Wow Generic, it has been really inspiring reading through your whole tread, also to see that when things seem to 'stand still' or seem worsening, you shouldn't lose hope and keep on going in the journey.

I have just started two weeks ago, had a very nice first week with a decrease in my units and another feeling when drinking. However, I had a very bad dream last night that this for some reason wouldn't work for me and that I would never regain total control and have to battle with this problem for the rest of my life.

But if I read stories like yours, you realize that you just have to keep in mind that it is a long journey and you should lose faith after a period or a bad dream, which is just an expression of fear one might have.

Just keep having faith!

Hi Generic ... how's It going? built your robot yet!!?

Sounds amazing... (how clever!) ... I like your optimism and that you're trying new things ... Barryb also talked about rediscovering old hobbies during the time previously spent drinking .. this is goooooooooood!

I'm still trying to up my exercise ... although I'm delighted my units are down ... and the AF days are up .. I'm still bit lazy.. lacking energy and a bit down after 2 esp 3 Nal days. So .. I'm limiting to max 2 Nal days in a row

Still striving for the full week AF like you ... but I'm getting closer!

Hope your weekend went well and you had those hangover free mornings?? Lorraine

Oh how the mighty have fallen...

Last week was just awful. If you have followed my thread you know that my wife had a miscarriage earlier this year. Well, five weeks into our second pregnancy and it happened again. Motherf*cker. (As an aside, can somebody get ahold of the f*cking mods and tell them to stop censoring our words? I think most of us have seen worse than the word "****.")

Anyway, it was worse this time. Ectopic pregnancy. Required methotrexate. At first the methotrexate wasn't working and I tortured myself with scenarios of my wife's cancer from years ago having returned, and that's where the hCG was coming from. GAAAAH! Anxiety overload. I drank Monday and Thursday night just to deal with life. Not too much, less than a bottle of wine each time.

Friday comes and the hCG is dropping. Not cancer. Thank you Jesus. Emotional release, catharsis, beer, and whiskey, and more beer. Gray but not black. Home, teeth brushed before bed. Not great, not terrible.

Saturday, hung over somewhat. Here in SF it's gay pride weekend. Equality and the freedom to love who you choose are something that I am INTENSELY passionate about. So, down to the Castro for me, the wife, and some friends to celebrate LGBT people FINALLY gaining full citizenship... The night started great - I didn't feel like finishing my beer that I had with dinner, shocking the wife enough that she took a picture of it. After that it's into the craziness of the Castro block party. If you have never been to a gay bar, it's a dipso's dream. 6 bucks for a long island iced tea that is the color of dishwater. Sooooo, the festive atmosphere, the joy and excitement in the air, all added up to me ignoring my own rules and hitting the hard stuff hard. A couple vodka-root beers as a nightcap and I'm in black out territory. Don't remember getting home. Woke up, shamefully, in my own piss. F*CK!

So here we are. I don't know if I need to delete my "cured" post or what. I don't think this is me heading back down to where I used to be. I think a few things added up to a bad night. Of note, I think at the tail end of the night I was past 8hrs with only one nal. Not good. That's a backdoor violation of the first rule! Argh. I believe I have mentioned a few times that "cured" to me doesn't mean I am magically a normal person. I can't drink without my meds. I also just love drinking. That part of me hasn't changed completely, now it's just that my life doesn't revolve around it.

So, not many positives:
I remain believing that my life has forever changed. This was a bad night, but these are now out of the ordinary

Things I'll be doing in the future to avoid this:
Set a timer on my phone any time I have a drink before 7pm, so I can make sure to double up if need be.
DRINK MORE BEER. Beer doesn't get me in trouble.
Avoid joyful celebrations of love that have cheap libations on weekends following your wife's ectopic pregnancy.
This could be a correlation/coincidence but this is the first week in quite a while in which I've drank on weekdays... Need to avoid that if possible.

I agree, we have all heard worse words than ****.

Seems like you did have a night like mine the other week. Never mind, you are still here and you wife seems to be getting better???

And I can sympathize with you on the miscarriage. My wife and I had 3 miscarriages, the last one in the 6th month, now that was fu*king hard. The fetus is a baby, she could have been born that early and still lived. But, life goes on and we have 2 beautiful kids now. So keep on keeping on.

I really appreciate the kind words Dave. I'm gonna try to keep up hope on all fronts.

I started a post on another forum recently entitled Don't Panic, and I'm going to say it again, Don't Panic.

I had a bad spike last summer, and I actually did take the top up Nal halfway through the session however I had the following contributory factors;

Stressful 4 days from hell dealing with difficult people
On my own for those 4 days
Had social event with people I rarely meet with, with whom I wanted to make good impression
Had an equally stressful day leading up to the evening with people just messing with my head(and me allowing them to)
Started on wine, let people buy me 'large' glasses.................and I was off

Ended up with me unable to get into my place, friends had to look after me then I vomited everywhere. Woke with the Nalover from hell which I had to travel some distance with, passed out in public and was sick during the journey (this was day after). It was like the bad old days all over again.

There were no cravings and I was soon back to normal. I still have occasional heavy drinking sessions and recently noticed I've been comfort eating and drinking a lot - which has become a habit but the drinking is only perhaps once a week, and I'm more focussed on chocolate than booze - I'd go out of my way for the choccy, but I'm not really bothered about booze unless I've already had some.

I think new triggers set these spikes off, plus it's an opportunity to look at some things in our lives we perhaps don't deal with very well - like normal feelings. I've told my counsellor about my recent concerns, she doesn't think I'm an alcoholic, she does think I'm at a realisation point which could lead me further on my journey of discovery.

Let's keep on.

PS I'm now almost 2 years down the line from cure point, and 2 years 2 months 1 week from the start of my TSM journey. I'm struggling to find anyone with more experience to guide me, but I'm thinking there's definitely more to this than taking the pills.

Thanks very much for the encouragement UKB... I am now a few days AF and starting to feel clearer about the whole occasion. Like you, I am not craving the bottle like I would have in the old days, so my fears about returning to the bad old days are subsiding.

Also... This might be a stretch... But I think the blister pack I am currently using may not be good. I realize this sounds unlikely... But I was just wondering if you or anyone else had an experience like this ever? From the first pill I took in this pack, I immediately noticed that it didn't taste bad. I thought after that first pill that maybe I had just magically avoided the flavor of earwax by swallowing the water the right way, but nope, none of these have had any particularly pungent flavor... I even left one on my tongue for a little while while searching through the fridge for a water. With my other packs, this would have been awful, but this time all I got was a faint flavor. Unfortunately it's the last pack I currently have and the new shipment is in customs right now. I waited too long to re-order, because recently I have only been using 2pills/wk. This pack of 10 was gone in 2+1/2 weeks or so. My wife says these couple weeks have been pretty wonky. Could be coincidence. I dunno. Maybe, maybe not.



THIS is something that I think we all need to talk more about. I feel my life has been changed by thesinclairmethod.net, but I don't really believe in "The Sinclair Method" as it is written. Maybe I should, you know, read the book before condemning it, but it seems like very few people follow the timeline of 3 months to "cured," and a lot of people find that they hit a plateau that is frustrating, and in many cases, causes people to drop out. More sinister or sneaky, I believe the dreaded plateau causes people to start failing at compliance. Drinking on the nal most of the time, but drinking without it too. Pretty soon, when this happens, the benefit you get is less and less until there's not a lot of point in taking it anymore...

I agree, let's keep on. This community is what convinced me to try this, and has kept me going many times. Thanks for the encouragement UKB.

I don't think it's a fault of the pills or not complying because I have an almost perfect record of compliance, and have never consued alcohol without it in over 2 years.

I believe I am cured however I'm not a lab rat, humans have higher levels of reasoning and unreasonable thinking. I believe what's left underneath is unresolved habits, emotions and feelings - stuff that needs learning about and exploring to deal with. It'll be a very individual process for everyone and I don't dispute the book, and I don't dispute it works. I certainly saw a mega improvement in the first 3 months, I just wasn't in a clinically controlled environment. We are simply humans with choices, baggage, and emotions.

My therapist wants me to try keep a record of feelings before I go off and binge, which is more on food for me these days but occasionally some alcohol is involved. Might be something you might try especially if you feel things are building up. I certainly recognise a definite build up at times.

Thanks so much again Dave and UKB for all the encouragement... Now almost a couple weeks out from my shameful failure I have a couple of things to report....

1. I am nearly certain that there was something wrong with one of my blister packs of naltima. It wasn't completely devoid of drug, but those pills didn't work very well. I could go on for pages about the things I realized by accidentally taking a small period of nal reduction, but I think this is not a common occurrence, so I won't bore you all.

2. I have been thinking a lot about what I actually want from the naltrexone. Before ever taking nal, I would have told you that all I want is to stop pissing myself from drinking too much. At some point in this journey, when I had essentially achieved that, I would have told you that I want to stop having hangovers. I want to wake up refreshed. Really though, that's a very non-specific answer, and so it isn't a goal that I can really visualize or work toward. Which brings me to what I have been thinking a lot about lately:

What do you want your drinking to look like? If naltrexone were a perfect pill, and you could turn a dial to determine the number of drinks you would have per week or per night, where would you set that dial?

I went out with some friends on Saturday night and had 3 cocktails (medium to strongish, but not ridiculous) followed by one beer, all over the course of a couple of hours. I was in control, drank less than they did, went home first... But I was intoxicated... I still woke up with a hangover... So is this unacceptable behavior to me? I don't want hangovers, but I haven't reached a point where I am ready to give up going to bars.

On the occasions that I drink at home, which is now the exception, not the rule, I have absolutely no trouble at all keeping it to sub-hangover levels. This is a major victory for me compared to how I used to be. Like many of us, I used to plow through almost two bottles of wine and still need to surreptitiously gulp 2 mouthfuls of hard A while my wife was brushing her teeth. I never lay in bed waiting for my wife to fall asleep so I can go back to the living room and drink more. NEVER.

But what do I do about the fact that I legitimately enjoy going out? I now like cocktails in a new way - the flavor, the mild buzz, the whole experience. I don't find myself crushing whiskey after whiskey, or buttering up the 'tender with extra tip money and suggesting "can you make this one a double?" but, still I am far from a teetotaler, and since I don't want to be one, I don't see myself becoming one!

So I don't know. I realize this may sound lame or whiny. Maybe I am being nit-picky wanting to figure out some perfect solution, but that's the way it is. I keep on saying this, so maybe it's time to implement it all the time: maybe I oughta just stick to beer and wine. Or maybe it's time to implement that old saying from college: liquor before beer, you're in the clear. Maybe a 2 cocktail limit before beer time rather than 3.

Anyway, I am happy that things are back to normal and these are my problems. Nal on everyone and thanks for listening to another characteristically long post

"What do you want your drinking to look like? If naltrexone were a perfect pill, and you could turn a dial to determine the number of drinks you would have per week or per night, where would you set that dial?"

9 months ago I couldn't have imagined quitting, but that's my goal now. Nal has helped me get to a point where I genuinely don't like drinking very much. I don't want to quit for AA reasons or moralistic reasons...I want to quit because alcohol almost ruined my life and has caused me more pain than it is worth. Also, I still feel a little worse on the mornings after I drink, even if its not a true hangover. I just feel more sluggish.

Alcohol has destroyed many lives...and I want to get it out of my life as soon as possible. Luckily, alcohol is Naltrexone's bitch, so I feel good about my chances.