Just curious, where did LFS go? I noticed he hasn't posted any since last summer.

curious: anyone itt who succesfully replaced their alchohol consumption with a quaility sativa strain? I specifically suggest sativa, cause it's cerebral and more of an upper in contrast to couch lock/body buzz indicas...

edit: I am having a really tough time giving up wine and single malt.

I've known people that have, but the strain didn't matter. They just get high instead of drunk. Seems to be a good alternative...

However, it seems like anyone that has/had a drinking problem has to substitute it for some other activity in excess such as weed, exercise, religion etc.

I don't think you have to substitute one single activity for drinking if you quit.

Exercise is pretty standard behavior for all healthy people.

It would be beneficial to find a balance of healthy activities to submerse yourself in once you decide to quit. Again this applies to most mentally and physically healthy people regardless of whether they drink alcohol or not.

I am for the legalization of marijuana however I don't smoke, and didn't smoke to help quit drinking.

I don't really think an alcoholic should substitute another drug(even marijuana) when they are first attempting to quit. But I do agree it is a far less harmful drug.

Good luck to everyone.

I had my last drink in January 2010.

I definitely drink too much, and I would probably be better off if I didn't drink at all. Basically I drink roughly 5 days a week. Usually wine, and if I go out (which is maybe once a week these days), I usually have vodka sodas for some period of the night.

Most of the time I do not get extremely drunk. I have a financial markets job that requires me to wake up at 5:30am, and it is not an easy job, so I have to be alert. If I went out late and/or got very drunk with any regularity I would not be able to hold this job. i have been doing it for 16 years and have been decently successful.

So I would say my drinking is in control for the most part, and I am pretty healthy in other areas of my life (exercise regularly, don't smoke, not badly overweight) but I think it would be naive of me to say I don't have some degree of a drinking problem. First off, I drink at least 4 days a week, and it's usually more like 5 or 6. Secondly, it is not just one glass of wine. It is frequently closer to an entire bottle. Thirdly, on weekends, I frequently get it going in the afternoon (usually around 3 or 4), as opposed to evenings. Fourth, I consume drinks quickly, especially when I am out. When in a group, I am frequently the first to need a refill, so my drink count is usually higher than those around me. I don't go out that much anymore (more like once a week these days), but when I do I drink quite a bit. If it's an early night out and I'm home on the earlier side, I frequently keep the drinking going at home, which I know is a bad sign.

My habits have basically not gotten worse or better for the past decade, and on the surface my life looks pretty normal. I don't feel like my drinking has affected my work at all (my income and level of seniority at my firm has trended steadily higher for the past decade-plus), and my marriage is fine as well. My wife definitely has commented on my drinking on occasion, but not in a way that suggests she is excessively worried, angry, or unhappy.

I guess my question is, what are people's thoughts? Do I need to stop drinking altogether? Obviously that would be a good idea for anyone, but is it clear that I am in great danger with these drinking habits? Am I a functioning alcoholic? Am I definitely an alcoholic at all?

Because you asked: Yes, I think you are a functioning alcoholic. I also think it may be a long time before you experiment with cutting back because you seem to be in the highest tier of "successful functioning alcoholics."

Do you wake up every morning looking forward to that first drink?

Why do you think you're now having some self-doubt? Was it an accumulation of your wife's comments and maybe some other factors/incidents? Do you feel trapped in your career track?

Try stopping for 30 days and see what happens. Only you can answer those questions.

I think there are many different types of alcoholic, some need to drink everyday to feel normal thats the worst kind but some people can't stop myself from drinking if they even touch alcohol, they have no self control when it come to drinking. I would always make plans to do something not involving alcohol and then go to the pub say the famous last words "I'm only having one" Next thing you know its 2 days later and I'm stumbling home, i did this for years Its complete insanity now i think bout it. I also got the most horrific hangovers for the next few days with crippling anxiety and guilt over my drinking, would call in sick to work all the time miss appointments and just be altogether antisocial.

Thanks very much for replying.

No, I do not think about alcohol in the morning. Not ever. On days where I really feel like drinking the cravings don't come until mid-day or later in the day. The thought of drinking in the morning honestly is very unappealing to me. I crave coffee in the morning.

Why am I now having some self doubt? Great question. I think some of it just has to do with getting older. I'm 38 now, and I feel like heavy drinking is something that was more normal/acceptable in my peer group 6-10 years ago than it is now. All of my friends drink, some more than others, but centering an evening around it is not really done anymore. I feel like some of my friends have evolved into more mature drinkers than I have.

10 Questions

Do you lose time from work due to drinking?
Is drinking making your home life unhappy?
Is drinking affecting your reputation?
Have you ever felt remorse after drinking?
Do you crave a drink at a definite time daily?
Do you want a drink the next morning?
Do you drink alone?
Have you ever had a complete loss of memory as a result of drinking?
Is drinking jeopardizing your job or your business?
Have you ever been to a hospital or institution on account of drinking?

I'm gonna need to see some scientific data on that. I would be interested to know what % of the non-sober population answers yes to 3 or more. I bet it's pretty high.

Who hasn't ever felt remorse after drinking? So 99%+ are at 1 right there.

Same goes for loss of memory while drinking. I bet that's 90%+ of people who went to college.

Now say you have a glass of wine alone with dinner every now and then. That + got hammered a few times in college = alcoholic. (Btw is alcoholic the hardest word to spell for anyone else?)

my favorite line item on that list is the "do you ever drink alone?" one, like having a glass of wine with dinner alone is worse than getting kerslammered with friends

Yeah this, although I am the first to admit that I need to cut back on alcohol and this thread is a great reminder/motivator for me on a regular basis. But am I really drinking alone if I am for example, playing video games with friends online and we are all drinking, yet communicating over the internet with each other in real time? Or if I choose to have a few drinks while playing poker (alone) instead of going out and drinking much much more (not alone)?

Hey guys,

I’ve given a great deal of thought over the last year to the question of what, if anything, I should post in this thread. I decided many times I wasn’t going to post at all. Ultimately, however, I believe that I have an obligation to update because reading this might help someone. I also truly appreciate the caring that people have shown to each other and to me in this thread and I want to respect that.

For starters, I need to state that anything I post about alcoholism or addiction is MY experience and interpretation. Unless I am quoting directly from any literature, which I don’t plan to do, nothing I write should be interpreted as an official position of Alcoholics Anonymous or any other organization.

OK, with that said, here’s what happened: for some period of time after I quit drinking I think I was doing OK. I was proud I had stopped drinking alcohol and enjoyed not having hangovers, not having my wife worry, etc. But, as I’m certain I posted at some point in the thread, drinking wasn’t really my problem; life without drinking was my problem. Drinking didn’t cause me to lose my family, business, license, etc. It was headed that way, of course, but it didn’t happen.

Life without alcohol was very difficult. I was very unhappy and not really acknowledging that fact with anything approaching real honesty. For as long as I can remember the only times I actually felt “good” were when I was intoxicated or high. So, with that taken away I got very very dry and crispy. In many ways, I was worse off than when I was drinking.

For almost all my life I’ve taken almost all drugs that were offered to me. At some point my doctor gave me some Xanax to help with anxiety about flying and I thought that was pretty good. Over the years (while drinking) I took Xanax “recreationally”, although it’s not really that fun. During that time I had learned where and how to order Xanax over the internet.

After I quit alcohol I took Xanax more regularly. Over time, as my tolerance increased I took more and more. When I lost all the weight my sleep got super ****ed-up, which is when I think the hooks really got into me. In any case, I became addicted. I’ve heard some crazy stories about the enormous amounts of benzos some addicts take, but I think the most I ever took in a day would be like 5 MG. My usual daily was around 3 MG. Literally nobody knew that this had happened – not my wife, not my therapist, not my business partners, not my friends (although I had driven them all away anyway). I was completely alone.

Sometime around the end of 2011 I realized that things were bad – my memory was suffering, I was irritable and withdrawn, etc. So, again, without telling anyone what was happening, I devised a plan to get off the Xanax. I read medical journals, etc, to learn how this worked. I crossed over from Xanax to Valium because Valium has a longer half-life and is thus supposed to be easier to taper off of (debatable). I flirted with starting the process and started to cut down, but I really started the process in earnest in like April or May of 2012. I could write a LOT about the process of quitting benzos, but I don’t really want to do that here. Suffice it to say: everything you’ve heard about benzo addiction and withdrawal is true. It is the worst. I felt like I was losing my mind because I was. The physical and mental withdrawal symptoms are just devastating. Compounding this, I still hadn’t told anybody. So in addition to the withdrawal I was carrying tremendous secrecy and shame. It was really bad.

Sometime around late June or early July 2012 I started to give some real thought to killing myself. I was completely stuck and couldn’t imagine there was a way out of the Hell that I had created. I was sleeping maybe four hours a night, incredibly anxious and depressed, etc. I cried regularly for no apparent reason. At this point my wife clearly could see that I was falling apart, but she didn’t know why and I didn’t tell her.

I was having trouble coming up with a real suicide plan because my brain was so scrambled, something I attributed mostly to my lack of sleep. So I started to learn to meditate, primarily in order to hopefully get some sleep so I could get it together enough to kill myself (my sponsor gets a big kick out of that reasoning). Fortunately, the meditation succeeded in giving my poor brain some breathing room. One morning in August I had a moment of clarity and knew that the jig was up. For the first time in my recent memory, I wanted to live. I knew I needed help. The first person I told about what was happening was my therapist. I told him I didn’t think I had the strength to tell my wife, but he helped me change my mind about that. I told her the next day. The day after that I went to a psychopharmacologist to get medical assistance with my self-designed withdrawal plan and to get a prescription for Valium (so that I wouldn’t be taking German internet Valium anymore, although I really don’t think the product quality was different at all). My plan was very well researched and designed, so I was allowed to continue my very slow taper with medical supervision. I continued the taper to the end and took my last (extremely, extremely tiny by that point) dose of Valium on 12/26/12.

I went to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous on 9/20/12 and committed to the program a week later on 9/27/12. I go to meetings regularly, have a sponsor, and am actively working the steps. I am very lucky that I was in complete and total despair when I walked in the door of my first meeting. I knew that MY way of living really didn’t work. I didn’t necessarily believe that the guys in that room had the answers, but it couldn’t be worse that anything I’d come up with. This has proven, so far, to be correct. I am completely drug and alcohol free and doing pretty well, all things considered. I have good days and bad, but most importantly I have ways of dealing with bad days. I talk to my friends in the program, I talk to my sponsor, and I work the steps. I still have them, but my lows aren’t as low as they were before.

As I said, drinking wasn’t exactly my problem, life was my problem. Drinking was the solution. And for a long, long, time, it worked pretty well. With alcohol I could talk to people (women), feel confident, etc. It worked great, until it didn’t. So I got into a position where I couldn’t live with alcohol and I couldn’t live without it. The program I’m currently following is a way to live without alcohol and not be a huge ****ing mess. If I stopped following this program I don’t think I’d immediately start drinking or using or anything like that. But I would get super crispy. I’d go back to being a terrible husband, father, businessperson, etc. I’d be miserable. Eventually I do believe I would drink, use, or harm myself.

To the people who are wondering if they are alcoholics, my experience is that you should look at how you are when you’re not drinking as opposed to when you are. Also, here is the procedure that is recommended by the program: try an experiment of controlled drinking. Drink two drinks every day – no more, no less – for a month. If you can do that, you are probably not an alcoholic. If you try that experiment and you fail you might want to say “oh, I wasn’t really trying”. Well, that’s up to you. But if you’re serious about it and can’t do the controlled drinking, I would suggest that you might want to seek some help.

Man that turned into a long post. I’m sure there are things I meant to say that didn’t get written, maybe I’ll add stuff later. I am happy to answer questions, but again I will say that I’m not a spokesperson for anything. I’m not going to get into a debate about AA – it has worked great for me and a ton of people I know, that’s it. If you’re really interested in AA you should probably PM me. If someone is reading this and knows they need help and is waiting for a sign, I would suggest to you that this post is it. I would like nothing more than the opportunity to help you.

Finally, I will say that it is highly likely that some of the details in this post conflict with things I’ve posted in the past. For much of this thread I was an active, if secret, addict. If there are contradictory things I’ve posted before, it’s because I was lying, whether I knew I was or not. That’s what I do, lie and obscure the truth. But I’m working on that.

LFS

PS – LO ****ing L at the first line of my OP. “I may or may not be an alcoholic”. That is rich!

You rock LFS. So glad to see you post again; so sorry you've had to go through all of that.

I too have refrained from posting a lot about my AA experience for whatever reason, even though I have been sober for 17 yrs after first going to meetings when I was 24. Maybe your story has inspired me to share more on the off chance it could help someone.

Damn LFS, that took a lot of guts to write. I guess I know why our poker games stopped now

I'm not sure if it's been recommended to you, but trazadone really helped me with my sleeping. I sleep 7-8 hours a night now (as opposed to 5-6 before and I would often wake up for a couple hours in the middle of the night) and feel like a completely different person during the day. There's no fuzzy-headedness in the morning either.

Good luck dude, hope to see you again soon! I don't even mind having a sober poker game if that would make things easier for you.

Thanks guys!

Suzzer, I don't know anything about trazadone, but as you might imagine these days I'm pretty fearful of any solutions that come in pill form. I meditate daily, that has helped me keep an even keel. I get six hours of sleep most nights, and when I get less I'm better equipped to deal.

Trazadone is a liquid in the form I take it - between .4 and .7ml depending on how long I want to sleep. It doesn't give you any kind of buzz or anything. The difference in how I feel during the day after 8 hours of sleep, how I deal with my coworkers, etc. is amazing. I don't take it all the time and I can still sleep pretty well then too, so at least so far I haven't become dependent on it. Might be worth asking about anyway.

I really want to try meditation but I'm so restless and scatter brained it's almost like torture for me. But that may mean it would do me a lot of good.

Good for you LFS

Trazadone was given out at rehabs to help kids sleep. Mostly the heroin addicts. It isn't that bad, probably can be addicting, but not like benzos.

FWIW, LFS, for years I lied to Psychiatrists about my motive for needing klonopin. And they gave it to me. I was taking that when I couldn't drink or to detox myself. Was told what a deadly combination alcohol and benzos can be


Thanks for you post too.


Edit: I want to know what people think about this, mostly those who identify as alcoholics or addicts, but others too. The only way to be sober and get better is to get uncomfortable at first by getting out of yourself and helping others. Or rather, helping others is key to being happy when sober.

There's always going to be someone at a meeting with less time than you - and any time spent talking to him or her is time you won't be thinking about yourself.

I'm no expert, but helping others certainly seems to be an enormous part of the program. Regular, honest, real contact with other human beings is something I had completely rejected in my life. That situation was both a source of my many of my problems and a real problem unto itself. Helping others is an opportunity to be rigorously honest, which is absolutely crucial to my recovery. Also, it takes my focus off how I'm feeling. If I'm thinking about someone else I have less of an opportunity to get all up inside my head. I can't tell you how many times I'll call one of my buddies thinking I'm going to unload about all the crap in my head, but before I get a chance they jump in with their own situation. After a few minutes I've completely forgotten about my ludicrous complaints. It just works.

Talking to other people, giving out my number, and all that was really hard for me to do, but now it's part of my daily routine. It goes in the category of things that are totally foreign to me, but I see guys doing it and feeling good, so I figured I might as well try it.

Trazodone is non-addictive. We hand it out like candy in the psych hospitals because it's a good sleep aid that doesn't work like alcohol, benzos, and ambien all do and isn't addictive. It's supposed to give you a good sleep.

It's really an anti-depressant that has a sedating side effect. For depression, it's approved to a max dose between 400 and 600mg daily, but for sleep we tend to use 50mg or 100mg, maybe up to 200mg if needed, so it's rather safe for sleep too (though of course not without potential side effects).

And on top of all this, I believe it's rather cheap.

I could always talk to my sponsor and be honest and he would always listen me and my day and then, especially if I was complaining or telling him I felt irritated, he would say "hmm, well why don't you get out of the house and go see if you can help someone else."

It angered me at first that he didn't acknowledge the B.S. I had to deal with at work. But, it is a strange thing when you help someone else it must do something chemically in your brain to make you feel good/think you are good.

I was told to get numbers and call 5 people a day. So weird at first