February Free

[mama bear]

February Free

I am committed to March since I didn't make it all the way through February...and I will be honest if I drink
I don't want to say "slip" because it sounds like I am not taking this seriously.....and I am!

[Unwasted]

February Free

Hope This Isn't TMI.......too much information but I think it's well worth reading and understanding!


The Addiction Web Site of Terence T. Gorski
Best Practice Principles - Articles - Publications

Levels of Relapse Warning Signs
By Terence T. Gorski


Recovery from chemical dependence occurs at five levels – abstinence, situation change, behavior change, emotional change, and personal belief change.

Abstinence
The first level is abstinence. Chemical addicts must stop using alcohol and drugs and stabilize from withdrawal before they can begin to recover. At this level, we have to make a decision to stop drinking and drugging and reach out to get help.

Situational Change
Once abstinent, they move into the second level of recovery that focuses upon situational change. This level involves replacing an addiction-centered lifestyle with one that is sobriety-centered.

To stop drinking and drugging we have to get away from people places and things that make us want to use alcohol and other drugs. Counselors call this “getting into an adequately controlled environment.” If you keep hanging out with people who are drinking and drugging your chances of staying abstinence are nearly zero. To break the cycle of destructive alcohol and drug use you need help. You need to put yourself around people, places, and things that will encourage and support your abstinence and help you to learn a set of specific skills to keep yourself from drinking and drugging even if you feel like it at that moment.

Behavior Change
The third level of recovery, is behavior change. Chemical addicts must learn to identify and interrupt addictive behaviors that give short term pleasure, create long term pain, and reactivate the urge use addictively. At this level, addictive behaviors must be replaced with sobriety-centered behaviors that produce pain free pleasure by resolving the problems that create the pain.

Change In Thinking
This leads to a fourth level of recovery, a change in thinking. Addictive thinking is based upon the irrational belief that addictive use can magically fix us, solve our problems, and make us something we are not. We are thinking addictively when we believe that we can never feel whole, complete, or have the good life unless we are using addictively. The antidote for addictively thinking is sober thinking that helps us recognize the destructive effects of addictive use and see the positive benefits and opportunities provided by sobriety.

Thinking about using alcohol and other drugs increases the risk of relapse. Thinking is a cognitive process controlled by the cerebral cortex or thinking part of the brain. There are three ways of thinking about alcohol and drug use that are particularly dangerous.

The first is called euphoric recall. You remember and exaggerating the good times that you had when using alcohol and other drugs while blocking out or minimizing the bad times.

A recovering person who called himself Jake the Snake used to tell the story of the great time he had when he got stoned on cocaine and stole $150,000 worth of coke from his supplier and went off for a marvelous one week binge in Las Vegas. He forgot to mention that he caught a serious venereal disease from a prostitute, and was nearly killed when his supplier showed up to get his coke back. After being shot and taken to the emergency room, the police found a small bag of cocaine and some marijuana in Jake’s room and he ended up in jail and was serving a seven year sentence when I talked with him. He still argues that he had a good time.

The second relapse-prone way of thinking is called Awfulizing Abstinence. You think about all of the bad times associated with being alcohol and drug free while blocking out and minimizing all of the good times.

A woman named Jessie told me that nothing was working out for her since she got sober and she felt shw would be better off to start drinking and drugging again. When Jessie was drinking and drugging she was unemployed, earning money by drug dealing and prostitution, and was in a skid row cubicle hotel. Now she was physically healthy, working a regular job, and sharing a decent apartment in a middle class neighborhood with two women she got to know through her home group of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). But in her her mind, at that moment, she felt her sobriety was awful, terrible, and unbearable.

The third relapse prone way of thinking is called magical thinking about use. Cognitive therapists call this positive expectancy. We start to believe that using alcohol and other drugs will somehow magically fix out problems and make our lives better. WE forget that alcohol and drugs make us feel good for a little while and then wipes out our judgment and impulse control setting us off into a cycle of self-destructive behaviors that destroys us and those that we love.

People who relapse often begin to spend of their time cycling between these three ways of relapse prone thinking. They remember drinking and drugging and exaggerate the good times while refusing to think about any pain or problems. They exaggerate all the pain and problems of living sober while blocking out any benefits. They then begin to think about how alcohol and drugs could magically fix them and make everything in their life wonderful once again. This creates a strong desire to use alcohol and other drugs.

Emotional Change
The fifth level of recovery is emotional change. By turning off our addictive thinking, we turn on our feelings. Initially this is difficult because we must experience the pain of the past. The shame, guilt, and the nagging pain caused by the addiction surface. There is an urge is to stuff these feelings and run back into addictive or compulsive behaviors. The permanent way out is to resolve these feelings by recognizing, labeling, and communicating them to others. Then we can recognize the underlying thoughts, behaviors, and situations that create the feelings.

Effective emotional management involves learning a set of feeling management skills. First, we must learn how t or recognize the inner experiences that tell us that we are having a feeling or emotion. We have to learn to calm down, get centered and pay attention to the sensations in our bodies. Whenever we feel tense, have a knot in our stomach, feel queasy, or start clenching our jaws or fits, or can’t calmly sit still we are probably having a feeling.

The second feeling management skill is to learn how to label the feeling with a word or phrase. This means that we need to develop an emotional volabulary that will let us think about what we’re feeling on the inside and figure out how those feelings are connected with what we’re thinking and what’s happening outside of us.

The third feeling management skill is to talk about our feeling swith someone who will listen to us, try and understand our feelings, take us seriously, and respect us. The best place to find someone like this is at Twelve Step meetings or by going to a counselor or treatment program. We can’t manage painful feelings without talking about them. It’s important to talk about our feelings before we try to block them out by using alcohol or other drugs.

A Change In Core Personal Beliefs
As we learn how to manage pain and unpleasant feelings we can enter the sixth level of recovery, a change in core personal beliefs. Here we confront the core mistaken beliefs about ourselves, other people, and the world that make us miserable in recovery and make us want to use alcohol and drugs to block out the pain. These self-destructive core beliefs were usually developed when we were children before the age of 10. If we come from a dysfunctional family, we have probably internalized a dysfunctional set of core beliefs. We believe that the world is a painful and difficult place and we must always struggle in order to survive. Many of us believe, on a core level, that we a pretty hopeless and that there is no hope and no way we can ever learn to enjoy life.

These core mistaken beliefs cause us to recreate our family of origin in sobriety. We begin to unconsciously set up the situations of our lives to create the same pain and dysfunction that we experienced as children. To combat this tendency we must learn to identify these mistaken and irrational beliefs that we learned as children, to examine the logical consequences of continuing to believe these things, and to make appropriate changes in our belief system and our actions. It is only when we confront our family of origin and learn to be free from the dysfunctional and irrational beliefs that we can develop the kind of life in sobriety that will give us meaning and purpose.

The Developmental Sequence Of Recovery
Notice the developmental nature of this recovery process: (1) stop using alcohol and drugs, (2) replace addiction centered living with sobriety-centered living, (3) interrupt addictive and compulsive behaviors, (4) replace addictive thinking with rational sober thinking, (5) learn to identify and manage feelings and emotions, and (6) change the self-defeating core beliefs about ourselves, others and the world that we learned as children.

This model of recovery suggests that relapse is more than just alcohol an drug use. It is a process that can occur at each level and progress from one level to the next.

For most people who relapse, the first step is a subtle return of the core self-defeating beliefs that we learned as children. Something shifts inside of us and we no longer feel a sense of self-worth and self-confidence. We no longer feel worthy of living or having good things in sobriety, or we no longer feel capable of doing what we need to do in order to feel good about ourselves.

When our old, dysfunctional beliefs from childhood are reactivated, we begin to have negative feelings. These feelings seem out of place in our newly found recovery. There is a tendency to repress them. We would rather not think about them, so we try to push them from our minds. As a result the pain get worse and we tend to reactivate our irrational, addictive thinking to cope with the pain.

Our addictive logic tells us we must find something, anything, that will make the go away. This urge to blot out the pain awakens the echoes of our addictive past. We begin to remember how good it was when we could medicate with alcohol and drugs. We exaggerate the positive aspects of those memories while minimizing or denying the negatives. We then begin to awfulize our sobriety. We take all the negatives of being sober and exaggerate them, while blocking out all the positives. Then, we begin using magical thinking about what alcohol and drug use could do for us in the future. The addictive logic goes like this: "Since alcohol and drugs worked so well for us in the past, and since it is so terrible to be sober today, alcohol and drugs will somehow be able to magically fix me in the future."

These irrational thoughts begin to mobilize addictive behaviors. We begin looking for something, anything, that will make the pain go away. Since our sober friends are beginning to confront us by telling us that we are in trouble and we need help, we seek out "more supportive friends." We want friends who won't confront us with the fact that we're backsliding into old behaviors. This means we begin surrounding ourselves with two types of people - codependents who won't challenge our self-defeating behavior, and people who are still actively addicted.

Relapse prevention is both proactive and reactive. As a proactive strategy, relapse prevention teaches us the importance of panning our recovery, moving through its various stages, and recognizing when we become stuck and taking corrective action. Reactively, relapse prevention teaches us to recognize the warning signs that show us we are backsliding into previous stages of recovery. We can then take action to manage those warning signs before we return to alcohol and drug use.


About the Author
Terence T. Gorski is internationally recognized for his contributions to Relapse Prevention Therapy. The scope of his work, however, extends far beyond this. A skilled cognitive behavioral therapist with extensive training in experiential therapies, Gorski has broad-based experience and expertise in the chemical dependency, behavioral health, and criminal justice fields.

Mr. Gorski holds a B.A. degree in psychology and sociology from Northeastern Illinois University and an M.A. degree from Webster's College in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a Senior Certified Addiction Counselor In Illinois. He is a prolific author who has published numerous books, pamphlets and articles. Mr. Gorski routinely makes himself available for interviews, public presentations, and consultant. He has presented lectures and conducted workshops in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

[sunshinedaisies]

February Free

VERY quick post - have to leave for work - I am in whatever!

love and hygs to all,

Sun XX

[GingerDust]

February Free

Sorry if I offended anyone. Like I said, I would not likely have posted to this thread if AF for the month sounded like a requirement. This thread has become incredibly important to me over the last few weeks. And now I am sober! It's an awesome thread. And I agree with Nora. I follow you around and look for your posts, UW. You really are an inspiration. Thanks for the article too.

MB, March sounds like a great month to get sober. It "comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb," which could be nice analogy for the first few weeks of sobriety so far as I can tell. :H The lion still lives but it's not roaring quite so loud now. And wouldn't it be wonderful to hit April, the month that defines spring, IMO, with 30 days under your belt? :l

Hi Sun and anyone else who I might have missed or who will drop by later. Hugs to all! :l

[K9Lover]

February Free

I think the main thing is that there are no "requirements" for this thread, we all just do the best we can and support each other along the way. I plan to be sober for all of March, but that's just me. Others may feel intimidated and not want to post if they don't feel they can commit to it. I just hope everyone sticks around and continues on in the March thread, no matter where they are at in their sobriety. We have a good thing here, so lets keep it going!

How about "March Motivators" or something along those lines...no prerequisites for being completely sober since we're all at different points.

You guys better all stick around cuz I need you and I know others do too! :h

K9

[Unwasted]

February Free

K9, is that your picture or your daughter's? If that's you, I'm shocked cuz you look so young......you don't look old enough to have a teenage daughter.......ok, well I guess you could have had her when you were 5?:H

[K9Lover]

February Free

Oh UW I LOVE YOU!!! hehehe...that's me...my kid is turning 15 this year and I am (gulp) turning 40!! Yikes! Guess I'll try to accept it gracefully though.

[RingingCedars]

February Free

Niner that is a lovely picture of you! I agree you do not look 40! Enjoy it! I didn't look 40 at all at 40. However, I do look 50 at 50.
I've been thinking of a Merry Marchers thread. While I understand slips, I don't think one should go into it giving themselves pre-permission to slip. I would prefer to be 100%committed without starting out thinking of back door escapes.
Just my two cents worth and I do wish you all, all the best!

[NoraC]

February Free

I like this that K9 (the youngster :H) suggested:

How about "March Motivators" or something along those lines...no prerequisites for being completely sober since we're all at different points.

UW - Thanks for posting that. I'm at work and haven't been able to read it yet. But, it looks very interesting.

[mylife]

February Free

Hi Guys!

Wow, I take an evening and a morning off and there are all kinds of posts going on!!

I like March Motivators! I also agree anyone is welcome but none of you better go anywhere! (heehee) You are now officially my "sober group".

I'm feeling much better today. I'm finally starting to tackle my diet so I can look like as young as K9!!

Let's charge on to a Motivated and Magical March!!! I also plan to be sober for the month but I know that's daunting for many still. I really want to get in a year or two of sobriety so that I can inspire people with my story of so many failed attempts followed at last by success!

Have a great AF day Februaries! I know this will always be a special thread for me as it is the one where I finally gave up drinking.

By the way - UW - I loved reading that article. Thank you for posting!

[WineWrangler]

February Free

60 days AF here, a clean 1012 and the goal here is to make it a AF year. So whats it going to be for March ? motivators ? magical ? mo-jo ? Merry (to Christmassy) ? marching through ?. I'v read fab Feb almost everyday and have enjoyed all your support.
Thanks WW

[WineWrangler]

February Free

Opps, Feb Free

[Unwasted]

February Free

Hey WW, good to see you on this thread!

OK, guys, it's March 1 so I'm going to start a new thread - still under General like this one.

I'm going to call it March Motivaters. See you there!

[scottish lass]

February Free

Looking forward to hitting the March thread - I agree with what is being said, I am moving closer, but not there yet. I have had an almost sober February, but not totally. I need to recognize what I have achieved and keep on trying, but i need somewhere to feel safe and secure when I continue to learn. I like this threads as I feel ok to be able to come back and say day 1 again - I don't like doing it and stress about it, but I don't feel that I will be repremanded for slipping, but will be encouraged to try, try again - and I need that! I can be accountable here and will continue to move forward - so long way to say thanks for all the help in February!

[DriftyAlison0]

February Free

I made it through Feb. AF and now onto my next AF month!