Anybody else trade addictions?

Walgreens had a big gaping hole where the Sour Haribo is supposed to be. So I guess they are super popular.

Made do with some Sour Patch kids. I’ll order the Haribo from Amazon. DOH?!
 
I’ll be at 20 years without alcohol in September. I wouldn’t say I traded one addiction for another, but sobriety did give me the focus and drive to start a new career and push myself into a very comfortable salary, so I suppose I could say that quitting did pave the way for the ability to buy more stuff.

My actual “replacement” for drinking turned out to be woodworking, which does a great job of keeping my mind occupied and yields something tangible and positive as a result. Instead of craving new gear, I get ideas for things I want to build for my house. Then I build them. Win/win.
 
norminal said:
Congrats man!
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Thanks! The best advice I got early on was from the drummer from my old bar band, who had gotten sober a few years before me. He said that the first year or so is pretty tough, but eventually you get over the hump and the new lifestyle takes over.

I can honestly say that I never have any cravings, and it doesn’t bother me at all to be around people who are drinking. It’s just not a part of my life anymore, and walking down the beer aisle at the supermarket doesn’t phase me at all.

I do know that I’m not a typical recovering alcoholic, and that there are many who struggle with it for the rest of their lives. I feel extremely lucky in that regard.
 
Frodebro said:
Thanks! The best advice I got early on was from the drummer from my old bar band, who had gotten sober a few years before me. He said that the first year or so is pretty tough, but eventually you get over the hump and the new lifestyle takes over.

I can honestly say that I never have any cravings, and it doesn’t bother me at all to be around people who are drinking. It’s just not a part of my life anymore, and walking down the beer aisle at the supermarket doesn’t phase me at all.

I do know that I’m not a typical recovering alcoholic, and that there are many who struggle with it for the rest of their lives. I feel extremely lucky in that regard.
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That is Awesome! Congratulations on it all!
 
I came away from rehab with a new perspective on alcohol: It is a toxin that ends up in every cell in your body.

There was a guy there who had such a great disposition, even though he was only in his early 30's with a full-blown, DT's-when-he-came-in, alcohol addiction. He goes, "I don't know how the hell you heroin addicts could afford your $300-a-day habits! Mine was $28.73 a day, 18-pack."
 
Holden Afart said:
I trade addictions almost every year. Pretty soon I'll need that drug from Robocop....
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Burgess Meredith Meme GIF
 
Oh yes. I'm only just now really starting to learn how a lot of my addictions/vices came to be as a result of working with these psychologists/psychiatrists to get a handle on the ADHD. A lot of it makes so much more sense than it did, but the first few times I ever got drunk I was 6 years old and it was from my mom giving my Fuzzy Navels. I'd sit at the table and get drunk with her and her friends who thought it was hilarious a little kid was getting tanked, while giving me nonstop attention and laughs. Having that kind of connection made to alcohol at that age....hahahhaa doesn't take a genius to tell ya that's going to end bad.

This is the 4th time I re-write this as I keep writing novels and going off topic, but I was a wreck from the ages 15-30. I started drinking to intentionally blackout at 21 and didn't go more than 2 days without doing so until I was 28. My average was 5 nights of blackout drinking and 2 days of hangovers/hair of the doggin' it while I consumed every and any substance I could get my hands on. The last 3 years I drank like that I was regularly getting the DT's and consciously knew I was headed down the same road much of my family had. A mushroom trip made me do a 180 one night and after 2 months, I entirely lost the desire to be blackout drunk or even drink regularly at all. Since I turned 30 I average 2-4 drinks every 2-3 months apart and drugs just aren't a thing I give a shit about these days. I love LSD and mushrooms, but those are like a once-a-year or 'In case of fire break glass' thing for me. I generally take a couple hits off a weed vape or bong in the evenings, but plenty of days go by where I don't smoke at all.
Frodebro said:
I can honestly say that I never have any cravings, and it doesn’t bother me at all to be around people who are drinking. It’s just not a part of my life anymore, and walking down the beer aisle at the supermarket doesn’t phase me at all.

I do know that I’m not a typical recovering alcoholic, and that there are many who struggle with it for the rest of their lives. I feel extremely lucky in that regard.
Click to expand...

I get this, 110%. My boss, who lost her husband to severe alcoholism, regularly advises me that I should do something with this in regard to helping others. 3 years ago I started the training to be a substance abuse counselor/peer support specialist and I was really stoked about it for a while and volunteered at rehab center until I saw things I couldn't get behind and stopped. It's something I still want to pursue, though. I know exactly what mechanism allowed me to make that 180 and how I got to it as quickly as I did. Being able to forgive someone regardless if they are capable of acknowlegding their complicity in a situation was it for me and I know it's the hangup with so many other of my friends with addiction or depression issues.

Overall, music has been the healthy alternative to the negative addiction stuff. It's certainly what's held me together all these years. It flips between the love of playing guitar and the love of writing/recording. I was pretty freaked out after my divorce and had nothing in the creative well for 2.5 years, but I just had faith that it'd all come back and it finally did. At this point it's hard to remember what it even felt like to not care about picking up a guitar or to have no music ideas in my head.
 
DrewJD82 said:
Oh yes. I'm only just now really starting to learn how a lot of my addictions/vices came to be as a result of working with these psychologists/psychiatrists to get a handle on the ADHD. A lot of it makes so much more sense than it did, but the first few times I ever got drunk I was 6 years old and it was from my mom giving my Fuzzy Navels. I'd sit at the table and get drunk with her and her friends who thought it was hilarious a little kid was getting tanked, while giving me nonstop attention and laughs. Having that kind of connection made to alcohol at that age....hahahhaa doesn't take a genius to tell ya that's going to end bad.

This is the 4th time I re-write this as I keep writing novels and going off topic, but I was a wreck from the ages 15-30. I started drinking to intentionally blackout at 21 and didn't go more than 2 days without doing so until I was 28. My average was 5 nights of blackout drinking and 2 days of hangovers/hair of the doggin' it while I consumed every and any substance I could get my hands on. The last 3 years I drank like that I was regularly getting the DT's and consciously knew I was headed down the same road much of my family had. A mushroom trip made me do a 180 one night and after 2 months, I entirely lost the desire to be blackout drunk or even drink regularly at all. Since I turned 30 I average 2-4 drinks every 2-3 months apart and drugs just aren't a thing I give a shit about these days. I love LSD and mushrooms, but those are like a once-a-year or 'In case of fire break glass' thing for me. I generally take a couple hits off a weed vape or bong in the evenings, but plenty of days go by where I don't smoke at all.


I get this, 110%. My boss, who lost her husband to severe alcoholism, regularly advises me that I should do something with this in regard to helping others. 3 years ago I started the training to be a substance abuse counselor/peer support specialist and I was really stoked about it for a while and volunteered at rehab center until I saw things I couldn't get behind and stopped. It's something I still want to pursue, though. I know exactly what mechanism allowed me to make that 180 and how I got to it as quickly as I did. Being able to forgive someone regardless if they are capable of acknowlegding their complicity in a situation was it for me and I know it's the hangup with so many other of my friends with addiction or depression issues.

Overall, music has been the healthy alternative to the negative addiction stuff. It's certainly what's held me together all these years. It flips between the love of playing guitar and the love of writing/recording. I was pretty freaked out after my divorce and had nothing in the creative well for 2.5 years, but I just had faith that it'd all come back and it finally did. At this point it's hard to remember what it even felt like to not care about picking up a guitar or to have no music ideas in my head.
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The story of my drinking career is eerily similar to yours.

For some, it's a genetic predisposition that can unleash the monster after the very first drink.
For others, it's the net result of an extended lifestyle of heavy or steady drinking/drugging that ends with physical addiction. Sometimes that starts as social drinking/using, sometimes it's self-medicating to block other issues.

Sometimes it's all of the above rolled into one, which can make things REALLY complicated. That was my trajectory.
 
Frodebro said:
The story of my drinking career is eerily similar to yours.

For some, it's a genetic predisposition that can unleash the monster after the very first drink.
For others, it's the net result of an extended lifestyle of heavy or steady drinking/drugging that ends with physical addiction. Sometimes that starts as social drinking/using, sometimes it's self-medicating to block other issues.

Sometimes it's all of the above rolled into one, which can make things REALLY complicated. That was my trajectory.
Click to expand...

Absolutely.

I definitely had the social aspect of it and it was really easy to see the entire time. The heavy drinking in my teens started after seeing Pantera's Watch It Go and being influenced by Dime's over-the-top personality just as much as his playing. He acted like I felt inside, but I was a shy kid until then. The drinking would help remove the shy barrier and inflate my personality. Being that my first experiences with booze was the attention I was getting from my mother/her friends, it's of zero surprise it became my tool for attention. Even towards the end when people started getting concerned and talking about me as if I were a lost cause, all that shit was a method of inviting attention toward myself.

There's also a fair bit that ADHD most likely played a role in it, but not as a precursor. My head never shuts the fuck up and when I didn't know how to use meditation to get some stillness, I'd pour a bottle of vodka in my skull to shut it up. Then there's self-sabotage aspects of it all that stem from some childhood experiences and not feeling worthy enough, so you self-sabotage your way away from success.

While losing the desire to drink to excess happened like a flick of a light switch, all those things that branch off addiction require active mindfulness to avoid. While I didn't have the desire to drink like that, I still had plenty of behaviors that created a desire to escape and some of those behaviors I'll mostly likely have to stay mindful of for the remainder of my life. IE- I don't have to worry about self-sabotage much these days because I replaced "I can't do that" with "Fuck yeah, that's another avenue to step up to the plate!", but I still have issues around putting myself first, so I'll find myself stressed out to the max because I wasn't able to say "No, I can't do that right now because I don't have the time or headspace and adding one more thing to my plate isn't smart".
 
DrewJD82 said:
Absolutely.

I definitely had the social aspect of it and it was really easy to see the entire time. The heavy drinking in my teens started after seeing Pantera's Watch It Go and being influenced by Dime's over-the-top personality just as much as his playing. He acted like I felt inside, but I was a shy kid until then. The drinking would help remove the shy barrier and inflate my personality. Being that my first experiences with booze was the attention I was getting from my mother/her friends, it's of zero surprise it became my tool for attention. Even towards the end when people started getting concerned and talking about me as if I were a lost cause, all that shit was a method of inviting attention toward myself.

There's also a fair bit that ADHD most likely played a role in it, but not as a precursor. My head never shuts the fuck up and when I didn't know how to use meditation to get some stillness, I'd pour a bottle of vodka in my skull to shut it up. Then there's self-sabotage aspects of it all that stem from some childhood experiences and not feeling worthy enough, so you self-sabotage your way away from success.

While losing the desire to drink to excess happened like a flick of a light switch, all those things that branch off addiction require active mindfulness to avoid. While I didn't have the desire to drink like that, I still had plenty of behaviors that created a desire to escape and some of those behaviors I'll mostly likely have to stay mindful of for the remainder of my life. IE- I don't have to worry about self-sabotage much these days because I replaced "I can't do that" with "Fuck yeah, that's another avenue to step up to the plate!", but I still have issues around putting myself first, so I'll find myself stressed out to the max because I wasn't able to say "No, I can't do that right now because I don't have the time or headspace and adding one more thing to my plate isn't smart".
Click to expand...

I completely understand the bit about having a brain that never stops. To this day, I have to keep myself mentally occupied most of the time, or else my mind can wander off into places that at best can put me in a mild funk, and at worst shut me down completely until I force myself out of it. I actually put a concentrated effort into rebuilding my life in a way that I had multiple mind-occupying hobbies at my disposal to keep my head on the right course. Woodworking was the main one, as it was something new to me that had no connection to my old self. And now it's a huge part of my new self, so that was a successful experiment in getting my shit together.
 
Mine was childhood emotional & (some) physical abuse, with a definite genetic predisposition to addiction (father was an alcoholic), and a social disposition that awakened when I was using. I actually scored the best job of my career from being high on coke, while posting on a construction forum, that got me noticed by a very high-end custom builder's lead carpenter. :facepalm

You think I'm long-winded here... My brain came ALIVE on that shit!

I never used while working, but when I broke my leg during that gig, and needed 3 surgeries, I traded it for an opiate addiction, and things quickly fell apart, and they cut ties with me soon after. That was a rocky road for me for about 5 years.


I can't believe I'm sharing some of this shit, but since it's all behind me, and part of who I am (I too learned SO much about myself), I guess I just don't feel the need to hide it. I certainly used to, though.
 
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