I have wanted to be clean from alcohol for the last few years and just can’t find a way to keep it down. It’s ruining my health mentally and physically. Maybe there’s not enough reason to live. I can’t imagine life sober. It keeps winning. I am done with it, I’m exhausted.
9 Likes
Have you tried any support systems that are available they will help you with your sobriety wish you well
4 Likes
I too had this exact frame of mind before I got sober. I thought that sobriety was going to be an endless string of gray days, with no relief, no fun, not even a real point to continuing to get up day after day. It was exhausting.
And like you, for me the booze kept winning. At the end, I made the conscious decision to just drink and accept whatever happened because I was so very tired of the fight, the empty resolve I made each morning to not get drunk, or not get so drunk that day. I drank every day for a number of years, and each day I drank, my silent prayer was “I hope I get away with it this time”. Each time I drank I blacked out and could not predict what I would do or what would happen to me. The consequences were certain and inevitable - besides the withdrawals and the out of control digestive tract I could not trust, besides the getting caught by my spouse or job or the cops, was the daily paying out of a little piece of my soul. I imagined my soul to be like a leg of lamb at the Greek gyro shop, and every day I would shave off a little more of it as the cost of doing business with alcohol.
The most hopeful sentence in your post?
I am done with it, I’m exhausted.
This may be the point at which you surrender completely, not to the booze, but to the idea of being sober. It hurts so badly to keep drinking. I reached the point where I wanted the constant aching pain to stop more than I could deny that the fundamental problem was that I kept pouring beer and whiskey down my throat. I got to where I did not care if sobriety was going to be nearly unbearable, because continuing to drink had become truly unbearable. Being dry or abstinent was only 49% revolting to me, and continuing to drink flipped over to 51% disgusting.
I had to be physically stopped, I had to have forced compliance and accountability. In order to stay out of jail before trial for my last DUI, I was required to report to the police station 7 days a week, between 6 AM and 8 AM and provide a breath sample. If the sample was not .000% alcohol, or if I were late, or if I missed a day, the threat was to land me in jail for a few months. This motivated me to manage my day so I could go to bed sober every night.
Having that enforced abstinence, I initially managed it with Antabuse and counseling. After about a month, I had to stop the Antabuse, so I returned to AA, the place that had afforded me the single contented stretch of sobriety, about 9 months, since I had started drinking 35 years earlier. I did what they told me to do in AA, but it still took some time and progress in the 12 step program before I began to be grateful for each morning I woke up sober. It took time for the gray clouds to lift. And when they did, I could plainly see that I had been responsible for my drinking - it wasn’t the job or the wife or the cops, it was me. And just as I had been responsible for my drinking, I could get the help and loving support of the Unseen as expressed by the people in AA to stay sober and to grow my sobriety and to keep stacking sober days.
It is always darkest just before the dawn. Blessings on your house 
as you find your way on the sober path with us.
9 Likes
I am done with support groups. They just tell me to quit a bad attitude or take up Jesus. They don’t listen.
4 Likes
Well fader we listen. I know it’s hard. We’ve all been there. If we can you can. Hang in there. Any step in the right direction is progress. Welcome to TS.
That sounds like a very rough story. You have clearly survived a lot.
I don’t have any external motivators pushing me. No criminal record, no effect to my job. That would be much more helpful. But no wake up call is coming.
To me adulthood and drinking is synonomous. What else is there to really do? You work a crappy job, come home alone to a cheap apartment. No family no future. The worst has already happened. Alcohol never caused that, just gives me some desperate relief from it.
What have you tried? I know within AA there are agnostic groups. And there are groups outside AA: Dharma Recovery, SMART, etc.
As for attitude, sometimes that does have to change. I was pretty anti AA for a while, I wasn’t that bad, etc. And even after a few meetings I wasn’t sure how just listening to other people and talking for two minutes could help me. But slowly, listening to others made me feel less alone, and less broken. Doing the steps really helped too. I don’t understand how, just grateful it did.
‘Nothing changes, if nothing changes’ as they say. If what you are doing now isn’t working, then you have to add something else.
3 Likes
As you know, friend, there can be what seems a canyon between wanting things to change or be better, and the willingness to change what you are doing.
There’s a thread about that topic here:
3 Likes
Welcome @fader the good news is it sounds like youre desperate for a solution. Theres hope. Read around here and grab on to as many sober tools as you can. This community is an awesome resource if you use it.
Just take the next best step. Commit to not using just for today
1 Like
First of all … You are worthy of life, your alcohism is only a small part of who you are but it doesnt define you and it never should. Quitting alcohol is the easy part, staying stopped is the battle we face as alcoholics everyday.
Most of us have been sober at some point, but have we begun to truly recover? Recovery is not simply not drinking. Recovery is discovering who you really are, accepting the things you cannot change, being willing to try to change the things you can, beginning to forgive and love yourself as you truly are. You become connected to your true self, your spirit is no longer broken. By being connected to self you can connect to others.
You are not here on this earth to simply suffer, you have a choice…choose to live. You are worthy of life. There is a solution
2 Likes
I got sober for a full month and lost it too, u and me can make it.
1 Like
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with groups keep us posted on your journey
Or as someone once put it to me: do you want the kitchen to be clean or are you willing to clean the kitchen? Both are very different things!
1 Like