About 2:00PM yesterday I realized it was my six year sobriety anniversary (or birthday, as it's commonly referred to in AA). If you're thinking about getting sober, or are newly sober, and are worried about it being boring, let me assure you that in my case it has not been that. The ride, in fact, seems to get wilder as time goes on. As I've heard a million times from long-time sober people, I need the program and the stuff I've learned even more now than I did when I got sober in the first place. For me, the pillars that have kept me completely sober and relatively sane are: AA, which needs to include all three of unity (meetings), service (helping others to achieve sobriety), and recovery (working the steps); therapy; meditation; exercise; and diet. I can slip a little on one or the other but if I'm taking all these actions I have found will slide back toward the middle eventually.

It was anything but the easiest year, but I'm looking forward to whatever's ahead. I've got a ton of growing to do but am confident the conditions are in place to allow that to happen.

Nice job LFS!

Approaching 90 days myself, which will coincidentally be on New Year Eve.

Last drink was 12/24 and the plan is for that to be my last one, at least for a few months anyway.

Been reading the thread from the beginning. When WVU made an appearance it prompted me to go back through and read his whole saga last night. Seeing posts from a dead man talking about his struggle is pretty poignant.

Nice work people! I'm not sure exactly my date of my last drink but I'm sure it's been a whole year now. I love the no booze, good lord I was just not wired for it. LFS, we may have different approaches but it sounds like things are going well and thanks for the thread. It's got to be helpful for people looking to quit to be able to read over others' experiences and struggles and, hopefully, successes. Looking forward to waking up New Years with no hangover whatsoever, amazing how healthier I feel now.

to everyone working to improve themselves, keep it up!


EDIT: p.s. what a terrible username I have for this thread!

Congrats, man. Im battling my own drinking/online plo demons and they often are tied together.

Good going, Dodger. I'm about to hit 2 years sober, and as I've said earlier in this thread it was literally the best decision I ever made.

Huge congrats to LFS on his 6 years too!

Quickly checking in, 134 days today. I'd meant to make some big 100 day milestone post and I forgot. Then I was like "I'll do it at 120" and I forgot. Because I'm out living life and getting things done instead of drinking / recovering from a hangover / thinking about drinking all the time.

I'm not religious but the word "miracle" comes to mind when I reflect that a bit more than four short months ago I was suicidal and drinking vodka for breakfast.

Four months later life isn't perfect but holy **** I'm practically a new person. I wake up every day with a clear head, a clear direction, ready to kick ass from sunup to sundown. The obsession is gone (for a day at a time,) the weight is lifted, I'm free to be the best possible version of myself. This isn't just a feeling, this is manifesting in concrete ways. A new career, a new body, a new social circle, projects coming to fruition.

I could not have done this without AA.

I have to admit that I have been slipping in my program a little bit, not making as many meetings as I should. I guess that's what I need to be addressing right now, because there is no shortage of guys who get sober, turn their life around, gradually lose their need for the program (or so they think) and then they slip and bring down everything they've built 20 years later. We have to remember that the threat is always at our doorstep and sometimes the most dangerous times are those in which we feel safest.

I will simply close by saying once again - if you're struggling, try AA. I'm an atheist and a cynical bastard. If it's working for me it can work for you.

Happy New Year everyone!

That is outstanding, thank you for sharing. If you don’t have a sponsor, get one tonight. Doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s not a marriage. Just a temporary one is fine.

Anybody have any experience with toxic myopathy? (alcoholic myopathy)

Had never even heard of it until recently

That does not sound like fun!

Hope all are doing well. My sponsee, who was pretty committed all things considered, completely disappeared. Obviously this happens and it's just a part of each of our journeys, but still a bummer. In many ways it makes me grateful for the desperate state I was in when I got sober - I couldn't help but commit.

I'm still going good, 5+ months under my belt. I assume when someone completely disappears that more than likely means they started drinking again.

I have a Vegas trip planned for June that is tempting me to drink. I keep going back and forth whether I want to. See if the changes I've made can keep things under control, or just not risk it. I obviously know what the advice will be from everyone, which is the main reason I am against drinking during it, other's past experiences have shown I'll just return to my previous habits.

I just made it through a sober Vegas trip. Not gonna lie, was definitely a challenge at times, but wow what a feeling flying out of that airport with a clear head.

Has anyone here who has quit drinking found that you substituted something instead of the alcohol, for example marijuana?

A few of us in thread use weed. There are a few issues at play, one of which is whether using substances in general is a good idea, one of which is whether using weed helps people avoid alcohol or brings them back to their substance of choice. Those are things for individual people to figure out. The only thing I'd say for sure is that if you want to get sober, do it without switching to another drug. Bargaining like that tends to have the same result as the old "I'll just have one".

Personally, I am an alcoholic and an addict. Alcohol is one of the things I can use alcoholically, but it's not the only one. Alcohol, drugs, food, women, money, etc, were things I used to escape real existence. It doesn't work. I don't think that somebody like me can "replace" alcohol with anything other than real sobriety with any success at all.

But there are people who are "problem drinkers" who are able, with sufficient reason, to stop/moderate their drinking. People like that can probably use marijuana in moderation without severe consequences. Again, I am not one of those people.

The way the question is phrased does make me wonder a bit. If pot is a "substitute", what is the substitute's purpose? In my experience, for normal users of alcohol and drugs, they don't really have a "purpose" exactly. It's just something those people do, or don't do. For ME, they surely did have a purpose. And that's not a good thing.

I'm well, about 15 months sober. Don't want to make a secret of that I'm into non-alcoholic beers. Once again the exception confirms the rule, probably can't be recommended on a greater scale. It's totally different from when my "hobby" was whisky though. Then, yes the "taste", but HAD to have it. Not so now with the NA stuff.

The addiction was the basis. And I'm done with it and the ridiculous partly successful controlling. Will not test my body and mind with it again.

I consider myself an addict but I still smoke pot. When I first quit opiates I definitely substituted with alcohol, that seemed ok at first but obviously didn't work out as a long term solution.

Day 159 off the booze today and never felt better. Maybe I'm just lucky but I've never fell into any of the negative stereotypes with weed--in fact I enjoy trying to actively subvert them. I feel the positives MJ brings into my life (thinking about problems/solutions from a different perspective, reduces poker tilt, physical + social enjoyment) outweigh the negatives which is never something I could have said about alcohol, but of course MJ affects everyone differently and YMMV.

My concern with pot is that, unlike alcohol or "harder" drugs, some people seem to be able to use it constantly and more-or-less perform basic human functions while still really sleepwalking through life. It seems to be more difficult to hit a bottom smoking pot than it is with other stuff. You can't take pills the way I took pills and have it carry on for 10 years without things falling apart, it's just not possible. But I know people who have spent 30 years stoned. Their lives have gone nowhere, but they also aren't complete disasters. I personally needed for things to get really, really bad in order to change in some very necessary ways.

Just to be clear, as far as I'm concerned everybody's got their own deal and should do what works for them as long as it isn't harming someone else. Just for me personally, I'm at a place today where, unpleasant as it sometimes can be, I feel a need to be present and accounted for as much as I possibly can. I don't even like taking cold or allergy medicine and only do so if it's absolutely necessary because it fogs me up.

Personally, my biggest challenge is self esteem and that requires achievement. I can’t use anything and feel good about myself, which means I can’t be happy. I fully understand and appreciate others are different. Life is tough, whatever works for someone else is not my business.

For me alcohol kind of fogged up my life the last years, when the consumption tended to increase, touching various lower guidelines. It was a daily exercise, nearly all weekdays. The weekends needed to be sober for not sinking in big time, pure self preservation.

I thought my creativity was partly enabled by alcohol, but it was more in spite of it, it's better now. I sleep a bit after work, why having alcohol just messing up the sleep quality?

Looking back on my post it does read just like someone who is in denial about a problem. I would certainly like to get the point where I don't feel like I want to use pot to "enhance" my life at all but I just don't think I'm there yet. For now it is a vice I am okay with keeping, especially if it helps keep me off the booze.

Just grateful to be able to wake up early on a Sunday morning and share with you all... I am certainly very blessed.

I think it is interesting to discuss this subject within the context of a poker forum. Do you think of poker/gambling as a potential future pitfall? I would think that anyone who gravitates towards addictive behavior would also need to steer clear of poker too.

But there seem to be a lot of sober poker players, ie Greg Merson for one. Seems to me like in relation to alcohol, MJ would be similar to poker. (way less harmful vices) Yet I imagine many/most sober people would consider playing poker to be much less risky for an alcoholic than using MJ.

I suppose that one is a chemical, and one is an activity so there could be differences in developing tolerance/dependancy/etc. But ironically, it seems to me that the worst case scenario that could come from problems with gambling could be far far worse than the problems that could come from MJ (other than legal consequences).

Just my .02. GL to all.

It's an interesting question. I gambled and played poker a ton for the better part of 30 years but never did so addictively/compulsively. When my ability to win dropped after UIEGA, I just stopped. Poker was always about the winning for me, never really about the "action" which seems to be the issue with compulsive gamblers. I have not played much poker since getting sober and don't really have the urge - I had already mostly stopped even before getting sober.

But I do know that gambling problems can be a super-*****, especially in people who were formerly alcoholics/addicts. I imagine it's because they're using it for the same purpose that drugs and alcohol served.

True, drug and alcohol addicts are more likely to:

- get addicted to gambling
- get addicted to eating
- get addicted to working out
- get addicted to work
- get addicted to shopping
- get addicted to sex

...than people who aren’t addicted to drugs or alcohol.


This isn’t rocket science and I honestly can’t believe there is so much speculation about what someone “can and can’t do” as an addict in a thread where people claim to know a lot about addiction. Everyone exists on the spectrum, everyone’s brain chemistry is different, it is a complete waste of time to try to make blanket statements regarding this stuff. The only thing that is definitely true for any addict is that as a person prone to addiction, you are more likely to get addicted to (any)thing, whether it be chemical, physical, healthy, or unhealthy.

I can say that I’ve played poker for 10 years and would never set a foot in the pit; I don’t even want to test those waters. I approach pretty much anything addictive with the same degree of wariness.

People who have problems with addiction in one area definitely often have problems in others, but of course that doesn't mean that all potentially addictive things are dangerous to everyone with addiction problems. I gamble for a living and the idea that I would get addicted to it is ludicrous to me, I find it incredibly mundane. It just doesn't do it for me. Similarly, it's very unlikely I would get addicted to stimulants; I just don't like feeling that way. Alcohol, benzos, opiates, the internet/distraction sickness in general? Now we're talking. That's my thing, is to numb myself. Anything which allows me to withdraw and be tranquilized, that's where the danger is for me.