**I need help with the problem of abusing and using alcohol , if I feel sad, or I am going to be alone in my house by myself, or when my adult children rarely call me back or show they even care about me or my husband ,missing my kids when they were small and they showed me love and laughter! .I pray to God and love YouTube sermons and inspirational videos especially in the mornings! Then somedays I get a rush to want to drink to keep my happiness I am feeling to keep going! I know that’s totally weird! I also have ADHD, anxiety disorder, manic depressive yrs ago. I take medication for everything, I need to learn ways of coping without using alcohol for my painI have the best husband we both are 50 yrs old well I will be 50 in April 2023! But, I hide it from him bc it has caused a lot of problems in the the last 6 yrs! Today is another day of trying not to take a half a cup of alcohol like yesterday! The sa thing is I love the lord with all my heart, but I always tell myself alcohol is no different than taking a anxiety pill to just take the edge off! Why? And what can I use today in replacement of my emotions? I get off work at 5:00pm I greatly appreciate any suggestions! I just started on here yesterday ! My name is rainie **
I’ve been where you are and I’m just beginning the climb out. It has to come from you and you have to be ready to make the hard changes needed. Ask yourself if drinking that cup of alcohol is actually helping the anxiety. If you’re honest with yourself it’s probably not, but actually making you even more anxious especially aster you wake up the next day with regret. Work on healing what is hurting you deep inside. If you don’t know what it is, take some time to unpack it and learn about yourself. Id say you can busy yourself with hobbies but I find that once you get bored the things that drive you to drink are still there lurking beneath the surface. First decide that you’re worth the change. Then make purposeful habit changes. If you feel triggered at a certain time of day or activity, change those things. Every day around 5 when I’d be in the kitchen that’s my trigger. For the first week I actually avoided the kitchen. Then I started making mocktails or Shirley temples and putting those in my old drinking glasses. For me it helped, but do what works for you. Something inside has to be resolved to change though. Create space to work on your relationships and bring honesty back into them. Work on your relationship with yourself. Give yourself grace, because you are enough. You are here and you are needed. Be strong. I wish you the best
I have depression and anxiety. The meds will absolutely not work if you are consuming alcohol. After I got sober and got the alcohol out of my system, my mental health improved almost completely.
There are a ton of sobriety support meetings in the evening hours and after work. I participated in zoom AA local meetings and The Luckiest Club.
Welcome! I know for me, hiding it was a real problem. I had the same thinking-it’s like a cup of medicine. But medicine comes with strict user instructions. Just one dose. Well, one dose was not what I could ever stick to. Suddenly, more cups needed for more anxiety, and the habit gets harder to hide and the anxiety gets bigger and nothing is cured at all- everything is just worse. That is not medicine. That is poison. Keep posting and reading posts. You are so not alone in this journey.
I think it’s a natural side-effect of being a parent, in that once the kids are grown and gone, we are a bit lost. We’ve wrapped so much of ourselves into our kids, it can be tough to transition.
While watching our kids grow, we forget that we too must continue to grow, physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Time to start growing again. Time to volunteer, or take up a musical instrument, or take an Italian cooking class, or get a black belt in a martial art. Time to get after it.
Drinking isn’t coping. Drinking is masking, avoiding, denying, numbing. Drinking isn’t growing.