Relapse is a failure, the point is failure doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Babies ‘fail’ many times trying to walk, geniuses ‘fail’ many times trying to invent something. Addicts may fail many times trying to get sober.
17 Likes
I was thinking something similar. Relapse is failure but the person is not A failure. Failing can be a good thing if we take the time to reflect and learn.
8 Likes
Yes! There has been a shifting rhetoric around what “failure” means in the business world more broadly, with FailCon and failure festivals and conferences for entrepreneurs…reimagining what failure can offer for a broader purpose has a lot of potential, I think. Learning to deal with failure, back slides, not achieving what we expected, whatever it is, can be part of building resilience. I only can speak for myself that I struggled with being resilient in the face of tough life things, part of what led to me drinking in the first place, and the process of finding sobriety and recovery has helped me to learn resilience, including all my failures and relapses and slips and blips.
6 Likes
I accept everyone’s point of view here and I encourage everyone here to do what’s working for them. I don’t want anyone to change what they’re doing if it’s working.
Thus, if viewing relapse as failure is beneficial to people here, I’m not going to discourage them.
I’m just saying that it’s not helpful or truthful to me. Nor do I believe that it’s helpful and truthful for every person that’s reading this thread. For me, negativity is a very bad thing in my program. And failure, to me, comes off as a very negative word. I am careful when using that word to describe recovery in general.
Again, I’m not discouraging anyone else’s recovery methods or beliefs. But I just wanted to reiterate that I still don’t believe it’s beneficial for me to say that relapse always equates to failure.
Nor do I believe it’s beneficial for me to say that if I relapse, then my recovery really hasn’t started yet.
8 Likes
Tomi, this resonates with me. I had many moments of desperation when I was utterly befuddled by my continued drinking and consequences. I was desperate for those to stop.
But the true gift of desperation that came to me was when I fully surrendered to sobriety and was willing to do something different, to do all things differently to move toward contentment. Desperation does not have to look like a frantic, terror filled scrambling search for a magic fix. For me, it liked like wrapping myself in AA and other sobriety inducing measures with an intense focus and fierce dedication that I did not know I possessed. That was the gift, the determination to stay sober above all else and the manifestation of it was my running back to AA with a willingness I had not shown or known before.
3 Likes
Back in early April I took over a new role at my work that was completely different from what I was doing. It was dealing with state and federal funding, which requires very strict budgetary, reporting, and projection standards. Now I’m relatively intelligent, confident in my abilities and able to learn pretty quickly. However, I also knew that I didn’t know fuck-all about state funded budgets. But our finance department does. So I relied on the experts for help. Then I learned from them. At no point did I ask them for help and then completely ignore them. Nor did I tell them “I know what I’m doing” while not asking them for help at all. Here we are 7 months later and I am excelling at my job and now I get to train other directors on my systems… and even now, I still ask the finance department for help because they are still the experts.
Notice any similarities to sobriety?
21 Likes
Seeing some more posts of members going to bars and other drinking events. For me, I simply don’t see any value attending such events centered around people ingesting poison.
But for those that do, I’ll remind you that…
If you hang around a barber shop, you’ll eventually get a haircut.
5 Likes
I was at the bar last night for my trivia team. We did not win. There were a ton of people there. And all I kept thinking was how the fuck did I used to do that 7 nights a week. But I think that’s mainly because I’m old now.
6 Likes
What??? I thought that pink afro was authentic! 
4 Likes
Because although the event revolves around poison, u still want the human relations that occur at the same time. It is dangerous though.
Agreed, going to the bars now and seeing everyone going hard…I don’t know how I ever did it so often.
I recently joined a dating app (almost instantly regretted it lol) one of the messages I got tonight:
It was always pretty easy to tell people I was sober…I was uncomfortable in the beginning with a select few people but besides that I think I’ve been ok with it. For me I didn’t want the other person to feel uncomfortable with it for whatever reason. But doing things to avoid confrontation or hard conversations will keep me stuck in my bad habits of wanting to escape. Being as straightforward as possible gets way easier with practice 
20 Likes
Dating seems so romantic these days.
The subtlety, the gentle nuance to conversation… Beautiful.
21 Likes
You know, I’m not a drinker. I’ve never have been and never will be. I don’t see any value in it.
And I’ve been to many places where alcohol is served. Weddings, for instance, I see value in celebrating at such an event.
I’ve often done my balloon twisting gigs at Restaurants with bars. Drunk people can be good tippers. Lol. So I see value in that.
I don’t see value in simply hanging around buddies while watching them get sloshed.
4 Likes
I don’t know if drinking is part of anyone’s values… maybe in some cultures it’s a connection to tradition I guess? It’s highly normalized, which I’m sure you can relate to with your own personal DOC.
Also, I love seeing live music, and it’s normally performed at a bar or a place with alcohol unfortunately. Hate seeing people getting fucked up beyond their threshold but I’ve been there so many times, it’s hard to judge.
6 Likes
The problem is not alcohol. The problem is not the normalization and promotion of alcohol in society. The problem is not people who get drunk. The only problem with alcohol is my relationship with it. And therefore the problem is me.
Personally I believe alcohol absolutely has a place in our society. I’m happy that people can enjoy it, or even go out and get blasted every now and then. Just because I can’t drink doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t. Just because a beer commercial might ‘trigger’ someone doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be on tv. To think otherwise would just be a continuation of my selfish alcoholic behavior.
14 Likes
Remember tho, we have a fucked up health care system, which is wildly inflated with costs. I have an alcoholic client who easily exceeds $1,000,000 annually in preventable ED visits. His inability to get sober is the issue. The vast majority of people incur $0 in excessive health care. Sugar, processed food, etc also drive up health care costs. But again, that is primarily among a small group of people. When you read stats and numbers like that without knowing the background it can really skew what the reality is.
Alcohol has been around in society since pretty much the beginning. Despite the overwhelming perception it is heavily regulated to help reduce risk, but as with anything, personal responsibility is the best thing one can have. But just because a segment of the population lacks that personal responsibility doesn’t mean the rest should have to stop drinking.
If we want to reduce costs we would expand treatment options, invest in more mental health and early intervention services. Just saying oh “alcohol is bad let’s ban it” is not going to solve anything .
5 Likes
I agree. After all, it didn’t become my problem until my father gave it to me from about the age of 2. There has to be some messed up level of “normal” for that to happen.
There are people in my foodie group, at least weekly, looking for a place to take their newly 21-year old kid to get them their “first” drink. I do think it’s a problem when parents can’t wait to initiate their kids.
And the 1600 or so alcohol-related car accidents concern me a great deal, as I have kids out there driving on those roads. The amount of obliterated post-tailgate drivers I see leave a Husker game is terrifying.
So, while my messed up relationship with alcohol is my responsibility, the problem is wide-spread.
6 Likes
I’ve never seen a crack commercial but still became a crack head. People don’t become alcoholics because of tv commercials. Childhood trauma, genetics probably lead the way there. Alcoholism is a big and real problem, but the media isn’t the boogie man everyone here wants it to be. Anyone who thinks a beer ad is somehow responsible for their disease that’s just them not taking responsibility. The real problem, at least here, is that for every 10 people seeking treatment there’s one bed available. Or that there’s little in the way of treatment for incarcerated people. Or 6 month waiting lists for MH treatment. Or insurance companies denying coverage of treatment.
7 Likes