I would hide booze and sneak away to drink it, then get very angry if I got caught.

A little under 2 years ago I wrecked our car and got lucky I didn't die. I lost a job because I would get drunk every night and not show up on time.

I could go on and on about the bad decisions I have made because I was drunk. Sadly the last 5 years have been a blur.

We have an amazing 3 year old daughter and are 3 weeks from our 4th wedding anniversary, yet we are on the verge of divorce because I have chosen alcohol over everything else in life. My wife is absolutely amazing for putting up with what I made her put up with.

I wish I would of realized the important things in life sooner and I'm glad I did now.




Cliffs

TLDR
I let alcohol **** up my life and finally decided to quit!

Hey guys, I've deleted some posts that are not in the spirit of this thread, which is to be a safe environment to support people whose lives are being negatively affected by drugs and alcohol, either through their own use or the use of people close to them. The tone here is different than the rest of OOT. Thanks.

LFS

PS - I'm on vacation, sorry I didn't get to these until now. I also see there are some posts I'd like to respond to in detail, I will do that as soon as I have the time to read and respond thoughtfully. Hope everyone is well.

GW,

I'm sure it was tough to share that. I hope you and Kristy can work things out.