I have a small circle. One person in my circle has a major drinking problem and uses alcohol to escape a poor marriage and stress of work. I feel like if I bail on her, I am being a bad friend but everything involves drinking. This is an extremely stressful piece of my recovery. This person is also my boss so it adds an even more difficult piece to the mix. Does our friendship have depth without drinking and will it affect my job if I put up boundaries. I know the answers but pulling the “trigger” is harder said than done. I have always been the type of person where I bail completely rather than create tools for myself to deal with a situation.
We have a lunch for a coworkers birthday that will of course involve drinking tomorrow. How would someone deal with this situation? If I don’t go, the lunch will likely not happen and I will get blamed. Do I just put a time limit on it? Do I just push my strength as hard as I can to show that I can go to lunch without drinking? Does anyone have small tips to get through that? Like, breathing heavy or counting to 10?
I was talking to my therapist and we typically go to lunch on Fridays and it becomes a drinking fest, so I have scheduled my therapy session on Friday to create a reason not to. I think this will help. If I miss one, I can miss 100.
Sorry to ramble. Just feeling stupid stressed. We all have so much going on and I guess I never realized how much I incorporated drinking into my every day life. A bit scary.
Ok, so why not instead of seeing it as having a drink problem see it as a choice to stop drinking because you want to.
No one has a right to question that choice if they do then that’s on them.
With that mindset you should be able to go wherever you want and not be bothered because you don’t drink.
We can still have fun without drink, infact I have more fun in my life now. It kind of lets us know what our priorities in life should be.
All you need is confidence.
Completely agree with @anon12657779 . Your addictive desire is clouding your perception right now but to choose not to drink because you want to remain sober and because you have the luxury of not having to drink. I say to myself that I never have to drink again, I don’t have to poison myself ever again. This might sound daunting so you may have heard people tell you one day at a time (I will not drink today), well you can break that down to an hour at a time, a minute at a time if that is what it needs. Just remember why you want sobriety, there are loads of reasons people have posted here. Why do YOU want it? Best wishes and I hope it all goes well.
BTW I once had a boss with a drinking problem and a bad marriage. I once heard all about it on the train. Correction, the whole carriage heard about it because she didn’t realise how loud she was.speaking.
HAHA! Yes, it is exhausting being someone’s sounding board when that same respect isn’t reciprocated. Thank you so much for the advice on changing my mindset. I have the luxury to not poison myself. That hits home with me as I am extremely into fitness and eating healthy. “I can have wine because I worked out so much” or “I ate so healthy today, I will treat myself”. Like, what is the point of putting so much emphasis on working out, running, eating healthy- when I am poisoning myself and my mind daily. THANK YOU!
I think that is the initial problem for most people who abuse something, right? It became my best friend so shutting that off or “denying” myself that, is a total change of mindset. The hardest part in my opinion. I think it will be a daily struggle to remind myself that it isn’t me denying myself anything or even protecting myself from something, but it is something so great in which I do not have to rely on something to fill a void. It is pretty liberating to know, if someone has a problem with it, it says more about them than it does about me. Thank you for your advice.
It’s as difficult as we want to make it.
The while acceptance thing helped me. I accepted that I couldn’t drink anymore.
Changed that to wouldn’t drink anymore so there was no danger of resentment and cracked on.
Keep working on it and it’ll all fall into place.
