I was in rehab for 60 days. Although i knew i was not ready to come home i still did so due to feeling as though the program was no longer working for me & that i needed to come home and get my stuff together b/c i felt like i no longer had my families full support. I think they just thought i was OK/rehabilitated because i began looking healthy again. Anyway, i relapsed last night w/alcohol, but didnt end up calling my dealer for tina like i usually would have. I was dropped off at an AA meeting i had promised a friend i would go to an hr later by a friend while i still had a little buzz going & the girls i was in rehab with could smell it apparently soo to make matters worse everyone knows i relapsed. I feel terrible about it, but overall in good spirits today. Any advice would be helpful :)
two questions
1.i plan on moving into a sober living idk if i should tell them i relapsed.??
2.Even though i wasnt drunk i feel terrible for putting my friend (alcoholic) p through the smell and probably not my typical behavior....any advice on what i should say when i apologize
I was in rehab for 60 days. Although i knew i was not ready to come home i still did so due to feeling as though the program was no longer working for me & that i needed to come home and get my stuff together b/c i felt like i no longer had my families full support. I think they just thought i was OK/rehabilitated because i began looking healthy again. Anyway, i relapsed last night w/alcohol, but didnt end up calling my dealer for tina like i usually would have. I was dropped off at an AA meeting i had promised a friend i would go to an hr later by a friend while i still had a little buzz going & the girls i was in rehab with could smell it apparently soo to make matters worse everyone knows i relapsed. I feel terrible about it, but overall in good spirits today. Any advice would be helpful :)
two questions
1.i plan on moving into a sober living idk if i should tell them i relapsed.??
2.Even though i wasnt drunk i feel terrible for putting my friend (alcoholic) p through the smell and probably not my typical behavior....any advice on what i should say when i apologize
Thanks
1. yes be honest 2. I am sorry to have put you through that, thank you for being there for me
Sobriety doesn't work unless it is the most important thing in our lives, if I drink it isn't the rehabs fault or my families fault, the times I drank I was the one that put the bottle up to my lips, no one help me down.
You want to know why I relapsed?
Because I am an alcoholic, and that's what alcoholics do, once I strated taking responsibility not only for my drinking but for my own sobriety, it made sobriety once step closer to getting and keeping. As long as I blamed others I couldn't get and stay sober.
Period, that was non-negotiable for me, and was part and parcel of my denial, of me bullshitting myself.
If you ask him why he started on that last bender, the chances are he will offer you any one of a hundred alibis. Sometimes these excuses have a certain plausibility, but none of them really makes sense in the light of the havoc an alcoholic's drinking bout creates. They sound like the philosophy of the man who, having a headache, beats himself on the head with a hammer so that he can't feel the ache. If you draw this fallacious reasoning to the attention of an alcoholic, he will laugh it off, or become irritated and refuse to talk.
Once in a while he may tell the truth. And the truth, strange to say, is usually that he has no more idea why he took that first drink than you have. Some drinkers have excuses with which they are satisfied part of the time. But in their hearts they really do not know why they do it. Once this malady has a real hold, they are a baffled lot. There is the obsession that somehow, someday, they will beat the game. But they often suspect they are down for the count.
So if you are powerless over alcohol and your life is unmanageable, you know where to go get help, and this is just for me but the first thing I had to do was stop bullshitting myself and those around me.
We think few, to whom this book will appeal, can stay dry anything like a year. Some will be drunk the day after making their resolutions; most of them within a few weeks.
For those who are unable to drink moderately the question is how to stop altogether. We are assuming, of course, that the reader desires to stop. Whether such a person can quit upon a nonspiritual basis depends upon the extent to which he has already lost the power to choose whether he will drink or not.Yet we found it impossible. This is the baffling feature of alcoholism as we know it this utter inability to leave it alone, no matter how great the necessity or the wish.Many of us felt that we had plenty of character. There was a tremendous urge to cease forever.
The steps work when nothing else does, when you are ready, we will be here.
__________________
Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a night, light a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
What do you mean by "I no longer had my family's full support? The problem wasn't your family's "full support" or lack of it, it was that your disease had the upper hand and you wanted to get out and drink or use again. You only have yourself to worry about. If you relapsed because you didn't have your family's "full support", just keep drinking. Pretty soon you won't have a family anyway so their "full support" or lack of it won't be a factor. You need to get honest and quit blaming people, places and things outside yourself for your problems.
Listen---you don't deserve to be in a sober living place if you're not living sober. Let someone else have it who does want to be sober and who really does deserve the spot.
You got drunk if you took a single drink! You don't have to be falling down, slobbering, and puking in order to be drunk. In fact, I'd go so far as to say you weren't ever really sober in the first place. Being sober is not just not drinking for awhile, whether you're in a rehab place or not. Sobriety is being able to live life on life's terms without taking a drink or using a mind-altering substance.
You weren't worried about your family or your friend when you got out and drank again. At least get honest enough with yourself to admit you drank because you're an alcoholic and honest enough with others to give up that spot in sober living to let someone else have it who truly does want sobriety and deserves the spot.
Guilt is a much better tool for change than a warm gun.
Aloha Happiness...I hated feeling guilty with a hot passion. Feeling guilty made me think crazy and do crazy stuff and guilt with alcohol resulted in many of my unintentional visits to foreign planets. Sober I hated the feeling (oh I said that) and I wanted to know how to get out from under it. I got the answers in the rooms of recovery. Guilt drove me to the meetings and the literature and a sponsor and working the steps and a major working relationship with a power greater than my own ego where guilt had a large master bedroom well equipped.
Use guilt and the toxic feelings that come with it to keep you in your recovery. Go when you need to, when you want to, when you don't want to and stay.
You are responsible and it isn't necessary that the awareness continue to result in guilt.
You know, in my post, I was saying "you need to do this" and "you didn't do that". With one finger pointed at you, there were four more pointed back at me. The same thing I was saying about "you" is true for me, too. The last time I drank, I thought I didn't "get drunk" again, either, but then I learned that even if I only took one sip, I had activated my disease again, so the two or three drinks I took that day were a relapse. I didn't go on a rampage or get stumbling, falling down drunk, either. But my disease was in full swing again and I'd lost all that ground I'd gained in the three months without drinking. I had to start all over from scratch again.
I didn't have my family's full support, either. In fact, most of my family wanted nothing more to do with me by then. The only ones who did were a couple of my poor kids who didn't really have a choice because they were too young to leave home at that time. My family didn't give me their "full support" for my drinking, either, but that doesn't make me quit drinking any more than me having my family's full support would have kept me sober. They'd given me their full support so many times by then, only to have me repay them with kicking sh** in their faces and breaking their hearts again, that they wouldn't give it anymore. They probably wished I'd just hurry up and die and get it over with so they could stop watching me kill myself one drink at a time.
We all have to get honest, as painful as that is, and quit blaming other people for not loving us enough, for not giving us enough, for not supporting us "fully" enough, and just get on with sobriety if that's what we really want. I had to do it. Larry had to do it. Jerry had to do it. Anyone with any sobriety has to do it. And we have to work at it with all our hearts and souls. For me to show I wanted it that much, I had to quit blaming everyone else, admit what I was, and work for what I really wanted to be instead---sober.
I had to spend my time under bridges but you don't have to if you get serious about it sooner than I did.
You didn't have the program if you drank again when you got out. I didn't have it either, when I drank again. You don't have it till you work it because you want it real bad. When you want it that bad, then it will work for you. Not before.
-- Edited by Ellen E on Thursday 1st of April 2010 07:09:42 PM
Welcome to MIP. Wow, did your Post bring back memories of doing this same kind of thing. So many times, lost count.
In your Profile I saw that you are pretty young, that is great too.
You might call my response a sort of cautionary tale about the very real PROGRESSION of the Disease....
I did this same sort of dancing around in and out of AA, in the beginning, just like Ellen, having a lot of loving and caring famly and friends supporting me....and what did I do with it, just manipulate it.....for almost 7 and a half years, and you guessed it, not one living soul wanted anything to do with me. When only death was standing before me, then I found the willingness to do whatever it took, for at the end of my drinking, I was in what you might call the Grip of Alcoholism,drank 24/7 everyday, and I really did want out. It was on my 3rd suicide attempt that once again failed, did I turn to a God that I did not understand at all, and simply ask that same mysterious God to Please show me a different way.....the wilingness I am speaking about was something that was given to me by that same mysterious HP.
Ann, that was my moment.....to this day, 19 and half years ago, I have not returned, nor ever wanted to Just have "one". My first year of going to a meeting every single day of the entire year, did that for almost 3 or 4 of the following years, but what I started to say was that first year, well really felt a lot more like going daily to ICU, than AA. I had been to hundreds and hundreds of AA meetings. They call that the swinging door of AA.
In my heart I am really feeling for you dear, and I Pray that you listen carefully to all that has been written by your real friends here. This fantastic Board can offer up in some way a very deep and personal experiences on a daily basis, o those that have been in your shoes, and now have a wonderful life, thanks to a LOVING God and to this AA Program and the Steps of Recovery.
Whatever happened in the last week regarding rehab, family issues, and all the other stuff that happened before today is gone. We together have this day to start over, not drink and tomorrow just redo that, no matter what, we don't drink, if our asses fall off, we dont drink.
This is one of the tried and true sayings.....If we Keep Sobriety in FRONT OF EVERYTHING ELSE, Chances are good that we can keep it...
Put something, ANYTHING IN FRONT OF SOBRIETY, Chances of holding on to it get very slim, if at all.
Hope and Pray you will join us in our Journey, and follow those tried and true suggestions, go to a meeting everyday, look for and find a Sponsor with some good sobriety time, and begin working the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Those beloved 12 Steps of Recovery, are the steps we take, in order, and you will be amazed before you are half way though. This Program Works, as has been said here, but ONLY if we work it.
A Big Hug, and again Welcome dear.
Toni
-- Edited by Just Toni on Thursday 1st of April 2010 08:16:29 PM
Makes me wonder what the heck is being "taught" in rehab these days...either not much (that I recognize as good, contemporary, science-based important things to know about the disease of alcoholism and the process of recovery and the dynamics of relapse and relapse prevention) or someone wasn't listening. Maybe back to rehab, along with back to Step One, is worth considering. Also sounds like there are drugs in addition to alcohol involved, so there's that to deal with as well. Half measures avail us nothing.
Sure brings back a lot of memories for me to. I was in rehab for 120 days. I came out clean as heck and free from desire to do anythings to endanger my new life with my wife, kids, and sobriety. That lasted 18 months. Then one day I decided that taking an Ultram could not hurt me. It was off to the races again, and this time it was alcohol. Im coming up on 2 weeks of my latest try. My only advice is that you realize we all go through the same thing.
The only thing rehab did for me was get me a (somewhat) decent attitude towards living sober and clear my head. Without A.A. I cannot stay sober and I definitely can't keep a (somewhat) decent attitude. When I came into the program they told me I had to change. Change what? Everything!
The only thing rehab did for me was get me a (somewhat) decent attitude towards living sober and clear my head. Without A.A. I cannot stay sober and I definitely can't keep a (somewhat) decent attitude. When I came into the program they told me I had to change. Change what? Everything!
