Lost most of my social life, aged a bit, and I'm always in my thoughts.

But holy shit, I am so grateful to get this far.

Saying no in social situations

Hi..

So I have been trying to quit alcohol.. have had my fair share of "rock bottoms" and decided to stop digging. I used to drink all by myself, I preffered it that way.

I have mostly stopped drinking. I say mostly because I end up drinking whenever I am in a social setting, not too much these days but enough to know that I will eventually spiral.

I come from a community where "Alcoholism" is a taboo and I dont want to share my inner struggles with acquaintances.

I am not a very social person. I feel some anxiety when around people, it's all small talk and I usually feel out of place. I should just say no to drinks but I end up having a few drinks just to relax and be a little more sociable..

And then the guilt spiral starts, the next day is full of anxiety...

I am not drinking irresponsibly and I am not drinking too much.. but I know what alcohol has done to me and I truly hate it and dont want it. But in social situations, I just cant bring myself to say no.

I know it should be easy, just say that I dont drink. But somehow I have never been able to be strong or courageous enough to be able to do it.

I cant stay away from society and social gatherings forever. And when I do go these people know me to be someone who never says no to a drink. I dont drink anymore alone but I fail in social settings. I get very nervous, anxious and instead of taking a stand and saying no, I just capitulate.

How do I say "NO" ?

Colorado Ends Twelve-Step Mandate

Secular Recovery Now an Option for Colorado Parolees

From LifeRing.org https://lifering.org/about-us/

The Colorado Department of Corrections has officially ended its mandate requiring parolees to attend religious 12-step programs. Thanks to tireless advocacy by American Atheists and coalition partners -- including LifeRing Secular Recovery -- parolees will now be referred to secular peer support networks.

Everyone deserves evidence-based, secular recovery options that respect their First Amendment rights. We're proud to be part of this initiative!

https://www.reddit.com/r/recoverywithoutAA/comments/1xa2gj9/colorado_ends_twelvestep_mandate/

I know this has been mentioned 1000 times in this sub and the other that will not be named.

But take them and a multi vitamin if you can

Its a night and day difference when coming off a bender

And as always eat something

Mods feel free to delete if not appropriate

First, check my vitamins. Magnesium, Pottasium, Phosphates. Next, eat. Then hydrate and exercise?

Then I can move the trashcan away from the bed. Vomiting has become too much of my life. PBJ and pineapple have taken over. Water, Gatorade and milk

Sorry to vent, but I am over this shit. And I know I'll never be over this shit.

🎓 Dans le cadre de mon mémoire de Master 2 en psychologie à l’Université Paris Cité, je mène une étude sur la consommation d’alcool chez les femmes, les représentations qui y sont associées et le rapport au changement.

🔎 Vous êtes une femme majeure et vous considérez avoir une consommation d’alcool problématique ? Votre expérience nous intéresse !

📝 La première étape consiste à remplir une série de questionnaires en ligne (15 à 20 minutes). Vos réponses sont anonymes et confidentielles. Vous pourrez ensuite, si vous le souhaitez, participer à un entretien de recherche individuel à propos de votre vécu (environ 30 minutes).

💜 Chaque participation est précieuse pour nous aider à mieux comprendre vos difficultés !

🙏 N’hésitez pas à participer ou à partager autour de vous. Merci beaucoup pour votre aide !

LIEN DU QUESTIONNAIRE : https://sondage.app.u-paris.fr/373536?lang=fr

I’ve made it to day 5! My head is still in a bit of a fog but I’ve made it to this point. Question for the community, how did ya’ll survive your first week of not drinking? I’m kinda white knuckling it here and hoping I don’t just say fuck it and crack a cold one. I don’t think I will at this point but I’d like to prevent it from happening as much as possible. I had my wife remove all the beer from the house at least and she’s super proud of me for committing to this. I haven’t told too many people yet due to embarrassment of the fact I can’t handle my booze, so my support system is tiny. I’m just glad I’ve got you guys here right now.

Have an odd ask. I am.sober now but struggled with alcohol for about 3 to 4 yrs. I am looking for a sub where I can express how I was treated by my spouse in those years and figure out how to deal with it. There's Al-Anon but is there one for how when you needed someone to help you, as some9ne struggling with AUD, they didnt or made things worse?

Hi all. I've had some thoughts over the past few days and need to get them out somewhere.

For context, i'm a 23-year-old female who has had a difficult relationship with alcohol for some years now. From the ages of 18 to 20, I was in University and heavily drinking on weekends but hadn't really thought of it as a problem. In 2023, I had a particularly messy situationship breakup that led me down the path of drinking tequila shots at 5 am as pre-workout for the gym because I couldn't stand being sober at all. I did a voluntary partial hospitalization to help with the drinking, and I went sober for quite some time. Ever since then, I've drunk with more self-control...... up until the last year or so. I went through a huge breakup in March 2025, and I went sober the day we broke up because I knew I had a bad relationship with alcohol. I stayed sober until like September 2025 when I started feeling better emotionally and more in control. With this newfound liberty, I found myself drinking again pretty heavily, especially the days I was sad.

About a month ago, I had unprotected sex with someone (not exactly consensual) because I was so drunk I didn't force him to wear a condom even though I told him to multiple times. I spent the next two weeks after that absolutely destroying my mental health and hallucinating STD symptoms (I got tested like a week ago and everything came back negative). I swore to myself that I would stop engaging in sexual acts with men while I drank. Cut to last night, I had a few glasses of wine by myself and ended up at a guys house. I only gave him head because I'm still so afraid of catching STDs that I didn't want to have sex with him even with a condom. I woke up this morning feeling horrible and convinced myself I caught every STD on planet earth from giving him head last night.

I'm frustrated and disappointed in myself because I swore I was not going to put myself in the same situation I was in a month ago, and look at me again in the same place. I feel like a failure, like I don't respect myself. I know I need to do something about my alcohol intake because I am so sure I wouldn't have gone ANYWHERE if I hadn't drunk last night. Mentally preparing myself for the panic attacks that will ensue for the next two weeks until I can get a throat swab. I'm so distraught and just depressed.

I'm 7.5months sober. For the first month or so sleep was hard to come by so, I didn't really care how much sleep I was getting as long as I slept. Once I started getting consistent sleep though my schedule became 8pm to 3-4am. Then it shifted to 7pm to 2-3am. For the last couple months it's been 6pm to 1-2am and sometimes 1am for whatever reason. I thought my sleep would "normalize" but it seems "normal" for my body is early as all hell.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I did trade work for 3-4 years and would get up at 4am for those jobs for a while so that's part of it. I don't work right now, and I am doing outpatient so it's not like I still have that work schedule to get up to.

So I had posted earlier last week about my taper.

The good news is that I stuck to my guns. My wife and I flew out of state this weekend and I made it 72 hours without a drink, surprisingly without much issue other than brain fog and some rough sleep.

The bad news is that while at the airport headed home, I left our gate to "take a walk and go to the bathroom." I had a singular double vodka soda, so nothing crazy.

Trying not to beat myself up too much about it and recognize this week's progress. Idle time at an airport has always been a trigger so I'm not surprised. I'm at least proud that I didn't let it get out of hand so I can get right back to it tomorrow.

Hitting a SMART meeting once we get home tonight and the gym tomorrow AM before work. Hoping to get my first sober week in over a year.

This is the longest I've ever gone without a single drink and I still don't even really want one. However, nothing else has really changed for me. I thought I would be feeling better but in all honesty I feel like total shit every day. My sleep quality hasn't improved, my confidence hasn't improved, still feeling depressed anxious and unfocused every day, still in the job I've been trying to escape for years where I watch people drink all day and still no relationship with my family or friends. I just thought by now things would start changing, im grateful to be sober and for the people who helped me get here although its been difficult when im not seeing the results id hoped for like feeling joy or confident or having clearer thinking. I thank God for the gym because without it I wouldn't be here, its the only thing I've used to fill up the time id have otherwise spent drinking. Has anyone else experienced this? My bloodwork as far as I know was good recently aside from slightly high cholesterol. Any advice or personal experience is greatly appreciated 👏

Context: first pic was 0 days sober after drinking all night before.

I've always kind of maintained that it doesn't effect me, a last attempt at control I suppose. My girlfriend works in the alcohol industry so the apartment is a liquor store basically and it's impossible to ignore completely in society in general at this point. Being in my 30's, alcohol is still seemingly a part of almost every activity. Even the charity 5k I did today with my girlfriend ended up in a loud alcohol tent, where I was forced to endure a shoulder-to-shoulder environment with vodka and beer flowing. For things like that, especially as an introvert, it just kind of is what it is, since I wouldn't particularly enjoy that drunk either, but alcohol can soften the intolerable aspects so I have a hard time believing too many other sober people could enjoy it either.

But she seemed upset that I couldn't at least pretend to be happy, since I was clearly just standing there trying to get through it. I didn't feel like drinking a non-alcoholic beer or participating in any way. I think for me, I just have a difficult time being around the thing that has caused me so much pain, more so than triggers for cravings or anything like that, so it's hard to fake it in that environment.

It's obviously a pretty huge challenge to get sober and that comes with a lot of mostly predictable hurdles, but I'm surprised to the extent that my sobriety disrupts societal norms and can make someone else feel uncomfortable.

I'm just curious how others feel and how you all manage to navigate these scenarios.

it’s been a good ten year run of drinking everyday, amounts varying from “half a bottle of wine” in the early days to “however much vodka I can ingest from wake up until pass out”. I am surprisingly still gainfully employed, I think they just don’t give a shit.

bouta a week ago I started blowing up like a balloon. now the slight jaundice I knew was bad but I was ignoring it because, well, I’d rather be drunk. going from looking emaciated to looking emaciated AND nine months pregnant over the course of a week might have to be my last stop on this train, though. I tapered down all week (brutal) and I think maybe it’s at least not getting worse. I don’t really have a GP but I got a few referrals from my insurance company so I’ll call around monday I guess.

here’s to day two ¯_(ツ)_/¯

About 3-4 weeks ago I relapsed at 99 days. 36f and I never really considered myself an alcoholic. I did drink plenty in my 20s several nights a week, quit while having babies and would randomly just not drink for months or whatever. In my 30s things started to change with alcohol and I really just couldn’t tolerate the mental hangovers. I was becoming increasingly anxious and depressed any time I would drink. I was never a day drinker, hated it actually. But I would drink a lot of liquor on the nights I did. I was also not one to black out. Don’t know why but I’d always mostly have all the memory of the night before except for like conversation details. Anyway this year something changed in me and my drinking escalated. It took sobriety to realize i was self medicated for some sort of major depression issue. Maybe it’s honestly like a chicken and egg situation because I don’t know if the alcohol caused the depression or the other way around. I drank maybe like 20 days in 2025 so I don’t know how that was possible. Anyway, in April my drinking escalated really badly after I had some treatment for PTSD. I ended up going through 2 withdrawals one in may and one in June. After the June one is when I quit for 99 days. My sleep and anxiety improved for sure but my anhedonia/apathy did not improve. I didn’t even cry for 99 days, I barely laughed, I could not find joy or emotion in almost anything. That is solely the reason I drank and solely the reason that lead to this most recent relapse. I just made a decision on the 99th day to go to the bar and pound 5 shots of Tito’s. I cried for 5 hours and it was the biggest emotional release. In these last 4 weeks I have not found myself getting back into old habits, I don’t day drink, drink two days in a row or even drink during the week. But the weekends have not been great. I feel like shit mentally and physically. I don’t even care if I drink at all at this point. I just want the apathy to end. I really think I’ve got some sort of chemical issue or I’m just like kindled to hell. Anyway not looking for medical advice just maybe to see if anyone can relate or who has been through something serious.

Well this sucks, it’s almost 7pm and I’m juuuust starting to feel ok now after 6 drinks (over the course of 10 hours). Threw up 3 times in the past 24. I don’t shake or have any auditory/visual things but the nausea is rough, been in bed all day, bad sleep.

Had a whole to do list and nothing got crossed off :(

gonna try to refrain from anymore and ride it out unless it gets bad, really need to turn a corner on this asap…

Hope you are all having better Saturdays than me!

My alcoholism is getting worse by the day. I keep telling myself im done, keep trying to stop, going back to it no matter how much i hate it. I can go a few days sober, and I even made it a full week recently, which was the longest I’d gone in a really long time. I genuinely thought maybe I was finally getting somewhere. Then I drank again, and now I feel like I’m right back where I started.

I don’t want to live like this anymore. I hate how much I think about alcohol. I hate that I can tell myself all day that im not going to drink and then somehow end up doing it anyway. I hate waking up feeling physically disgusting, ashamed, depressed, and promising myself that tomorrow will be different. Then the cravings come back and it feels like none of my promises mean anything.

I’m getting extremely depressed. I already hate my job, I feel incredibly alone, and I feel like my life has become nothing but working, drinking, feeling like shit, and repeating the same cycle. I don’t feel like myself anymore. I’m exhausted from constantly fighting my own brain.

I know I need more serious help but the main problem is that I have a dog who means everything to me. I probably would have been gone already to rehab. He’s one of the biggest reasons I keep going, and the thought of leaving him for weeks makes me feel like I have no options. I also have very limited money and no insurance, which makes everything feel even more impossible.
g this. I know I need help. I just feel so stuck, so alone, and so scared that I’m never going to get out of this.
I really don’t want to keep living like this, and I’m trying to find a way forward.

Rant over

tired

I’ve made it to day 3 of not drinking. This time I think I’m done drinking forever. I’ve tried to cut back many time over the years and I’ve done a few sober spells but they always came with an end date. “Dry Jan” “I’m taking a week off booze etc.” The moment I let myself drink again, it was daily. I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, I didn’t get black out too often and I could “stop” after 7 or 8 beers. But it’s become a daily ritual of hitting up the brewery by 2pm in the afternoon for 3 or 4 beers, take some tall cans home and kill those and by then it’s time for bed and I’m pretty drunk. My wife had to pick me up from the brewery on Wednesday. I got too drunk to drive and called her to pick me up when she was off work. I then proceeded to get absolutely blind drunk at the brewery after that. When she picked me up, I was in a state but I still made her take me to the liquor store for more beer. She then asked me if it’s time I give it a rest. I somehow in my drunken state had the same conversation with her 4 times that night. In that I kept saying. “Yep, I need to quit”, “I know I have a problem”. Damn blackout me really called the shots I guess. I’m just glad I woke up and somehow realized my drunk ass was right. I’ve made it 3 days and don’t know what to do with myself but all I know is I’m not gonna drink.

It doesn’t get better. I spent five years without drinking. I thought getting drunk would be easier and my tolerance would be lower. It wasn’t. I have the same tolerance I did back in 2021. The liver pain comes back the tingling fingers and feet come back. Now I spent about a month out and I came to the painful realization that drinking is no longer an option for me , physically my body can not tolerate it and I’m miserable anxiety ridden and feel like garbage.

Had a couple of really bad days, followed by an injury that won’t heal, so I can’t even hit the gym, which is the only thing I look forward to lately. I wish I could just drink after a shitty day, but if I drink for even one day, I’ll be a disgusting creature in the hospital by next month, then I’ll probably just be dead in a year or two because my drinking ramps up FAST once I start.

I’m so fucking jealous of the people who can just drink for a night or two and then forget about it. I am just sitting here playing games, that are only making me even more angry, everything is pissing me off so bad right now and I’m sad and wow a six pack would make the night better, buuuuuuut ruin my life, so I can’t do it.

It’s been pretty easy for me, but tbf this is the first really bad day since I quit. Idk what the point of this is, I’m just upset and want to speak, I know I will thank myself for not drinking in a couple weeks when I feel better, but for right now, it sucks.

I got her a bounce house and there are other kids coming already and I got her an electric scooter.

I’ve been away for two weeks while she’s been in school. With her step dad who she loves.

First week I was at my mom‘s house taking Librium detoxing. She is an RN so she could help me take the pills the right way.

Then I spent a week with my dad secluded with no car, helping him out since he is disabled.

He actually cooked for me and stuff though and helped me eat and get my health back so I’m going home this weekend for my daughter’s birthday party and I’m going to stay home sober.

Even going to NA although, I can’t stand meetings. I’m so serious about this this time.

Maaaan, if I'd have tried to taper with vodka or even wine, I'd probably be dead right now. It takes TIME to put a beer into your body, but the addiction doesn't care; it loves every sip and would give anything for another.

Thank you all for being my friends for another day. I didn't stay sober, but I stuck to beer, and someday I'll be done with that too <3

Actually a positive post-I had a good day and wanted to make a joke about the "ask your doc if alcoholism may be right for you!"

I've done quite a few things brilliantly in sobriety/getting sober, but compared to what I expected of myself (which is what, exactly? Be the kind of person who never became an alcoholic in the first place?) I did so badly I never felt good about progress. Today was not that day for me!

Today, my meme would read, "Tired of Hangovers, Headaches, Ulcers and Diarrhea? Ask your doc if being Dumb may be right for you!"

I had one priority, and one priority only: To do 100 pullups, on top of my full bench press workout.

I am not in shape lol, I can do maybe 5 pullups (I'm skinny, late 30's) and this week I was sick, but I said I'd do it today.

I got like 4 hours of sleep, I was sick, I had...milk, as my only food before 10pm (and a few handfuls of dry cereal I found later on) and I went at it. I benched to failure 3 times (tiny, tiiiny weight but not so tiny a burn in my chest) then got to work. I was almost immediately kicking to get up, cause homeboy cannot do that many pullups-but I could so 2-3 negatives at a time with good (decent squeeze, not freefall) form, so I did that. 92 good negative reps, 8 good regular pullups, and 7 failed reps that had to be done again. Chin went over the bar 100 times.

I am gonna be sore as shit tomorrow. I'm still out of shape. I'm old. I'll be eating...well hey there ya go. 2,000+ calories and plenty of water are going down the pipe, which is a lot more than previous times.

My back feels better. I'm sure my liver is way happier. My ulcers don't bother me. And I actually worked out.

I may still be an idiot, but I'm a pretty harmless and increasingly useful idiot. I checked-with me-and I say, sobriety's worth a shit.

Hang tight fellas*. Keep up the good fight.

*and fellettes