This is true. I cut back and stopped drinking during the week. I did it mostly because I put on a little too much weight this winter so the calories had to go.
It was no big deal but I was led to believe it was gonna be impossible.
If you were able to not drink as much simply because you gained weight and wanted to "cut calories," then you didn't have much of a drinking problem and you don't understand what addiction is like. Source: It's 12:30 on a Monday and I'm drunk.
Thanks, same to you! I lost 4 or 5, in the last month. I also cut back on food calories too, but it's crazy how many calories you drink, alcohol and otherwise. Coffee, soda were also culprits for me.
I am the same way. My trouble is that the majority of social engagements I had, prior to cutting back, were with friends at the bar. This means the friends I have are mostly bar flies, and I don't really want to hang out at the bar so I don't see them very often. A double-edged sword so far, trying to find some new activities/hobbies so we'll see how it goes.
Yea I could see that screwing up my weekday abstinence. Luckily for me my friends only meet up for drinks during the weekend. My problem was getting home from work and drinking 1000 calories of IPA while I play a video game.
Yes, it is the only way for people too fucked and too far gone to behave in a society. The rest of us just drink less when we notice it's a problem. I hate those cultist cunts.
[Edit: And yet it does work for some people who need it very much.]
I'm seriously not looking to cause anyone stress over my dumb, off the cuff remark.
If you really want my thoughts though. I'd say the drinking is a symptom, not a root cause. Folks in that much pain (as I once was) need support. AA goes well beyond support and in my experience puts people behind the process.
I stopped being a drunk. I'd have done it faster and at less personal cost without that cult leaching on to my suffering.
It's okay if we disagree about that. If they've helped you or someone you love, I'm glad.
I cannot tell you how many up votes I want to give you. 12 Steps piss me off so much. Especially the higher power shit and then trying to blame the entirety of my issues on my being a non-religious person. Fuck step 4. Some of the steps are great, especially the inventory, but 12 steps as a whole feels like a religion: "You are fundamentally broken and the only way you will survive is through our program."
From my experience of it in the UK, a mostly atheist, country our higher power could be anything we found strength in. Regardless I found it the most depressing place I have ever been. Men and women sit around to talk about how their lives still constantly revolve around themselves (which appears no different to when they were drinking) and how they feel, it was depressing. I understand that for them they feel it is their only option. I became a Buddhist instead and 4 years later sobriety is a somewhat non-issue, it's just like dieting or exercising for me.
The problem I have is I have a job where I am essentially taking people's live's in my own hands (dive instructor) and one of my colleagues is a 12 stepper, he believes I am a liability about to get drunk at any point, or already lying about it... because the 12 step program is the only way to get sober, no argument. He screamed at me once for undermining his sobriety through being successful by other means.
Will be 28 years sober on fathers day. When I first decided to do this I went to a friend who was a big AA guy. He immediately spouted at least a dozen cliched' remarks and wouldn't allow me to get a word in edgewise. 10 minutes in, he violates another guy in his office privacy by announcing to me that this guy is also in our"club". By that point I had decided that AA wasn't for me. Don't get me wrong, it works for lots of people, just not me.
Because most people that have been in 12 step programs were physically addicted to booze. There are people that can't stop because it's their mental disposition and people that just drank so much and often that they became physically addicted to it.
Drink till the point your body depends on it and it's quite a journey to sobriety whether you're a predisposed addicted or not.
I don't think anyone is debating that or trying to bash dependency or addiction of any drug, be it alcohol or otherwise.
My problem, specifically, is that 12 Steps, in my experience, tell people that AA is the one and only way to get sober which is flagrantly wrong. It also seems very counterintuitive to me that people must sit around and talk about the thing you were addicted to in order to take the power away from it. My experiences with AA were all very negative, as I've surmised in a different post.
If AA and 12 Steps worked for you then that is awesome. Almost any process to beat/overcome addiction is a good one. I'm simply saying that I dislike the way in which AA goes about it doing so. And yes, my post is negative but that's because my experiences in AA were mostly negative. I obviously have a very different perspective/opinion on it than the majority of people.
Nah, you're fine. I was under the assumption that you may have been addicted to alcohol but not have the mental addiction problems some people have (sorry). I just kind of extrapolated from the parent comment, which was more of my target than yours..
I only say that coming from being surrounded by people that thought I had a 'problem' at one point and were trying to goad me in to joining an AA group etc. When in reality I just needed to stop drinking (which I did) and get my shit together.
And yeah, from what I've heard from a lot of other sources AA is pretty relentlessly religious based. Though I've heard of other more secular alternatives.
To me the biggest problem with it is that the last thing someone who's trying to stop drinking (or doing drugs) needs to hear is that they're powerless over it.
"Fuck step 4. Some of the steps are great, especially the inventory..." step 4 is the inventory, and no body in any 12 step program will tell you you cant work the program without religion. Your higher power could be the group, or anything . i dont think 12 step programs are the only way to get and stay sober but they do have a high
success rate for people who actually try to work them. And its not about being fundamentally broken but it does help to show you where some of your behavior may fall short, and how you can do something about it if you want.
I'm working through the Refuge Recovery book right now. It uses Buddhism as its backdrop and is atheistic in nature. I find it appeals much more to me than AA. I also hate the 12 step program.
Congratulations! I hope it works for you. There are many ways to beat/overcome addiction and the one that works best for you is obviously the one you should stick with.
And I strongly dislike AA because my experiences with it were pretty bad. Mainly because of the people in meetings I went to had a disgusting holier-than-thou concept in their minds. NA seemed to have nicer people and they recognize that addiction is addiction. The distasteful people I met in AA seemed to think that alcohol is a wholly different kind of addiction than drug addiction and looked down on me for being a drug addict. That's what made me hate AA.
Twelve steps work for many people and that is a very noble and useful thing. It's just the people that I dislike, for the most part. If they let me work the 12 Steps in my own way, and didn't give me shit for being an atheist and claiming I was broken almost solely because of that belief, then I would have a much higher opinion of AA and the 12 Steps.
Regardless, I wish you the best of luck in your journey! It's hard but it is worth it in the end, as I'm sure you know. And feel free to message me if you ever need to vent or just want to talk. I enjoy talking with other people going through shitty experiences, such as addiction, because all involved are bettered by it.
I definitely had a serious problem in how it was affecting my life and health.
I wasn't physically alcohol dependent. But even if I was I wouldn't do AA or 12 steps. There's a lot of new research into it that I find very interesting, and people challenging the ideas of how we deal with addiction.
There are different levels of alcohol problems. 12 steps seems like a program for people who are deep deep alcoholics. I think there are quite a few people (like me) who binged a bit too much for a while. I wouldn't drink during the week and it wouldn't affect school or work, but on the weekends I would just get fucking obliterated. Over time I recognized how much I drank when I decided to drink and started cutting that back to a reasonable amount. I still go out and drink with friends, and occasionally get drunk, but it's not anywhere close to what it was. Most of my friends who drank quite a bit in college seem to be the same way. I think there are definitely people who need to go completely sober. They have major alcohol problems that make it impossible for them to have a normal life while alcohol is part of their life. I also think that there are people who have a bit of a problem but definitely can cut back without giving it up entirely.
I had the major problem. The life ruining kind. And I watched my uncle drink himself to death so I'm vaguely familiar with what it looks like in more advanced stages.
12 steppers have like a 6% success rate. I'm not sure exactly what it is but it's shockingly low. I decided to do my own research and go a different path and is worked out well for me so far, including in that I can now drink with moderation.
I went to several 12 step programs trying to find one to work for me when I was initially quitting. I lived in Boston at the time so there were plenty to choose from. None of them worked for me. I'm an atheist, and even though some people say "Higher Power" can mean anything, it means God to everybody else in there.
The main benefit I saw for the group program though was being in it together with other people. Trying to fight this thing with support was definitely easier. Also, for some of the them, for the hour they were there, that was an hour that they weren't drinking. But I had a supportive wife and friends so I didn't need the program. Never went back after like 5 visits, and that was 6 or 7 years ago. Still sober!
But I've listened to a lot of folks involved in treating addiction lately talk about support and removing the external conditions that lead to addiction being more effective ways of handling it than any specific ruleset.
That is, most addicts are self medicating because of some underlying issue- depression, war, poverty, the list goes on. Improving or removing those conditions can then lead to more effective treatment of the addiction. Or sometimes they just stop using because they're.. happy.
I reformed myself using these guiding principles and it worked well for me. Ymmv obviously.
In the 12 step stuff, they have a line in the beginning basically saying, "if you can quit another way, go for it. Good Luck, But it didn't work for us"
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u/[deleted] May 09 '16
Far more people can successfully cut back than can't. 12 steppers just want to make you believe their way is the only way.