Category: Booze

Booze at Christmas

I am a Bah Humbug / miserable git when it comes to Christmas, probably for many reasons not least of which the fact that it starts in October!!! Unfortunately I don’t believe in God, I don’t even like to type or say the “G” word, in fact when I did go to AA I wouldn’t say the “G” word at the start of the serenity prayer: –

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

Even the fact that it is called the Serenity “Prayer” bothers me a little bit, but nearly 11 years on from leaving the booze clinic I carry a coin with it on in my wallet. On one side it has the Serenity “thing” and the other side a butterfly with the words “Keep It Simple”, sounds daft but just looking at it gives me strength to stay off the booze. Of course being an alcoholic with mental health issues is never going to be “simple” but for me the answers are simple: –

Alcoholic = Avoid Booze

Mental Health = Ask for help and talk about it

I wish I could of done both of the above sooner than I did, but I can’t change that now I can change what I do moving forward and I have the wisdom to know the difference……

So, to the title of this post “Booze at Christmas” every year I can guarantee I will be asked the question “you will have a drink with your Christmas lunch wont you?” erm……nope! I also often get “if you haven’t had a drink for years surely that means you can control it now” erm……nope! Here’s the thing, there is a possibility that I could have one drink, there is the possibility that I could now drink like a gentleman but that’s a hell of a risk to take with my life and the lives of my family and friends. I was speaking with a guy the other day who has been soba for a couple of months and he was looking forward to his drink with Christmas lunch, I did say “I don’t think that is a good idea” but it’s not up to me and who knows he might be fine, but I am convinced I wouldn’t be. You won’t be surprised to hear that as an alcoholic I LOVE BOOZE, i’m not keen on the after effects of booze which is why I constantly had to top up the levels and if I had a drink I am sure I would only remember the good stuff and very soon it would be carnage.

“I have another drink in me, but I don’t have another recovery in me”

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable”

My guess is I will be getting the question about a drink with Christmas lunch on a fairly regular basis now, that’s cool it’s funny, sometimes you have to laugh at yourself. I am fortunate to have a bunch of mates that were merciless when it came to taking the piss…. one of my favorite comments I received after getting soba was “get Mans a pint of cider it will be entertaining” I still use this comment now :).

If you have a problem with booze, do something about it. Stopping drinking wont fix your life, it won’t be easy and at times it will be FU**ING Horrendous but it will be one of the best things you ever do, for you, for your family and for your friends. Being an active alcoholic is a selfish game of manipulation and lies, getting soba is also very selfish for a while, maybe for ever, getting soba will be the only important thing in your life, but  that is what booze is, well it was for me, nothing mattered more than booze, NOTHING!!

If you have any questions about getting off the booze drop me a message on here, Twitter or Facebook, i’m not an expert but I have a little experience in this area!! Do bear in mind though I am an alcoholic, I wont be able to be your crutch i’m too selfish for that and if you get on my nerves I will tell you.

Have a bostin Christmas……… Bah Hum Bug!!!!

Keep Smiling 🙂

Answering a question

I asked on Facebook and Twitter if anyone had any questions because I had received a lot of amazing feedback and people contacting me away from the blog and here is the first questions I will answer.

Again I will stress these are my opinions, it is important to know there are properly trained people out there that would probably disagree with me.

“do you ever crave a beer and how did you stop?”

There is a very short answer to this question….. Yes and I don’t know…… but if you have been reading my blog you will know by now I never use 5 words if I can use a couple of hundred!!!

Yes I crave beer, wine, cider and most strongly for some reason Southern Comfort (with a little bit of ice, no mixers that is just madness!!!). I was in a pub yesterday ordering a “cup of tea” walking up to the bar I was looking at the good stuff but I know I can’t go there it would destroy me!! In AA there are phrases like “one day at a time” I think these are a few very important words with alcohol and indeed mental illness. I think other people set goals like I wont drink until the end of the week and then the end of next week and so on and if that works for them that’s great but for me it was one day at a time.

So in short I do crave alcohol, i’m not sure it is a physical crave more a mental crave I want the feeling of being relaxed and if i’m honest the feeling of being completely out of it. There is another saying I took from AA “I have another drink in me but I don’t have another recovery in me”. I could not go through getting off the booze again, it is not easy!!!

On the “how did you stop” part of the question there is a short answer to this as well “The Woodbourne Priory” I am ashamed to say I am not 100% sure of the guy’s name I would accredit most of the praise to, I think it was Chris. There is of course a whole big story prior to me going into the Priory but I will cut it short’ish. I tried Aquarius after it was suggested by a counselor I was seeing at the time (Shaun was the guy that got the ball rolling he is an amazing man who stopped pussyfooting around me and said “until we sort out your alcohol problem we will never sort out your depression”), unfortunately Aquarius didn’t work for me, I will stress however I know lots of people it did work for it is an amazing charity, the reason I think it didn’t work for me was I basically just lied through my alcoholic, selfish, incredibly manipulative teeth. I told them what I thought they wanted to know and then I stopped going, I didn’t want to stop drinking.

I never tried AA because that is for proper alcoholics, you know the guys on the bench begging for money…… What a tool I was to think like that but I am pretty sure I am not the only one thinking like that and if you are reading this with the same thoughts then you are wrong. I have mentioned AA a number of times now but unfortunately I do not got to AA anymore, I wish I did, I often think I may be in a better place if I had carried on with AA but I can’t change that now. I am a very stubborn person and unfortunately although I have taken things from AA I don’t always agree with the things said in AA. It is important at this point that I stress that AA has helped an awful lot of people and I have thought long and hard about saying “I don’t always agree…..” I do not want to say anything that could possibly harm anyone but that is my point when people think of alcoholics they think of AA and this is for a good reason they do an awful lot of good, BUT for me it wasn’t the answer and the reason I decided to say this is that if AA hasn’t or doesn’t work for you then I believe there are other options but you wont know if it is for you until you give it a try and I don’t mean just go once try it again and again and go when you don’t want to go it works for so many people.

I am going to contradict myself now as I said I would on the “About Me” page, I got a lot from AA. Part of the one month in the Priory was two AA meetings a week, there are some fantastic people in AA and being able to spend time with people who had been soba for 10, 20 years is inspirational and makes you realise it is possible. There are also people there that fall off the wagon and with their strength and the people around them they dust themselves off and get back on again, this is very hard to see but also inspirational there is no shame in relapsing you have been drinking for a long time there is no shock that you go back to it. I saw a guy who had been soba about 15 years start drinking again it was horrible to see but he stopped again. There were people that would relapse again and again but they kept going, there was one guy who shared that he thought he needed to relapse to make him understand he couldn’t control the drink. Everyone is different even though the stories they share mirror your life almost exactly they are different and need something different for them to get it.

Without a shadow of a doubt the Priory stopped me and probably saved my life, I was lucky I was in BUPA and got the treatment for an excess of about £250, in fact that was one of the reasons I did go into the clinic, I realised I was lucky and that not everyone had the opportunity to go to such a good clinic and if I didn’t go it would be like I was taking the piss out of those people (sorry I couldn’t think of better words to describe that).film Despicable Me 3

The clinic took me out of “real life” and allowed me to concentrate on the job in hand other people in there had visitors I decided I didn’t want visitors, there were 5 or 6 people in the group I was in we did a lot of group therapy (scary but so beneficial!!!) a lot of that group therapy was based around the 12 Steps. I struggled for a long time with these because I fixated on the word “God”, in the end I just ignored the God word and listened to the rest. The point at which I thought “I’ve got this” was we had to write our “life story” and read it to the group (yup scary!!). The others guys life stories were incredible and upsetting at the same time, it was then my turn so I read it out and got some great feedback “you are so brave” “you have been so honest” etc etc. Then it was Chris’s turn to give me feedback (Chris was the guy in charge who earlier in this post I said I would accredit him with most of the praise) I don’t remember his exact words but they were along the line of “you haven’t been brave, you haven’t been honest, you have let us in a little bit but you have given us what you think we wanted to here”. You may think “harsh” the other guys in the room thought that as well I could see it in their faces, but he was spot on. I had used my alcoholic manipulation skills and manipulated most of the room, fortunately apart from Chris. We had words about this but he was right and in challenging me he had made me see I wasn’t putting in the effort I should I was still lying to myself and everyone else. So rightly or wrongly I decided I would never be able to do everything they wanted from me so I had to find the tools I could use. I have heard it said “think of AA as a tool box and use the tools that are right for you” so my main tool is Step 1 – 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Out of the 5 or 6 that were in my group I think I am the only one who never drank again, I could be wrong. I am pretty sure that the people in the group, the counselors and the people I met through AA thought I would not make it and lets be honest I still might not make it. People say “you are not an alcoholic anymore if you haven’t had a drink for over 10 years” I don’t agree with that I am still an alcoholic and will be until the day I die, I am just a soba alcoholic.

You can give up, even if you don’t want to. You may not want to but you know you have to, I still miss booze but I no longer have that option I look at it in this way “I abused alcohol so much I no longer have the right to enjoy it”. Again this might be right it might be wrong but it’s my sobriety and I don’t care if the experts agree with me or not. Reading through what I have just written I am thinking what a load of bollox so many contradictions but again I don’t care contradictions happen in life all the time especially in my mixed up brain, because I think one thing one day doesn’t mean I have to agree with that the next day. I disagree with myself all the time.

Keep smiling 🙂

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Booze and Depression

Ok, first of all I will stress that these are only my opinions and experiences.

For me I think my depression and alcoholism run hand in hand, like a lot of people I started drinking “down the tip” at about 14, cider, thunderbirds, something I think was called Scotsmac and I remember one particular bad decision one night to get pissed on QC Sherry (still can’t smell the stuff without feeling sick!). I don’t really remember when it got out of hand, probably from day one. When I went to Cavos with the lads when I was about 19 I had the temporary nickname of Olly Reed, to be fair I think another one of the guys was Keith Chegwin and there was another one tagged with an alcoholics name, I cant remember what that one was, probably George Best.

It is fair to say a lot of booze was drunk on that holiday and to be honest every time we went out. All the lads were drinkers, but if i’m honest I think I was different because I was the one getting the “Drunk and Disorderley’s”. The first time I was arrested was for trying to steal a policeman’s hat outside a local pub. I was later to be banned indefinitely from that pub and the next time I went in, while the land lord was on holiday, I got the shit beaten out of me. I don’t remember the beating at all, it involved 3 people from what I have been told one of them “karate chopped” me in the throat and then a fat C**t sat on my chest and beat me unconscious, which lead to all my front teeth having to be capped. There are many other stories that still to this day cause me a lot of shame, but I think the above is enough to demonstrate it was out of hand.Roblox Robux Hack 2017

I think I knew by the age of 20 I was an alcoholic it took me 10 years before I went into the booze clinic to do something seriously about it. I class that as 10 wasted years.

So why do I say booze and depression run hand in hand. I remember being a very shy kid, to the point that if I was washing my dads car on the drive and people were walking up the road I would hide. At 14 booze gave me some confidence, by 18 I was on antidepressants and by 20 I knew I was an alcoholic. Of course I may have suffered with depression even if I wasn’t an alcoholic but I feel the abuse of alcohol made things worse. Yes I dealt with the booze issue 10 years ago but I then just plodded on with life and the depression. Now I am 40 and have had what I can only describe as a mental breakdown, I don’t think the doctors use that term anymore but that’s the only way I can describe it. 10 years on from sorting out the booze issue I am “clinically depressed” with people using phrases like “disability”, “Mental Illness”, “Mental Health” (which I find very scary!!). I am waiting to see a psychiatrist (a very long wait but that’s a story for a different time!!!), waiting to see about other types of therapy, I have people from mental institutions calling me to give me “crisis numbers”, I am speaking with mental health charities. Its fair to say life is not a lot of fun at the moment and I class this 10 years after the booze clinic as another 10 wasted years.

During the 10 years from 20 to 30 I did things like not drinking for a couple of weeks to prove I wasn’t an alcoholic, but this is bull***t, all that does is it gets people off your back for a short while. All through the time I wasn’t drinking I knew I would be able to drink again soon. I also knew I would have to be cleverer and drink a bit when no-one was watching, try and behave a little better, it’s all bollox. It is said you have to hit “Rock Bottom” before you get off the booze, this is probably true, but let me tell you if you know you are an alcoholic “Rock Bottom” is fu**ing horrendous do something about it before you get there!!! They also say “you have to want to give up” i’m not sure that is true, I didn’t want to give up, yes life was hard at the end but the bad bits disappear when you are pissed off your box, there is no better feeling than being completely out of it. Booze owned me there was nothing more important to me than booze, nothing!!

I believe the reason I am where I am now it because I plodded along, yes I had accepted the depression, I had accepted life was miserable. I kept fighting it getting more and more tired, struggling harder each day to get out of bed and getting on with it, putting on my “Jon” mask every morning over and over again and eventually something just exploded in my head, I couldn’t fight it anymore. I believe if I had been more direct with my doctor and asked for more help sooner I would still be doing the job I love.

Please don’t let booze and depression begin to own you because when it does it will f**k you up!! You can give up the booze even if you love it as much as I did, I still miss it. From what I read now on Twitter and Facebook and plenty of other websites you can still have a great life with a mental illness but if you let it own you life will seem pointless, don’t get to the stage that you purposely get out of bed and get dressed for the sole reason to go and say goodbye to the cats before you throw yourself of a car park.

Get some help, help on the NHS will be hard and slow to get and the “system” will drive you mad, but keep going. When you are thinking its never going to get better it will seem real, it seemed real for me a couple of months ago. Now is still horrible for me I had to leave my brothers bonfire party earlier tonight I walked up the road in tears, but I do know I will come out the other side sooner or later.

Keep smiling 🙂

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Thoughts and feelings

This could go on for a while and probably make little sense???

It is my guess that people who know me will be surprised at some of this stuff. Recently the same person has said to me twice “you don’t looked depressed”. The guy who said it meant no harm by it, in fact I think he meant it as a sort of compliment but it does make me think. “What does someone with depression / mental illness look like?”

I was diagnosed with depression when I was about 18, I think initially I was embarrassed and ashamed for having depression but for a long time now I have been open about depression and my alcoholism. I think I hoped being open might help other people and also take the pressure of me.

I say I have been open but only on the surface, what I mean by this is I could be having a laugh and a joke with you at work but inside I hated myself. One guy fairly recently at work said to me “I’ve never met anyone who slates themselves as much as you do” we laughed it off but I knew this was the real me coming to the surface fighting with the “Jon” who people see. There is a lot of acting when you are depressed and it is very tiring being something you are not on the outside and something your are on the inside. It is a huge battle and I think finally this battle destroyed me. Now I can act like “Jon” for only very small periods of time before it makes me feel like i’m going mad.

My uncle John used to say when he was really down “that the way we saw him at that moment was the truth and that everything else is play acting”. I am sure there will be a lot of people that understand this.

I accepted my depression a long time ago, I accepted that I would probably have to take pills for the rest of my life and I tried to keep going, I accepted that on the outside life looked good but on the inside life was f**king miserable and pointless. I had my ups and downs and always got over the downs. That is until June this year I couldn’t fight it anymore I had now had a down that I couldn’t beat. The silly thing is that it was something very small that pushed me over the edge, my company car had a light bulb out and a tyre that needed changing, all I had to do was make a phone call and drive down the road from work about 2 miles and get it done,  but it just blew my mind!!!!!

I’ve gone on more than I had planned so I am going to finish with a list of thoughts and feelings: –Watch Full Movie Online Streaming Online and Download

  • Suicidal Thoughts – They are real and they are painful!
  • Buzzing in the head that leads to crippling lows that make me unable to move
  • Child like, Unmanly, no control
  • Useless, pathetic, pointless, waste of a life, waste of a human being
  • Very poor concentration
  • Very poor motivation
  • Things I used to enjoy no longer interest me
  • Everything I do is crap – In July/August my camera pretty much kept me sane, I cant pick it up now because every picture I take is crap and I don’t understand the settings and how to fix problems.
  • Very little energy – a month a go I could only do 8 press ups :(, I started doing them on a regular basis and got up to being able to do 25 :). I haven’t done any for a couple of weeks because I just cant find the energy or motivation to do them, pathetic!!
  • A thousand thoughts running through my head but I don’t know what any of them are and I cant control them
  • “Normal” life is over
  • I want to be in hospital
  • I’m never going to have another meaningful relationship
  • Do I hear voices or are they just my thoughts?

I cant think of anymore at the moment, it has taken over an hour and a half to write this and my concentration has gone!! I hope some of this makes sense, I am now fighting the “this is sh*t thoughts, just delete it, no-one is interested” but if it is sh*t who cares its just my thoughts as they are now, tomorrow they will probably be different anyway.

Please feel free to leave a comment and even subscribe to get updates when I post something new.

Keep Smiling 🙂

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A bit about booze

As the title of the blog suggests booze has played a part in my life, although it does’t now on a physical basis it definitely still does on a mental basis!! I still miss booze a lot, but I know I cant handle it. We will speak about booze a lot as we move forward, if you have read the “About Me” page you will know I was fortunate enough to be in BUPA through a company I worked for for many years.

I spent a month in The Woodbourne Priory, so basically for an excess of about £250 I received £15000 worth of residential treatment, mainly group therapy. A lot of the therapy was based around “The 12 Steps”, I struggled a lot with these steps for reasons that don’t really matter at the moment but eventually I got Step 1: –

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable

Step 1 for me is very important, I miss alcohol, I love alcohol but I cannot go back there.

I don’t know if my abuse of booze is why I am now labelled with “Clinical Depression” don’t get me wrong I am happy to be labelled as it makes sense of so much. I think this is an important point, I have been soba for 10 years and I feel if I went back to booze it would destroy me, one phrase I got from AA is “I have another drink in me but I don’t have another recovery in me”. With this in mind a few months ago when I was changing my medication from Cipralex to Sertraline I was a complete mess and wanted to die and this thought came into my head “Start drinking it will ease the pain and it will give you the strength to kill yourself”.

I’m going to leave it there, but please you HAVE to know if you want to give up booze IT IS POSSIBLE, it’s painful but it is possible.