keeping the plug in the jug is just as important as those things you seem to think as important.....maybe more important.....hugs

Booze has an effect on the brain and how it works. Take care of your brain. 1is2many

Yes I know what I need to do now. Trying to deal with uncomfortable feelings is difficult enough but drinking on them won't help. In fact it will just make it a whole lot worse. I must be strong in the future and not pick up no matter how overwhelmed I feel. Thanks for your support.

I am sure there are many who can identify with you so you have helped reinforce their own emotional healing from past problems that triggered their own drinking. It sounds like you are still using alcohol as a crutch and I hope one day you can rely on the God of your understanding instead.

Getting past the first few months sober was one of the hardest things I ever had to do but when I did it, I felt exactly like I did when I finish a marathon back in 1996. I was on top of the world then. I could never have done it unless I had been sober!

God Bless

Thanks Bob. The trouble is I never learnt how to deal with painful scary emotions sober. From a very young age I used booze to kill the pain and fear. I discovered alcohol's numbing effects at the tender age of just 12. By the time I was 15 I was a weekend drunk. By the time I was 19 I was a full blown drunk drinking every night. I lived to drink and I drank to live. I think I kinda got stuck emotionally at aged 12. I started drinking to cope with the feelings accompanying being sexually abused by my older brother. My feelings from back then kinda got frozen in time. Since attempting sobriety almost 7 weeks ago now I'm not only dealing with feeling physically crud from withdrawals but emotionally crud from past stuff coming back into my awareness. Often times I have big trouble distinguishing if its withdrawal or past stuff. Maybe at this time it's a combination of the 2. I guess I'm just going to have to ride out the first month til I have completely detoxed. Then I migybe able to start making sense of it all in my mind. I pray God skill help me cope with this. Or at least my fellow alcoholics who have been where I am now and can tell me how to bet through it by not picking up again. There must be a solution to this problem that I currently can't see. Thanks for your support friend xoxo

Manda,

Been there, done that.

My last 4-6 months of active alcoholism were a constant battle between drink/don't drink. I could string along a few dry days, only to get drunk as shit the next couple of days. But I kept going back to meetings, kept picking up desire chips (my current husband teases me that I have so many desire chips, I can tile the bathroom floor with them...), kept trying. Because I knew sobriety was the answer to my problem and AA held the key.

I finally went to enough meetings to learn that
1) no matter how shitty things get, a drink only makes things worse

2) when I am overwhelmed with the compulsion to drink (to make things "better", yeah, right), a quick little prayer (God, please take this obsession from me) usually did the trick.

3) I needed to do "the next right thing". I didn't have to have a big plan for my life, I just had to do the next right thing. Sometimes that was brushing my teeth, combing my hair, washing my face when I woke up in the morning. Then I would figure out the next "next right thing" to do.

Just keep coming back. Don't stop before the miracle happens.

Best wishes and hugs, Cora

Manda, I just read your reply to Bob and totally agree about being stuck as at the emotional age of a teenager. When I got sober, I think I had the emotional IQ of a 16 year old girl. I didn't know how to properly process my emotions and displayed rather knee-jerk reactions to everything that upset or confused me.

It wasn't until I completed my 4th and 5th steps that I matured emotionally. We grow up quick in AA and sobriety because rather than relying on the drink to fix our problems, we learn to rely on ourselves with God's guidance. I learned to "do the foot work and leave the results to God."

Brokenlady your post responding to bob was a real eye opener for me when you said you never deal with
Painful emotion sober

I will explain you why
Had the worse emotional stress you can have as a 13 year old the passing of a loved one
I was extremely hard on me
Shortly after that I had my first drink, and boy did it numb the pain, it numb it so much that every time I drank afterwards I wanted
To get completely drunk
As I grew older I tried to cut back so I wouldn't get completely drunk and it would normally last for 1-15 days
I am emotionally 13 years old dealing with adult problem
Meaning I have really never faced a problem sober head on since I was 13 years old
so I really need to go back to when I was 13 years old and digest everything that happened back then, since the lost of a love one was not the only trauma from age 13-18

Thank you

Thanks Cora. And thedane you're welcome xox