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Starting my Journey

created by: HM 4 years, 1 month ago



At the beginning of my journey with sobriety after last weekend. I blacked out for much of the evening and night while seeing friends in NYC. Somehow decided to take a 1.5 hour train ride back home and left my backpack at the train station. Very lucky to get home safe but realized the next morning that I was missing my phone, backpack, and wedding band. Again, I was very fortunate to track down all of these items and get them back after me, my wife, and my young stepdaughter drove over an hour to meet someone who had picked them up. After all this and 5 days sober I can feel thoughts coming back into my mind telling me it is okay to have one drink.... maybe rewarding myself for being sober through the week and having a glass of wine. There are many justifications my mind keeps putting forward. I have been trying to remind myself of the harm I did to myself, my friends and my family. I am reading more, working out and able to do more of what I want sober. But these thoughts still plague me. I look at this app everyday for guidance and meditate on my experience these past five days. If you have strategies or suggestions I’m all ears. Thank you for the support.


by: HM 4 years, 1 month ago
replying to HM

Meditation is always a good idea, as is keeping the negative consequences of your drinking fresh in your memory. In my experience, which includes a decent stretch of sobriety accomplished on my own, AA is really the best path to sobriety. There are multiple reasons I believe this but mostly it is because staying sober requires fellowship and tackling your desire for escape (via alcohol in your case). A tricky thing for me to accept was that I couldn't reason or intellect my way through this because my addiction bypassed my logic circuits entirely. I think you're getting a taste of that irrationality in the form of those thoughts of rewarding yourself with alcohol. Reward sobriety by drinking? That's like celebrating a healed wound by opening the wound. It sounds stupid when you bring it to the surface of your brain, but it doesn't sound so stupid when it's that little voice, does it? And in my case, that's nowhere near the dumbest rationalization I made. That voice is tricky.


by: NoStinkinThinkin 4 years, 1 month ago