aa Spoken Here Community Group
Fellowship Where you can share your thoughts, feelings, stories and get support to gain and continue sobriety.
I was sober for 17 years. My drinking became out of control when I lost my live-in boyfriend to suicide in my home in 1989, exactly one week after his 50th birthday. One year later, I went to re-hap and just quit the drink. I am married now and living in another part of the country. Our best friends are wine coniseurs, living in San Francisco. At first I learned to "taste" the wine by smelling it, but the day came a couple of years ago when I asked for a little taste of some amazing wine...and amazing it was. I still was able to control the drinking, even going to a couple of wine weekends in Sonoma.
Last year, March 2007, my mom was diagnosed with renal cancer. I brought her to my home for her to die, and cared for her night and day until she ultimately drew her last breath with all of us holding her. We drank Irish whiskey that night, then I started having an occasional beer or two or five. Or drinking wine...lots of it. I am approaching my mom's death anniversary and three days ago, I decided to quit the drink yet again. I am NOT confident in this at all. Please pray for me.
Last year, March 2007, my mom was diagnosed with renal cancer. I brought her to my home for her to die, and cared for her night and day until she ultimately drew her last breath with all of us holding her. We drank Irish whiskey that night, then I started having an occasional beer or two or five. Or drinking wine...lots of it. I am approaching my mom's death anniversary and three days ago, I decided to quit the drink yet again. I am NOT confident in this at all. Please pray for me.
Off hand, I'd say that lack of confidence is paradoxically the best thing you've got going for you at this point. As for prayer, well, here's my all-time favorite story about that.
Back in the Dark Ages of 1988 when I was still drinking between AA meetings, I once heard a lady speak on the occasion of her 18th anniversary of continuous sobriety. She told how she had first come into the fellowship shortly after moving to Boston, and with her gin-soaked brain, she thought she heard the people saying that they all had faith in some spook they called Hyapowah. She concluded that these people were praying to a Native American princess or goddess named Hyapowah, and were obviously more than a little cracked.
She had been raised in a Christian home, she reasoned, so if she was going to start praying again she was going to do it to the proper & duly appointed recipients of such entreaties or not at all. But after one more devastating bender she was finally desperate to stop drinking, and that desire overrode all of her theological misgivings. So one night she started praying to Hyapowah, and her compulsion to drink promptly vanished and had never returned. A week or two later, she explained, her head had cleared up enough to realize that they were saying "Higher Power."
Last January, I in turn celebrated 19 years of continuous sobriety, and Hyapowah still works for me.
God bless.
When I wanted to stay sober I absolutely knew I couldnt do it on my own so i got help and that made absolutely all the difference.
Staying sober is all about how we are on the inside not what is going on outside.
If you can do the work on your internal condition you will be able to deal with anything that happens in your life, sober.
The idea that alcohol helps us to deal with things is an illusion. It stops us dealing with anything.
I hate to say it (but). You can not keep them as friends.
It is just one of the many sacrifices that you MUST make (yes, there are musts).
And for all the detractors and arguers about the term 'recovered' please don't hijack this thread, I heard all the arguments!