Last week I relapsed. I felt alone and under such stress that I collapsed under the pressure of maintaining my sobriety while trying to piece my life back together. It’s been about 26 hours since my last drink. When is enough going to be enough? I’m breaking down emotionally. I feel so tired all the time and I keep catastrophizing every possible outcome to what the future may bring me shortly. I start a new job next week. It involves me moving (again). I’m so sick of starting over. I’m financially strapped to the point that there is a few things I know I’m not going to be able to bring. I have to cut the drinking out completely. Today was a good start, but I need to put together some days because I know how bad things will get if I continue to drink. My head is all over the place. I even tried to message my brother. It’s been five years since we’ve spoken. I hate having no one to turn to.
Sorry to hear of your struggles. Can you get to a recovery meeting such as AA? In person or online there are so many resources available to you. Read around here and find that connection that can help you stay sober. Congratulations on knowing you want change.
I am sorry you are having a rough time. As a chronic relapser I can relate. My family know I drink but don’t know I am an alcoholic as I drink mostly in secret at home alone. Enough is enough when you say it is. I’m on day 4 now and this time around I am fully emersing myself in AA and focusing on today. Not drinking just for today. You are not alone and have us to turn to.
There are AA meetings on line literally every hour or so and they get me through when I am not managing on my own. Keep coming back.
That’s a hard question to ask yourself. Looking over some of your past posts, you have some self-knowledge about your drinking patterns and the roots of your addiction. You have motivation to stop. And still you wonder when you will be able to stay sober day after day without fear of relapse.
I want to encourage you to keep trying. Try AA, try medication, try counseling, try all of it. I was quite often just where you are now - surveying some recent wreckage in my life, afraid of what was to come, knowing deep down that I had no faith in my ability to stay sober and knowing that continuing to drink would lead to hospitalization or jail or death for me. To stop and stay stopped took a whale of a lot of other people to help me, often in ways that felt pretty lousy at the time.
It’s hard for me to put into words, and it might sound like bad news, but for me and many others, getting sober was not a question of logic or money or love. Finally getting sober and staying sober involved activating a faith that everything is gonna be alright. It is about plugging into power sources outside myself, both physical and spiritual, to control my drinking behavior and straighten out my addictive thinking. I’m not saying you have to believe in any form of any deity at all. I’m saying that for me, the connection to other people (most of whom I had previously despised or feared), to an energy, that connection was and is today the mainspring of my recovery.
I first heard this in AA, but it’s a universal truth - “If you keep doing what you are doing, you will keep getting what you have got”. If you keep going after sobriety the way you have in the past, then you are looking at 30 or 60 days lived in angst, maybe some surface pleasantness, but always with the dread of ultimate collapse.
Here are a couple of questions for you. Are you done yet? And what have you not done previously in service of growing your sobriety?
As suggested maybe a meeting might help ,meet like minded people who understand how your feeling , i made those friends when i went to my first meeting some still alive and some still friends decades later wish you well
How are you today?