Thank you for the reminder.......I"m so glad you made it back. Please, keep coming.

(((hugs)))

First of all I'm glad that you made it back Allison and that it sounds like you are making a good effort to get back in the program. And I hope that you make it to long term sobriety but I got to say that you were spared the consequences of the DUI and you were enabled by your husband (and the police). You really got away with it and down deep your denial and disease will use that at your very next weak moment. If you read my previous comments you'd know how skeptical I am about people getting sober while in relationships and especially enabling relationships, which by nature are dysfunctional.  It's possible but that person must work extra hard to avoid their ego telling them that "I'm ok because I have That person in my life".

So while you're saying and doing all the right things (presumably for your benefit), under the duress of your recent troublesome relapse, what is going to keep you from straying when the pressure is off? And if you said and did all this stuff last time, to prove to yourself and at that point others that you were "getting it", were you full of it then? and are you full of it now? Ask yourself this in every meeting that you go to, "what am I doing, in my program, that will make me the 1 in 20 people In AA that Will make it to long term sobriety?". Look around the meeting, 19 others will have to leave in order for you to make it. There is no shame in being a survivor of this disease, but how will you make it past the other 19? There is always a lot of talk about "saying the right thing" to newcomers and people coming back in, but the reality is that people that "get it" and "make it" can't be made to leave the program. If you locked them out of the meeting, they'd find a way to break in because they have turned their obsession to drink into an obsession to get sober and they will spend several hours each and every day doing just that. Placing their sobriety in front of all other obligations and interests in their life, because they know that if they lose their sobriety, they will lose everything else as well.
Sadly people that still have jobs, spouses, family, and other distractions will have a hard time with denial. I heard it said that "Youth, Health, Wealth, and Brains are major obstacles to getting and staying sober".

I too was stuck in the revolving door for two years (and a lot more if you consider that I went to my first meeting at 15yo and didn't get sober till I was 29). I was using AA, like a base runner in baseball uses first base, diving back to it in order to be safe at the pitch out (trouble) after continuing trying to steal second base (relapse). When the pressure from spouse, family, employer, the law... are bearing down, jumping back into AA to prove that I'm "Safe". But when the pressure was off I couldn't resist the temptation of the forbiden. I also narrowly escaped being convicted for 2 DUI's by refusing the breathe test and hiring a good attorney and learned nothing from the experiences. It wasn't until I lost the best job I ever had, lost my wife, and my best drinking/drugging friend to an overdose that I finally had no enablers left and I got scared and finally committed to this simple program. I had been around long enough, at that point, to see a lot of "walking talking Big Books" go out and realized what was real for me was getting a tough sponsor who'd tell me how full of shit that I was (and listening to him instead of doing what I wanted to do), going to meetings every day for years, and promptly working through the steps. My sponsor told me that thing between my ears, that I thought made me soooo smart, was in reality a toxic waste dump and that I shouldn't try ant use it untill I was sober for a few years. My best thinking go me here. So I got a kick out of telling myself that to shut up and that I was full of shit. Although it may sound self defeating, I need to be defeated. My ego was killing me.

Allison good luck in your new journey. Consider it all new and don't look back. Glad that your back, stick around.

Dean

-- Edited by StPeteDean at 22:03, 2008-07-21

Hi Allison,

Welcome back! It's so good that you have come back.

Please keep posting and letting us know how things are going for you, won't you? We're all here for you.

Take care,

Carol

Welcome back!