Go to meetings!!!! I want to but something is blocking me. I know what I have to do but I can't seem to do it. I want someone to take me under their wing and make sure I get to meetings for just one week. I can't go to rehab. Not with my position and my job. People look up to me. I'll be O.K. if I can get to meetings. I had a sponser but she's too busy to bother with me. I just need someone (physically) in my life who cares that I am sober and helps me to achieve it. I won't be needy forever, but right now I am. God, please... just for one week I need a mother to care about me (at age 60). During the day I'm a competent professional but at home I dissolve into a needy, hurt child. Is there any healing for our earliest deprivations in life? I love my life I've made on so many levels but there is this deep, deep dark hurt that won't go away. I did 79 days last year, but I can't find my way back there. I want to and make deals with myself but I break them each day at 5:00 P.M.
Hi MAL, you are on the east coast and i am on the west..... consider yourself hugged. i drank as soon as i got in my door after work. so, if you are a bit like me, it sounds like you might need to stay away from your home for a week after work. is there someone you can visit after work? and spend the night? if it hits you like me, the minute you get home you will find a reason to drink. but if you are not going home, but visiting a friend or relative, you do not have to drink. plus you can go to a meeting after work or after dinner, and maybe again before work. you can call and ask if there is an AA woman who you can meet at a specific meeting before you go in. These are just some suggestions, and i hope you remember there is nothing that can happen to you that alcohol cannot make worse. it is up to you to take just a little step towards new decisions for your life after work and your HP will be right there with you. hugs jj
Aloha MAL...This is how you get help so you got that part down. Call the phone number to your central office (AA) and ask them the same thing you are asking here and tell them where you can be picked up.
I can feel your pain Mal, and remember that helpless, hopeless feeling still today. I hope you understand that people in AA do care if your sober or not. We are a fellowship of men and women that care, and HELP each other stay sober. That being said, the only one that's going to be able to get you back in the fellowship is you. If you feel that you need someone to "physically" take you to meetings, then it sounds to me like your not ready to go back. If you really wanted sobriety, I mean REALLY wanted it more than anything else, then there should be NOTHING standing in your way.
"If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to GO TO ANY LENGTH to get it, then your ready to take certain steps"
Until you decide that there is nothing more important in your life than your own sobriety, then it's just not going to work. I was told early on (and believe it today with all my heart) that anything I put ahead of my sobriety, I will lose. If I place jobs, family, and friends ahead of my sobriety I will lose them all. How about instead of making deals with yourself you make decisions? I made all kinds of deals with God, family, and friends when I was drinking, but all were in vain. Besides, Why would I (an alcoholic) want to make a deal with myself? When I was drinking that was making deals with the devil. You say something is blocking you. Could that maybe mean your not willing to surrender to a power greater than you that can, and will restore you to sanity?
No one can want it for you, you have to want it for yourself. No one can get you sober, you have to get yourself sober, but not alone. There are rooms full of people that want to help you get and stay sober if you accept their help and listen to their suggestions. Our BB tells us that in order to keep it, we have to give it away. I stay sober by helping other alcoholics get and stay sober. You might say a big part of my sobriety is based on people like you who have a desire to stop drinking.
Oh honey, you've got me pegged! I love your post and it's SO helpful. Ya, I need to find a friend to stay with for a week while I get sober. As soon as I get home - that's it!!! Nothing stops me. Then the evening is shot! I love you for connecting and understanding. MAL
Why do you seem to think that by going to meetings you're going to stay sober ?
Our very own literature tells us that if we put reliance upon ppl before God we are doomed !!
Maybe so... but on the other hand, here's what our own literature says, out of the mouth of A.A. number three upon being approached by Bill W. and Dr. Bob:
"I used to be strong for the church, but that won't fix it. I've prayed to God on hangover mornings and sworn that I'd never touch another drop but by nine o'clock I'd be boiled as an owl."
Next day found the prospect more receptive. He had been thinking it over. "Maybe you're right," he said. "God ought to be able to do anything." Then he added, "He sure didn't do much for me when I was trying to fight this booze racket alone."
God works through other people, IMO. And God helps those who help themselves. Which may mean going to meetings if they are available. I cringe when I hear people telling others that they just need to find a stronger connection with their Higher Power, that seem to pooh-pooh any kind of reliance upon meetings - the heart of this program is ONE ALCOHOLIC WORKING WITH ANOTHER. Period, end of story. For many people, meetings are an important part of that. They may not be the ONLY part of it, and meetings ALONE may not be enough to keep a person sober - but for those in early sobriety (and even some with years in the program), they are often the best thing a person can do to stay connected and keep learning.
Hey Mal, I agree with Jerry! Ask and you shall recieve. If you feel up to it, proclaim it loud and clear at the meeting that you might need some extra help to start and I am sure the support will be there. Tom
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"You're in the right place. That's the door right there. Turn around."
There are two parts to AA: The Program of Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book, 12x12, Steps, Traditions), and The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous (Meetings, Loners, Internationalists, Grapevine).
Fellowship and no Program doesn't work. Program and no Fellowship doesn't work.
i agree Rainspa, most alcoholics need both kinds of support, I need the program and fellowship to help keep focussed on my recovery and to remind me I have a Higher Power that loves me and wants me to help my brothers and sisters.
Hi Mal, This is what happened to me.....I had the job and all that went with it, people who looked up to me with respect etc..., professional, confident, in control, but I still drank, eventually my drinking got the better of me and I lost the job. It was then that I forced myself to go to meetings because I had been given the "gift of desperation". I no longer had a choice, I had to go to meetings or I would die. I went to a meeting and asked for help and many reached out to take my hand.
If you really want to get sober and stay sober you will find a way to get to a meeting and then ask for help! Or you can do what I did and wait till you've lost the job and respect and are given the "gift of desperation".
Thank you for your post, it reminded me of what brought me to AA and all the gifts I have been given since I got sober. One of the gifts is that the deep, dark, hurt is now just a pin prick of a memory. May God Bless you and give you the courage to ask for help!!
Mal, Welcome! Many good suggestions mentioned here. Sounds like your lack of ambition is driven by fear. Self-centered fear is the root cause to all of our problems.
My suggestion would be to call your local AA central office. Not sure where in New England you live but here's the number for the Boston area (617-426-9444). If your not from that area they can provide you with the number for your area. When you call tell them you'd like a ride to a meeting. They will pass you through to someone who will talk with you and arrange a meeting and pick up time. Go to the meeting and be honest with the folks there. The loving hand of AA will make you feel wanted, needed and loved. Take their suggestions even if you don't want to.
I second or third the recommendation to call the 24-hour hotline. Volunteers who are alcoholics answer the phone and are WONDERFUL to talk to. The San Francisco number is 415-674-1821. Feel free to call a number outside your area if you don't have a local one.
Who the hell cares if people look up to you at your job? If you need rehab then go. This is your life and if people looking up to you is more important than your life and dying an alcoholic death, then your values are messed up.
So...You do not need help to do any of this. You need willingness. You need to want it and it sounds like you are ambivalent right now or afraid to find out what is really at the root of that gnawing empty feeling which makes you want to drink and self-sabotage yourself nightly. You will get help and support in AA, but only when people see you working. If you try and half-ass the program, skip meetings, your sponsor wont want to really put out for you. You will get what you put into AA...Work hard and find a sponsor that has time for you. Remember that you don't really deserve their time if you aren't putting your best effort forth.
Our literature states "If we are painstaking from the very start, we will be amazed before we are half way through." I take this to mean being thorough and surrendering fully. I suggest you put your recovery FIRST so that you can get a life back. You are trying to salvage parts of a life that isn't working for you any how. Just surrender and get with the program. Don't be afraid of failure...Don't judge the future based on your experience in AA in the past. Most of all, Don't be afraid of change and whatever scary and frightening things are causing you to hate yourself so much that you have to drink nightly to not feel anything. It's better to face things and move forward with the help of AA.
I don't know why all this came to me or why God chose me to stay sober and to just know how to work this program pretty well...but I sure am glad to not have the doubts and fears you are describing now.
-- Edited by pinkchip on Thursday 16th of September 2010 08:08:16 AM
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Keep coming back. It works if you work it. So work it. You're worth it!
MAL, What an interesting contadiction; you know what I'm going to say...yet you still ask. I could sign off now and according to you you would be fine.
But...you have reached out and it is my responsibility (and pleasure) to extend my hand.
You are spouting the rhetoric of the "functional" alcoholic. That was me. I was a layer-cake of lies wrapped in a shiny package of thin but convincing bulls**t.
But...my luck ran out and I was two hairs and a whisper from losing everything from my job to my pulse. THAT was when I realized that I HAD to tend to my sobriety FIRST or everything else would quickly turn to sewage and I would drown in it.
So...I imagined myself sober and working recovery unemployed, seperated from and failing my practical obligations to my wife & kids, penniless and living with my sisters 1200 miles from my home. Was that situation better than death? Yup. Sure was. As long as I was sober.
It didn't come to that, though. My employers were very understanding and accomodated my AA meeting, intensive outpatient, one-on-one therapy and physician's schedule. They even gave me time off for withdrawals when my medications were changed. So...I was able to stay with my family in my home and continue to work my job.
Through AA I Came To Believe in a power greater than myself who could restore me to sanity...ON IT'S TERMS!!!!! and I found out pretty quickly that my Higher Power won't do squat for me unless do the leg-work myself.
That's my before/after. That's my Experience/Strength/Hope. Now it's up to you.
