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Chindi
–early 40s, Northwest USA
Member
and Online Meeting Facilitator, SMART Recovery® Online
Former
maladaptive behavior: alcohol
Sober:
ten months and counting
What
has SMART Recovery® meant to me? As I look back on life, I can
say that I was a mental bomb just waiting to go off. In almost all
respects you could say that I had accomplished most every goal I had
ever set out to achieve and my health had never been an issue.
Granted, I had minor set backs, but nothing that was too major. I was
what some people might call an over-achieving perfectionist. I saw
nothing wrong with that and often wondered why more people did not do
everything to the best of their ability.
Starting in the
summer of 2000 a series of one-after-another life events just didn’t
go right. Professional, personal, financial, health… you name
it, it happened. No matter how well thought out, no matter how great
the effort, no matter how good the intentions everything went wrong
and nothing worked out. A divorce in the summer of 2003 was the thing
that really did me in. It was not so much a nasty fight divorce, but
one in which the total faith, trust and loyalty I had put into it was
betrayed. Over the course of the next year insomnia started in. Every
time I went to bed I would lay there for hours going over everything
that had happened. I like to call it brain racing. It finally got to
the point where I was not sleeping for three to four days. Well, that
was the final straw! When you quit sleeping you quit thinking. I
turned to drinking for sleep. Honestly, no other reason. I JUST
WANTED SLEEP! Somewhere along the way it turned to drinking just to
drink and forget it all.
I was a closet drinker and did it
behind closed doors. Although I’m sure some people had concern,
nobody had a clue how much I was drinking. I had no family nearby,
most of the friends were attached to my marriage so faded away when
that ended and I didn’t socialize with the people I worked
with. I finally bailed out of the job, packed up and moved back
nearer to family and old friends. But by then I was firmly entrenched
in the downward spiral.
During this period I recognized that
I was in trouble. I went to a couple of AA meetings and the second
one I walked out of so pissed off it wasn’t funny. I couldn’t
accept anything that left a person at a point of indefinite
hopelessness. Even as messed up as my thinking was I accepted that I
had put myself into that position and I had the power and choice to
get myself out of it.
As with everything in my life up to that
point I put 100% into the drinking. On the day I ended up in the
hospital I was up to buying six or seven bottles of booze at a time,
scheduling a couple days of vacation before or after a weekend,
closing the front door on the world and going on three, four, five
day benders. Only ending when the booze ran out. The last time I came
pretty close to death and I don’t even want to think of how
many times before that I had drank myself to that point. On the 23rd
of August 2006 I walked out of that hospital resolved to get my life
back in order. Since I knew that AA and 12-step programs didn’t
sit well with me, I started looking for alternatives.
SMART
Recovery® was shown to me by a counselor in another program when
he felt that they had helped me about as far as they could. What
started out as a plan to quit drinking has turned into a journey to
change my life and ways of looking at it. Since I choose not to talk
about it with my family or friends and I refuse to talk about it at
work, SMART Recovery® has given me somewhere to come and
discuss my journey with others who understand and pass no judgment.
They are traveling their own journey. I have come to realize that for
every one of the billions of people on Earth there are an equal
number of roads traveled as people live their lives. Yet, when we
leave that individual road many of us end up in the exact same ditch.
It’s when we try to climb out of the ditch that some of us find
SMART Recovery®. We help our self and each other out of the ditch
through support in the chat room, discussing issues and the SMART
Recovery® tools in meetings and reading and sharing insights and
wisdom in the forums.
This started out as a plan to quit
drinking. With SMART Recovery® I have learned and now have at my
disposal the tools needed to keep from ever going back into that
ditch. It will also lead to a much fuller and happier life in the
future.
Here are some of the highlights of what I’ve
learned so far:
1- We must hold our self accountable for our
actions, make the tough decisions and do the hard work our self.
Nobody else can. On the other hand, this also allows us to give our
self praise and acknowledgement for the successes that we
achieve.
2- We must accept the past. No matter how terrible it
was and no matter how awful things were, it is the past. We have to
learn that if we can’t forget it we must find the proper place
to put it and move on with life.
3- Life is life. It has
nothing personal against us. Sometimes bad things happen, sometimes
good things happen. We have to take it in stride and go with the
flow. IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL!
4- Sometimes other peoples
actions are personal and do affect us. We can’t let those
things dictate the quality of our life. I’m at a loss for words
to express this in a deeper sense so I will leave it to you to
interpret my meaning.
5- And this, the most important lesson.
Do not ever, ever sit down to write a short post when you are jacked
up on a quadruple shot hazelnut mocha.
Chindi May 2007
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