I read the Sinclair guide and every website I can get my hands on. I've ordered the book and the movie and contacted a psychiatrist to work through some of this, but I guess only people with experience can tell me some of what I want to know.

I thought (after reading about how the drug worked) that it would kind of just work in the background of my drinking and slowly make me want to stop over time. I didn't think the drug would actually have an impact on my conscious drinking experience. I was wrong. It was a like an immediate sledgehammer to my drinking experience. On Friday, I took 25 mg and waited an hour. My first sip of wine was ****.

Question 1: Is wine tasting like crap a side effect that will go away or is my wine always going to taste like crap when I take the pill?

Because you know, I really like my wine, but to fix this taste problem I, of course switched, to whiskey and coke. The next thing that happened was that I didn't get happy as I drank. Normally, I become a pretty damn happy drunk, and I like this happy bit. On the drug, I didn't feel bad, I just didn't feel anything. My head felt kind of dizzy, but my drunkenness was severely lacking in flavor. Its like taking a big bite of your favorite ice cream and realizing they forgot to put sugar in it. It's cold, its creamy, but the good part is missing.

On the 2nd day - I kept drinking thinking I just needed one more and my happiness would come back. BAD IDEA. REALLY REALLY BAD IDEA. I had one of the worst drunken nights of my life on Day 2. I think I drank more on this one night than I have ever drunk in a night before, and this is how I learned that (on this medication), my happy is not coming back no matter how many drinks I have. I will get absolutely inebriated, blackout, barf and probably do something totally stupid in there somewhere, but I will not have enjoyed any little bit before I get to the sorry state of the yucky part.

So I figured out on day 1 and 2 that I really like drinking the first 3-4 drinks of my evening and if that's taken away from me,,,- what. is. the. point. of. drinking??? The medication ruins my drinking experience immediately. GREAT, but not great - because I want my cake and to eat it too. I want to enjoy drinking until I want to stop and be able to stop, which gives me a dilemma. If I know I'm going to hate drinking once I've taken the pill, I have to make a conscious decision every time I'm going to drink to sabotage the experience before I take the first drink. This makes it really hard to make the decision to take the pill.

Question 2: Is this experience possibly an early side effect also? I wondered if maybe I am just super-sensitive to this medication and a smaller dose (12.5mg), would be less of a sledgehammer to my drinking happiness and allow me to more gradually move into less. Mind you I only had a single 25mg dose. I know that I read it should work for about 10 hours, but for me it was still working on day 2. Has anybody else had a similar experience with the medication? It worked TOO WELL?

I hear of that from time to time, but usually people are pretty keen on drinking a lot less or just getting booze out of their life entirely. I didn't notice much of a difference in drinking on Nal myself, so I suppose that made it easier for me.

You could certainly try 12.5mg and see how it goes, this may indeed be a temporary thing. Usually side effects will clear within a couple of weeks.

NB though, that sentiment you have towards drinking is a construct in the unconscious, addicted part of the brain (the Striatum). That will in general be going away with TSM and the conscious part of the brain will not be so enthusiastic about alcohol.

Update: Success

I tried again with a much lower dose. My wine did not taste like swill and I had a few, felt sleepy and went to bed. Yay! I did not have any other effects and I still felt some happy. Will work with my dr to keep my dosage right, but feeling much better about it all.

Very cool, OhNo!

Next thing you might run into is the Honeymoon, wherein you get an initial drop in drinking on Naltrexone then a rebound. That's perfectly normal and the down/up/down/up variations in your drinking levels continue throughout TSM. Don't let it throw you, it really is what happens most of the time.

Thank you very much. I talked about all of this with the psychologist that's helping with this. She was really surprised about my first go on 25mg and agreed I should go down to 12.5 to adjust to the medication. We talked about the honeymoon too and how will I know if I need to up the dosage. I'm just going to have to take it easy and pay attention, which I need to do anyway.

Also, I'm a clock watcher on my drinks. Typically this is how I keep from drinking too much too fast but obviously it's doesn't always work so great. She told me I needed to keep track of drinks as I drank them, not the next day - when I'm trying to remember and can't. I found this app I'm going to try called Leaf. I found it by searching for a drink tracker and lo and behold - there it was. I was hoping it would track the time between drinks but it doesn't - but it will help me keep track of how many drinks on days and show me cool graphs.

Hope this information helps for somebody else down the line.

You might be able to come at it from a different angle:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whats-y ... 34750?mt=8

I think there are Breathalyzers you can plug into your phone too, perhaps that would help?

One thing I found useful was to put my beer in the fridge between sips. Difficult to do with red wine, but just getting it out of your sight and out of easy reach can help quite a bit. Throw in little tasks/chores in between sips (like you might do if you mostly weren't drinking) and you may find that you forget about the drink for 15 minutes, then half an hour, even an hour. If you can slow the rate of drinking, that's half the battle right there. Whatever delay/distract/replace techniques you've used in the past to quit drinking might work well to just slow the pace this time around.

If you drink more when you're watching the tube or talking on the phone, really use that technique or maybe even consider switching entirely to a NA drink at those times.

OhNoNotAgain -- I went through something similar. I accept that wine and most alcohol will never taste as good to me again and that I will have to give up on that pleasurable "happy" feeling. For me, it is well worth it. I hated the hold that alcohol had of me, and I wanted to divorce myself from it completely. My honest reaction is that you are really committed to changing your relationship with alcohol or you are not. You might have to sacrifice the pleasure of drinking. But life will get better and you'll find that a nice glass of coke or a cup of tea is tastier and makes you feel better than you ever could.

I believe there is a lot of truth to what AA teaches, and certain aspects of that recovery program can combine nicely with the Sinclair Method. You first have to admit that you have a problem and that your life is out of control. The Sinclair Method works, it is a huge gift from science, but you also have to be 100% psychologically ready for things to be different. There may be some sacrifices. Wine might never taste as good again. But it's worth it, I promise.

I have noticed similar feelings to alcohol. I feel that drinking on the pill means I'm drinking in a way that's not as exciting, and that I'm missing out. As pointed out, that's probably part of the addiction as well. There was a time when drinking would almost always make me happy and more sociable. However, that still is possible with moderate drinking, except one probably has to do a better job of having a good mood and fewer inhibitions to begin with instead of relying on alcohol to produce them. Another unfortunate idea of alcohol I have (probably the addiction speaking again), being in university, is that drinking a lot is some sort of competition. I actually got an award for having drunk the most in 2016 in one of the fraternities I'm in. Of course I won effortlessily. I don't actually believe drinking too much in itself is something to be proud of.

There's also some kind of social stigma to it. I guess there's this part of me that hates not being able to drink controllably without medication like others do. But then again, they probably haven't been predisposed and definitely not wired to drink like I have. We're up to a whole different fight in controlling our drinking, one that we're bound to lose, whereas 'normal drinkers' can moderate their drinking almost effortlessily.

For me, the taste of alcohol itself didn't change that much. But I can definitely relate to the fact there's something missing from it. When I drank a lot in a short time before, I would feel an enormous "chill" of feeling very good in a short time. Probably an endorphine-high. Hard liquor was the easiest way to get the feeling, by shotting or drinking straight out of the bottle, but even chugging beer at 2,3% would produce that. That feeling I can miss quite a bit, but again it should be reproduced by other means in other situations. Running long distances gives me almost the same kick. What I try to tell myself to stay motivated as I'm starting up again, is that alcohol is a whole lot better when it doesn't produce that feeling. And I hope that I will eventually stop missing that feeling as I'm recovering, and compensating for it by engaging in other endorphine-releasing activities when sober.

Have a look at the info on Selective Extinction here:

Selective Extinction: How to Maximize Your Results

https://www.the-sinclair-method.com/the ... -drinking/

This is a way to get 2 uses from one dose and "teach" your brain healthy endorphin releasing alternatives.