One more thing...I'm really becoming convinced that alcohol is affecting me differently as I age, especially in the emotion department. It seriously screws with my brain.

Congratz! Sounds like you are making progress!

I noticed the same thing. I was an emotional wreck when i was drinking. I think it is the cumulative effect of drinking over the years.

Outstanding thread. Learned a lot here. Thanks.

So, I guess we're all like lab rats here in a TSM experiment, so I thought I'd share how weird the past 10 days has been for me. There's a concept of a "dopamine fog" that's often applied to adultery, exciting obsessions, porn addictions, whereby the mind and its judgment is completely clouded within the midst of the addictive behavior. Once "the fog is lifted," then a new perspective sets in and a person is able to see things in a completely new way. With porn, it can take a bad addict something like 90 days to finally get to baseline mentally.

Anyway, my point being, my mind completely flipped a switch regarding alcohol this past week. I'm not saying it's never going to flip the other way, but I feel almost exactly as I did around March of last year when I went 30 days with no alcohol and had almost zero cravings. This, of course, was achieved with NO NALTREXONE. My mind has never been able to achieve this clear-thinking sobriety before last March in about 25-30 years, so it's not like I always do the "New Year" thing. For 25 years, I just kept right on drinking. It's very interesting to me. Am going to keep racking up AF days.

One way I've helped reconcile my "failed" past 6 months is to really look at this as year over year progress. So, 2013 saw a near 95% reduction from baseline for about 6 months while on Naltrexone, followed by about 50% reduction over the previous year for the last 6 months while off Naltrexone. As I've hinted, I think my trajectory is towards zero because I mentally can barely tolerate alcohol anymore in terms of being the kind of person I want to be.

I've noticed that my mood is really changed with alcohol and NAL. I get very negative and angry. Not a good combination. I've never been an angry drunk, but I can be that way on NAL and the sauce.

Barry,

Just so I understand, you are currently back on nal anytime you drink, and plan to do so indefinitely. As long as you go AF, no nal necessay and the dopamine fog clears. You realize you will never be able to drink normally again without nal, because the addiction comes back, whatever addiction, and becomes even harder to overcome. So now you are getting more of a buzz with AF days and no nal, than you would drinking with nal, and the brain says we don't need the alcohol anymore. Is that about right?

Well, I'd have two corrections there -- (1) the addiction "becomes even harder to overcome." Well, hardly, as I was able to snap right back to where I was at the height of my sobriety within about two days, (2) "getting more of a buzz" without alcohol -- I don't think I'd use the word "buzz." I'm intimately familiar with alcohol "buzzes," and they're awesome for the most part. Love 'em. But, sobriety is just overall more pleasant on a physical and existential level. It makes me "happy" versus just "buzzed." Alcohol doesn't make me "happy."

To add: The other thing is that, ideally, it would be great to be able to snap temporarily out of my sobriety zone for a quick night of "alcohol buzz" and then jump back into the sobriety zone, sans Naltrexone. The experience of the buzz seems to lead me back to the drinking-regularly zone, so I am indeed hesitant about trying that again, as I saw how it got me back to the same "swamp of profligacy", to quote St. Paul.

I did some research on this the last time the question came up. A once-learned then-extinguished behavior is easier to relearn than a behavior not previously learned -- that much we know.

It hasn't been well studied in humans, but with lab animals, a learned-extinguished-relearned behavior is actually easier to extinguish the second time around. I guess it's as if the extinguished state is sitting there dormant, much as the learned state was sitting there dormant during the extinguished period. Or something.

What does this mean for us humans? Well, I don't think it would be wise or safe to start a cycle of addicted/non-addicted on the grounds that we can always cure the addiction again. Some really bad things can happen during addiction.

On the bright side, people who screw up and get themselves readdicted need not despair. Re-curing is possible.

I should probably emphasize that, for this to even apply, the relearning happens after the behavior is completely extinguished. If the animal starts "relearning" before true extinction then it's actually receiving variable reward (aka intermittent reinforcement), and that's what really nails behavior down hard.

Barry,

Sad to hear you are back.

Glad to hear you are back.

^^^^ Totally agree, Melissa. I don't think anyone can pinpoint exactly how the phenomena works. Personally, I think it's more on the psychological basis (versus a neurological, whatever that means). That is, I quickly remembered what it felt like to abstain, all of my previous fears of abstaining had been proven wrong by me last year, I knew "tricks" to help me abstain, etc... It's still sort of weird, though, that I could flip the switch so fast without Naltrexone. No idea, but don't care.