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The Best Advice You?ve Ever Received

a year ago 0 +0 / -0 11212

Thank you Foxman!

Here to help :)

a year ago +1 +1 / -0 1562

Ashley -> Health Educator @ Jun 28, 2022, 3:53:57 PM

Bump!

Please add the best advice you ever received.

My Shrink asking me to visit an AA meeting and seek a spiritual solution.

a year ago 0 +0 / -0 11212

Bump!

Please add the best advice you ever received.

Here to help :)

10 years ago 0 +0 / -0 11

One of the bestpieces of advice I was given was that relapse was a part of recovery. So if you do slip dont beat yourself up about it. No one is perfect. If you have commited yourself to quitting, then you can get back on the road to recovery. If you relapse, use it to your advantage by remembering what caused the relapse and how to avoid that happening again.

A journel is a great way to track this.

10 years ago 0 +0 / -0 1009

The best piece of advice I've had (or at least one of them)......

I was at race school on my motorcycle (pavement circuit) and the first thing they tell you is "If you go into a corner really fast (stress, trigger!) and you don't think you're going to make it, as in crash (start drinking), don't panic, take it anyway because 9x out of 10 you'll make the corner. You're new at this and you need to learn to cope with what appears to be an emergency situation". And believe me, it works. Saved my butt more than once. Same can be applied to learning to abstain from drinking, and it's a relevant analogy.

Hope that make sense. I realize it maybe a little obscure.

Dave

10 years ago 0 +0 / -0 118

I searched the phrase "higher power" and found this thread. I don't have faith in God or a spiritual being. Maybe the higher power is a sense of community? Working together a community can be greater than the sum of its parts. There are many communities in my life, some of which can help with our struggle with alcohol. For me examples include, my family, my doctor (who is a recovering addict), this forum and, hopefully, the AA community. I love being part of a team although I hate the "rah, rah" stuff -- teamwork is more quiet for me. I wonder if these communities can be my higher power. When a family member or friend has a difficult problem, I like to tell them "we'll get through this together" and when I have a problem, often I want them to tell me the same thing without trying to solve my problem.

John

11 years ago 0 +0 / -0 1562

I totally understand. In modern day people get put off when they hear the word God. There are lot of atheists and agnostics in AA that have sobered up. AA does not force any concept of God onto its members. Its the members own conception of God that propels them into staging a recovery. We all have done some thing wrong/stupid while drinking or not. The passage I posted is about looking at the selfishness and self-centeredness (self-esteem, pride, fear, dishonesty, insecure) and trying to overcome them and be of maximum use to others (being selfless). Once we do that exercise and keep checking and ensuring that these don't infiltrate back into us we have taped into a great resource. Eckhart Tolle talks about the same thing. He uses the word Being instead of God.

11 years ago 0 +0 / -0 171

Hi Jessica,

It sounds like you know what you need to do, and you have some good insight into the underlying causes of your addictions. With a good therapist it is very possible to learn how to manage your emotions better.

I have recently entered a day treatment program where one of the requirements is attending 2 support group meetings a week. I am not very comfortable with AA either, but I have found that in the treatment program, it has been incredibly helpful to have a place where I can feel safe enough to talk openly about my own struggles among people who are completely non-judgemental. After 48 years, this is the first thing that has helped me to begin to unload some of that guilt and shame you talk about so eloquently.

Find a good therapist who understands the neurochemistry of addiction, but don't underestimate the power of a support group who can relate to your struggles. I have attended some Women for Sobriety meetings and I will be going to a different women's support group tomorrow night for the first time.

Like you, despite my personal struggles with addiction, I have been able to continue to function and achieve in my academic and professional lives. However, if you could do this on your own, you would have done it already. And besides, you don't need to do it on your own. There is help out there for you.

For me, the first step of AA - turning things over to a "higher power" - is mostly about accepting that you may not be able to do this on your own, and that trusting in the collective widom and experience of others is the first step to opening yourself up to consider that there might be other ways of thinking and being that would work better for you.

Please keep posting here. It is a great place to turn for encouragement and support as well as a non-judgemental forum for expressing yourself. I look forward to hearing more about your journey.

Athena

11 years ago 0 +0 / -0 61

Sadly foxman it is entries like that one in the AA books and traditions and steps that tell me that AA is not right for me. I'm an Atheist and cannot bring myself to any other religious or spiritual conclusion. There are many great bits of the program and surely the people are fantastic, but I cannot do the 'God' thing personally. I caused my drinking problem and I know I can fix it. But in order to do that I will need to learn to feel and manage guilt and shame. And in my opinion the best way to do this is to obtain the best cognitive and behavioural therapies available.

I am the author of my own future, oddly I have been wildly successful to this point in my life and I'm sure that I will continue to be successful moving forward, just have to get over this hurdle. Perhaps I'll write a book in the future about my travels and my struggles and my successes.

11 years ago 0 +0 / -0 1562

I think what I need is real therapy to get to the root of the issue..

Thats a profound statement: To get to the root of the issue: The book called alcoholics anonymous pegs the problem on the selfishness and self centeredness.

Selfishness, self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt.

So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kill us! God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without His aid. Many of us had moral and philosophical convictions galore, but we could not live up to them even though we would have liked to. Neither could we reduce our self-centeredness much by wishing or trying on our own power. We had to have God's help.

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The Best Advice You?ve Ever Received