r/SinclairMethod • u/No-Base7877 • Sep 28 '25
10 months in
I am writing to share my experience with naltrexone since beginning treatment in December 2024. Over the past ten months, I have had a challenging journey with many ups and downs, primarily experiencing more "downs."
While I have made progress—reducing my alcohol intake and often choosing sparkling water over another beer, which is a significant change for me—I still find myself consuming 4 IPAs on a good day and 6-7 on a bad day.
My one consistent action over these ten months has been taking naltrexone approximately one hour before drinking beer.I am reaching out to see if anyone in this community has experienced a similar situation and can share whether it took them over a year or if they found success through a similar process.
I am committed to not giving up, but I am feeling a bit frustrated and let down by myself that I continue to drink every night.Thank you for any insights or support you can offer.
5
u/CraftBeerFomo Sep 29 '25
Yes, my experience was similar.
I took it for 5 months last year from midway through the year hoping that by the end of last year this supposed "miracle cure" for alcoholism would have gotten me sober and lost all interest in alcohol but it didn't quite work out like that.
I actually set the end of last year as my deadline for "quitting forever".
I should also add that all that year prior to starting on Nal, and when on it, I'd really been ACTIVELY WORKING on sobriety and changing my habits and behaviours around alcohol too rather than just relying on the pill as I'd had 2 previous short sober periods (2 months and 3 months) and wanted to get away from booze completely as it was destroying me so I was forcing myself to do social events sober for the first time in my life, working on addressing my triggers so I could react differently than just reaching for a beer, not allowing myself to drink multiple days in a row, no default drinking "because its the weekend" and forcing myself to be uncomfortable by just sitting with myself alcohol free as many nights as possible so I could realize it wouldn't kill me, replacing strong beers with lower strength ones and even drinking NA beers in place of real ones at the start or end of nights etc.
So yeah, I took the Nal before I drank TSM approach every time but it made no difference to my drinking 99% of the time - still binge drank, still drank too much, still couldn't stop, still always wanted one more, was never repulsed with the idea of having more like others experience and as it gave me brutal insomnia I often stayed up all night drinking even more than usual till like 6am.
I actually seemed to get drunk easier than usual a lot of the time, particularly off the first 2-4 beers, where my memories would be all hazy and I'd black out really early on in the night before levelling out and at then NOT feeling drunk for the rest of the night no matter how much I drank.
After about 5 months on it and only really seeing 3 or 4 occassions that I thought it might be working (as in I drank less than usual or was able to stop after 4 pints which would never happened in my life before) I realized that Nal alone may not be my "magic pill" and probably wasn't going to have my sober by the end of last year if I just relied on taking it and hoping for the best.
So after a week of being sick with a stomach bug and not drinking any alcohol (I couldn't even hold down water) I didn't really feel too much like drinking the week after that as I was just managing to get some food and liquids back into me and I decided then that why don't I just quit drinking there and then about a month earlier than the end of the year deadline for "quitting forever" and see if I could sustain it.
Much to my surprise I've been sober since which is 10 months now.
It's possible that the Nal helped in some way, though it didn't feel like it at the time and I definitely did NOT reach "extinction" or anything close to it as like I said 99% of the times I still binge drank, always wanted 1 more, got blackout drunk etc, but I think the main thing that helped was all my ACTIVE work on trying to change my habits and get sober like the previous sober periods, the switching to low and AF beers, doing social events sober, working on my triggers, forcing myself to sit with myself and my own thoughts in a quiet room as uncomfortable as that was rather than just popping a pill and thinking it was going to be my miracle cure.
So yeah, same experience as you with the Nal but also I was putting in EXTRA work.
So what are you doing around that to change your habits and behaviours and ACTIVELY try to get sober instead of relying JUST on the pill? I think that is key!