Drinking: a confession

My cat just sticks to CatNip... each to there own :) 

I recommend A A Gills,  Pour Me a Life as well. 

On the other hand emotions don't necessarily respond well to any amount of intelligent insghts. I don't use alcohol but my anger about things that have happened to me from the past concerning scapegoating and ostracism is still there. I do make sure to walk away from anyone these days who show no respect, or who cannot seem not to want to indulge in toxic mind games such as deliberately pushing buttons for the drama of it all. And I can probably chalk up another failure on the office politics front with that school where I had a little part-time work though as the commute was so exhausting and the chalk hurting my inflamed windpipes, I feel relief more than anything when I was told my contract would not be renewed. Issues with looming Brexshit and employment laws may have had something to do with too of course. 

I, personally am a very light drinker.

My mother enjoyed making her own wine.  Which my parents and close relatives drank.  She hated commercial drinks (beers and wines).  It all had to be home brewed.  We had all the equipment and for thirty years we collected the varies berries. raspberry, blackberry and in later years Billberries.

One night our cat got drunk.  The wine which was fermenting in the living room, overflowed with the yeast.  And the whole room smelt of a brewery  the whole night.  In the morning the cat was totally ill/drunk. The poor thing was unable to stand on her feet. She was in a state.

Coogybear posted this 3 years ago.  A short thread, but relevant.  The book looks like a must-buy for me...

Drinking to cope?

Thanks, nexus.  Yes... I was always told, in AA meetings, therapy groups, by counsellors and therapists, that I have a lot of insight and understanding.  I know the arguments and risks.  It ought to be enough to stop me.  Whenever I wake up with a hangover now, I say 'That's it.  Never again.'  Until I feel better again.  I think I'm at a critical point right now.  I'll try to do the right thing.  I posted this thread partly for others to share their experiences and understanding.  I find it helpful to hear these stories.  Hopefully, it can help others, too.  I honestly think open discussion is one of the best forms of therapy.

Disallowed Cynosure said:

I myself become sick and then sleepy, and so was wondering if anyone else can detect that kind of "threshold" within themselves, telling them to stop drinking that thing and go off and eat/drink something else instead...?

Keith Richards claims he has a threshold which he doesn't exceed, which is the reason he gives for the fact that he's still alive.  He says he's always been able to get to a point and stop, when the others around have carried on and got wrecked.  I'm not sure how true that is.  I haven't known many true alcoholics who have been able to stop themselves once they're intoxicated enough.  As they say in AA: One's too much.  Ten's not enough. 

I used to have a limit.  On the rare occasions I might go out for a drink with other people when I was in my 20s and early 30s, three pints of beer was my limit.  Any more than that made me feel sick.  And I never wanted more.  Alcohol was just never very much a part of my life at all.  I didn't go out socialising, so didn't need any 'social lubricant'.  And, as I said, I was too jacked into personal fitness - road running, cycling to work, swimming, gym.  I've always maintained that, too.  But the booze has increasingly become the thing that could easily threaten that.  Sometimes, I can just have a couple of beers and be done with it.  That's usually during the week, though, and in the evenings.  At weekends, it depends when I start drinking.  If I leave it until late in the evening, I'm fine.  But if, like yesterday, I start at midday... I just carry on until I either fall asleep or can no longer think straight.  I often have blackout - something I never really experienced until just a few years ago.  When it gets to that stage of never having enough, of finishing what you've got and going out for more, then you know it's a problem. 

And the 'wet brain' will, of course, tell you things that are blatantly untrue.  You'll look around at people who drink very heavily for years and years and kid yourself that if they can do it, so can you.  My dad drank heavily from around the age of 13.  At my age, 59, he could knock back 12 cans of Special Brew (9% then, which is 4.5 alcohol units) over the course of a day and still function well.  He died at 77, having never had an alcohol-related illness.  So maybe I have some tough genes on my side.  Most of my writer heroes - Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Charles Bukowski, etc - were alcoholics.  Carver kicked it after he met Tess Gallagher, and she helped him to save himself.  Cheever died of it, I think.  Bukowski drank so heavily in his early life that he was hospitalised with a stomach hemorrhage at 33 and told he would die if he ever drank again.  He gave it a week, then drank again - and drank on throughout the rest of his life until he died at 74 (though he stopped in his final months, I think, after he got his leukaemia diagnosis).  His final writing years were fuelled by 2 bottles of wine an evening.  There's the romance of all that - which is all bulls**t, as Stephen King - a recovering alcoholic - rightly points out.  These people wrote well in spite of their drinking, not because of it. We can always find excuses and justifications to continue drinking.  During my years in therapy groups, I heard all the stories.  Something bad happens in your day, so you pick up a drink because it makes you feel better - makes it matter less.  I spoke to formerly recovered alcoholics who'd gone back to the bottle because they said they no longer found life as enjoyable without the fix.  They got bored.  I know heavy drinkers now who say they ought to stop, but they don't because they enjoy it so much.  That makes it difficult.  If you enjoy drinking - in spite of the many costs - then you have a battle on your hands.  And I think many of them probably use the 'enjoyment' argument as a justification when in reality they know they have a serious problem, but can't seem to do anything about it.

I'm not physically addicted to alcohol.  I don't get the shakes.  I've never had DTs.  I've never had dry retching.  It's only made me physically sick once in the last 10 years.  Maybe I have an inner 'limit'.  Again, though, that's me telling myself it's probably alright to continue.  Because, as we all know, the more the body adjusts to a drug, the more it needs.  I read that Richard Burton was regularly getting through 3 bottles of vodka a day during the 60s and 70s.  By 45, he was wrecked internally.  He had the body of an old man.  He had a neck operation, and they discovered that his spinal column was coated in crystallized alcohol.  When I read that, my reaction was  'I can't imagine ever getting that bad.'  But who knows?  I know I'm still very fit - probably much fitter than most people my age.  I can cycle ten miles to work in about 40 minutes, do a day's work, then cycle home again and feel fine.  I have a fast metabolism.  My body seems able to process alcohol very quickly. But sooner or later, something will give.  I know this.  So I have to ask myself some very important questions.  Do I want to keep sacrificing my health - playing Russian Roulette with it?  Do I want to keep kidding myself that I'll probably be alright?  Do I want to stop drinking altogether - which is the only way I'll ever really stop the harm it's doing?  If I'm honest, I know it's also connected to where I am right now in life.  I've not achieved the things I once hoped for, and I feel disillusioned by that.  In my down moments, I think it's too late now - though I know that's nonsense, really.  It's a common enough thing at this age, I suppose.  But add to it the sense I have that my life has been stunted in some way.  That I'm 'behind and still trying to catch up.'  My condition - unknown as it was for most of my life - has, I know, held me back in many ways.  And perhaps the awareness of this is one of the downsides of the diagnosis.  The rational, positive part of me says 'So what?  Move on.  Stop looking for reasons not to.'  There's still enough of that in me.  Drink is probably devouring it, though, bit by bit.

Again... I know what I need to do.  My first novel was all about a man recovering from mental illness and alcoholism (it's out of print, so this isn't a pitch!)  It was largely autobiographical.  I used it as a way to analyse my own mental processes - the reasons why I do certain things, think certain things.  Reading it again makes me realise that it's all about living with Asperger's.  Booze is naturally a huge motif in the story.  At one point, the character goes to see his alcohol counsellor and talks about his week.  I used it as a way of interrogating myself.  I see the arguments from both sides - and my side isn't really an argument at all.  One of the counsellors in my own therapy group once said 'You have a choice about this.  You can either stop or carry on.'  I took issue with that, saying that some people had fewer choices than others, or their choices were much harder to make.  She persisted, though.  'But it's still a choice.  You still have that choice, don't you?'

Yes.

But when you grow up feeling at one remove from everyone around you, it tends to breed a sense of being 'improper' - like everyone else has the secret that you're not privy to.

Had that, definitely.

For me, that's led to a need to be 'removed' in some way.

I suppose I reacted differently, then. I need alone time, but I don't invite alcohol into that.

As for things to say to you I have nothing. Nothing apparently could have stopped my old friend  from drinking herself to death. She certainly was not interested in advice. My Dad drank and I met a teaching colleague who was just like him. It made me less inined to take his vino veritas comments less personally as I could see it was the drink rather than 'him.' 

But you have one thing my old friend didn't have, who was like a soap offer character and just as tragic: you have a lot more understanding of where this could all be coming from. Maybe you can therefore find a way to reign in the drinking a little more. 

Don’t panic... it is a managed “indulgence” and one to temper life’s pointy edges. As DC eludes, knowing ones threshold is key. 

Things have been challenging of late and it is done not to seek a high per se but as Possibly Autistic so succinctly puts it, it is to dampen down ones system

• My Dad used to drink. He was pretty well a high-functioning alcoholic, as he got quite prosperous in later life. On the outside he was very successful. He could be cunning later on about appropriating extra bottles to drink at times like Christmas and downing them in secret places, then he would say things. My mother's mother went through times of excessive drinking too. I think my brother may still have an issue with drinking.

I always enjoy a modest glass of wine in the evening and do not actually like to drink more than that. I hate being hungover. Now all the pundits are saying that alcohol in even moderate consumption can give you cancer. Great!!

I misused alcohol in my mispent youth, certainly, to the point of having blackouts. At uni, I got angry at the vacuity of all the posy conversations around me and threw a glass away from me onto the floor in a thoroughly crowded room. One of the best scandalous things I did from the point of view of my parent's curtain twitching neighbours was to binge at a local school leabingt party and locking myself out of the house. When I called at the neighbours opposite I was panicking because I knew I had done.myself real harm and they wondered too if they had been taking drugs. Unfortunately I had come across this stupid hippy therapy book about primal screams and that this was the way to become more real and to get away from the false reality  and tyranny of social convention..........

I had an old friend who drank herself to death so on one level must have got used to the boundary breaking that drinkers tend to do. 

And much further out than we thought?

I didn't mean to suggest in my earlier comment about self-destructiveness that there aren't social factors that 'drive' people to drink, and some people may be physically more vulnerable to addiction. What is it AA tells you to avoid? Hunger, anger, loneliness and tiredness? Then there's stress and social inequality.

Personally I've been lucky enough not to have a problem with alcohol, smoking or drugs. I don't seem to get high off anything I've tried (although I hear heroin is very moreish), and recently I'd been associating this with autistic alexithymia. So maybe I do get a high but don't realise it. As a kid, I discovered butane gas and solvent in blu-tac by myself, so perhaps if I'd not been so isolated I would have got into glue-sniffing, or nowadays it would be nitrous oxide.

Hundreds of people die in the UK each year from acute alcohol toxicity, not to mention the thousands who die from liver cirrhosis, and then there's violence, suicide, accidents, cardiovascular disease. And yet whenever a death is even vaguely associated with, not caused by, ecstasy, the tabloids are all over it.

On the same page with you there, as well as the comment about relationships. 

Your post resonates with me too. 

I drink more than I'd like to and feel regretful afterwards. 

I seem to drink as a way to dampen down my system, especially after too much time spent around others / noisy environments. For me it's definitely linked to my job and work related stressors  (constant demands, noise, being on the receiving (hearing) end of other people complaining all the time etc..). 

I know that I need to change the way / environment I work in. That's a longer term plan. 

I think it's also connected to my gradual realisation that there's something different about me and that I may just be  too sensitive to be in a long term romantic relationship with anyone. 

Ah, but DC..  I am not drinking, but self-drowning :) 

Greetings, especially to Mr. Tom and Miss Elephant...

I recall the Christmas Threads, and have sort of waited for this Topic to come up again. I wanted to ask some perhaps strange questions about it (since I am anoymous here!).

...I myself do "drink" as well as "drink"... does anyone else get annoyed at the confusion between "drink", "drinking" and "getting drunk"? When I buy a "drink", people think the worst and think that I am only interested in "getting drunk".  ...If this question confuses anyone, then that is what I mean!

...Then there is the different effects which "drunk" has upon people (including myself). Some become elated, some become, er - "hostile", and some become sick, or just sleepy. I myself become sick and then sleepy, and so was wondering if anyone else can detect that kind of "threshold" within themselves, telling them to stop drinking that thing and go off and eat/drink something else instead...?

Again, this may be confusing, which is what I am trying to find out about. Thanks for any answers, even if I do not Post about it again, it is a sort of "sensitive/uncomfortable" topic, I think. (But I say again that I do not drink just to get drunk, ever!)

Cassandro said:

There is no 'proper human'. Isn't that just that 'normality' thing again?

Yes.  But when you grow up feeling at one remove from everyone around you, it tends to breed a sense of being 'improper' - like everyone else has the secret that you're not privy to.  For me, that's led to a need to be 'removed' in some way.  Alcohol is a good method of removal.

I gave up drinking alcoholic beverages when I was 19.  I had a particularly bad experience after partaking too much of the intoxicant, was extremely ill and vowed never to take alcohol again.

Although I don't think I was ever dependent on the drug (which alcohol is), stopping drinking brought on a bout of severe depression which lasted many months and led to psychiatric treatment, autism was not recognised then and certainly my autism had a major effedt on me and the depression that followed.

So I can well understand how difficult it is and how easy it would be to relapse.  From my perspective, I just said I would not have any and nearly 45 years later, I still haven't.  And my lack of partying activity, especially in the early stages, helped prevent being tempted by peer pressure.  Now I can detect alcohol in anything - when put in cakes, or even in fresh bread (someone once calculated that 30 loaves of quality fresh bread would send one over the drink-drive limit.  An awful lot of bread though to eat at once!) 

I must say that I don't think I could resume drinking now, even if I wanted to, the smell and how I remember being so very, very ill have ensured that I won't.

I understated.

It's a habit-forming drug. People don't need to have a self-destructive motive to harm themselves through drink.

There is no 'proper human'. Isn't that just that 'normality' thing again?

I'm sorry about the people you lost too.

You and Ellie know the options better than I. People I know who've gone sober and taken up AA have usually done it at a crisis, but maybe that was just a moment of awareness. Others are in a cyclic battle to cut down.

It's more than a lot.

I've also lost friends to alcohol.  I lost my father to it, too.  I know all the risks.  But it doesn't stop me.  Partly, I think, it's a form of self-punishment.  For what, I don't know.  Maybe not being a proper human.  Or, rather, feeling I'm not a proper human.