Sober – 9 years recovered from alcoholism

3 minute read.

Nine years ago I came off my last drunk after six years of failed sobriety. My journey into a spiritual liberation originally began in New Zealand, from leaving my then home in Australia after failing a marriage and a good life.

My decline into chronic alcoholism slowly twisted my mind into darkness. I became violent and unpredictable in blackouts which frightened me. Yet I could not stop drinking.

Contemplating ending my life, full of anger and frustration at my failings, the thought of making it all stop had become appealing once again. I had to stop drinking but didn’t know how. I began seeking a spiritual solution as it seemed to be the only hope left after trying almost every avenue of help.

My fear of sobriety was overwhelming, my inability to stop was destroying me. That year a failed stay in a drying out clinic just reaffirmed what I already knew by that point. I was beyond human aid. I was in the grip of a compulsion that I had no mental control over. I hated myself for what I felt as a weakness in me.

When I started I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t leave it alone.

The fear I experienced around sobriety was that my mental health would quickly decline without the crutch of alcohol. Sobriety brought mental tension, anxiety anger and conflict that I would always eventually turn back to alcohol for relief from. It had been the solution to my mental suffering since first discovering it. I have spent years in the mental health system and couldn’t face going through that wringer again.

The next six years was littered with failed attempts at sobriety, in and out of meetings looking for a spiritual solution that seemed to have been lost within a now largely made up fellowship of amateur therapist and people with other problems. I remained angry and fearful.

I was back in the mental health system, detoxes, a year out on a remote island in the hope that in solitude I would find peace. Nights in police cells, psychiatric evaluations and homelessness became normal once more.

Medications brought a little temporary relief but the pain always got to much to sit with and I would return to the bottle. Its what I did. I couldn’t get off the roundabout. My great hope was that I would one day get a handle on my drinking, that I would drink like normal people. That thought became a deadly obsession it itself.

My life revolved around obsessive thinking and compulsive drinking. Earning enough to drink while struggling to find balance with work and hold a job down in order to earn the money for alcohol to keep it in my system for some sort of perceived sanity.

The last 18 months of my drinking I convinced myself I had discovered that balance. But my mind was slowly sinking back into darkness and thoughts of suicide. I worked and drank, medicated on anti-psycotics, trying to maintain some stability.

That routine became my existence. I had a couple of friends but couldn’t be honest about the suffering that was eating at me. The memories of my past and my guilty conscious were getting harder to blot out with each bottle.

9 years ago, after coming around in the morning off a bender I sat in my stale smoke filled flat and poured a rum and coke. I sat and stared at it, I hated what I had become in my head. There was no peace, no relief anymore, I realised in that moment that where I was would be where it all ended. I was never going to get free from alcohol on my own will power.

I had run out of fight, justification and excuses. I couldn’t live another day in my head. I was beaten daily by reminders of the hurt I had caused others through my self centred existence. I had tried everything to be a decent human being but the fear and anger that my ego fed on didn’t allow me any emotional consistency, even with the best intentions I only ever hurt people.

It was a rock bottom like I had never experienced, the pain overwhelmed me. I prayed in tears for help, for strength I couldn’t muster. My own darkness had brought me a desperate need for light. An experience followed that left me shaken and uneasy. After a time got up from my knees and poured the drink away. I have never felt the need to drink again, the obsession had left me, I had been freed in that moment. I have never taken a drink since.

I began looking within a twelve step fellowship for a recovered alcoholic who was living by the spiritual principles it’s original members discovered and put into print back in the late 1930’s. It wasn’t an easy search. But I eventually found a man who had some answers, who had recovered himself. He showed me a way to grow in the spiritual principles of love and tolerance by way of prayer and meditation.

My life has never been the same since. Two months after getting sober I met Stacey. She has never known me drunk or lose my temper. She has only known consistency from me.

Tomorrow I will wake up with my daughters and begin another day with my family in the life I didn’t believe was possible or that I would ever experience.

I don’t look back at my sobriety with a sense of achievement, I’m not one to pat myself on the back. A supernatural power of love did what I could not and removed the anger that fuelled my alcoholism. My only job has been to grow in the spirit of love that replaced it. All credit goes to God’s grace, without which I wouldn’t be here now. Recovered from alcoholism and living a life beyond anything I could have imagined.

If you believe that you may be experiencing the two symptoms that make up alcoholism, an obsession to drink coupled with a craving beyond your control whenever you take a drink – don’t hesitate drop me a message, As a recovered alcoholic I can offer you a permanent solution. Or at least point you in the right direction of help.