I too was a huge skeptic. the results happened. I can't argue with that!

The one thing I am noticing now more and more is that alcohol free days don't really feel any different then days that I take a quarter tab of Naltrexon and drink. I think that's a good sign. My brother is coming to visit this weekend. He's had a battle with alcohol ever since high school and has been sober for years only to go back to drinking and then sober again for at least ten years now. Also coming up is the US holiday of Thanksgiving which is a big food and drink holiday and family get together. I always go home to my mom and dad's and my brothers and sister adn cousins and nephews and uncles all show up. Usually a dozen people or so.

But anyway my typical set up would be a bottle of vodka and a whole slew of airplane bottles. The airplane bottles are great because they are so easy to hide. I'd have my toiletry bag packed with tooth brush, paste, deodorant, nail clipper, shampoo, and vodka. Then airplane bottles all over the place. November is usually cold here which is a great thing because then I get to wear my favorite jacket. The one with all the hidden pockets in it to store airplane bottles.

That way I can have just two glasses of wine with dinner and little will they know I consumed 6-8 units with out anyone knowing.

I have absolutely no desire do to that anymore and no plans to carry it out. That desire is just plain and simply gone. It still amazes me that it is because it was so paramount in my past.

I started TSM 5 months to the day ago and have not been drunk once nor suffered a hangover once. I have not had a long run like that since high school. I still drink. Last night I had two drinks. My goal was never to go abstinent but I still feel that desire to drink. Not a craving. I can't call it a craving. A craving to me was what I felt in the past was an imperative. It was a primal need. I HAD to have alcohol or be physically ill or wildly psychotic with nervousness, anxiety and a general sense of crisis. But I still desire to drink.

Old dog new trick.

First, congrats! You've come a long way and I can certainly relate to the nips/airplane bottles. Otherwise, I confess it's a little disconcerting. Despite seeming desperation in my initial introduction, in my abstinence I had moved past real cravings to only desires for the most part. I'm searching for a little more peace through this pursuit and feedback like this makes me wonder if I was foolish. Only time will tell. I did have fundamental conflicts with aa so this might yet bring me closer to some sense of peace moving forward.

Hat's off to you Ocean! I'm sure you will enjoy this holiday season so much more!!! I wish we were all so fortunate to be such instant responders.... another blessing for you to count this Thanksgiving!!!

MinneMom

Good for you Ocean!! I too am anticipating Thanksgiving and looking forward to REMEMBERING IT!! It is my favorite holiday, and this year all my favorite people will be here, and the not-so-favorite ones won't!! I want to savor every minute!!

Very very happy for you. xoxo Newlife

I've probably read your thread 3 or 4 times ocean, I'm so amazed (and a little bit jealous!) by your progress, congrats!

I can totally relate to the holiday drink hiding shenanigans. This is the first Thanksgiving in a long time that I'm actually looking forward to instead of worrying about balancing maximum drunkeness and cooking a kickass dinner. I was getting really good at it honestly

Going on about five and a half months now I think and things are pretty much the same. I have not been drunk nor hung over since I started TSM. A couple weird things happened recently though. A few nights ago I had a very similar feeling like I had pretty much every day of my life prior to TSM and that was some time after getting off from work a physical craving to drink. I took my Naltrexone and about an hour an a half later had a beer that actually felt really good. It felt like 'the cure' like it did in the old days. It was a bit disturbing because that feeling literally went away pretty much after the first week of TSM. None the less I only had 3 drinks that night so it really didn't amount to much. I've actually been having more 4 drink nights rather than my usual 2 or 3 and I think that has a lot to do with the onset of winter. When it's nice out with lots of light I'm usually doing something outside till dark and now it's dark by the time I get off work so you know what else is there to do but drink? On some days I upped my dose to a half pill just to cover the additional hours in the day from when I start my first drink.

But still four drinks over the course of six hours doesn't get me drunk or make me hung over. I'm still very happy about where I am and in fact still really can hardly believe it's true. I have to always remind myself that for 25 years I was drunk almost all that time aside from my on the wagon rides here and there and being hung over and sick was just normal.

Thanksgiving holiday went over pretty well. For those not in the US it's a family holiday where families get together and eat and drink and argue over politics Kidding, well sort of, but eating and drinking is sure a big part of it. My normal routine would be to stock up and hide alcohol all over the place so I could look like I was sipping glasses of wine while really quaffing gulps of vodka to keep my levels up. I think I had 4 drinks on Thanksgiving and the night after as well. That's a first for me. In fact since I started TSM I have not had the desire to hide any drinks ever, not once. I simply don't need to do that anymore.

My family well that's a different story. My dad was so drunk he could hardly talk. Others in the family have given up drinking either with or without the help of AA and my mom is the only one who knows I do TSM. I confided in her about it in hopes to get my father to think about it and that is where I am today. My mother cannot convince him otherwise so now I'm thinking about how to approach it.

It's crazy too really. You know the AA mentality is that you have to hit rock bottom before you can come back out of it. What a bunch of bull shmidt! Rock bottom for my 75 year old father will be death. My mother is concerned about it since he's on so many god awful pills a day now and of course doctors will never prescribe anyone proper TSM, how can you tell an alcoholic to drink? I was thinking about it the other day, if my father suffered from something like Parkinson's, or Alzheimer, or diabetes or any other common type disease and I read an article that offered up a medical solution I'd be on the phone immediately to call him up and let him know about this new miracle medical treatment, so would my brothers and anyone who cares. But alcoholism? It's an entirely different ball game because of the stigma that society and organizations like AA put on it. It's a sign of personal weakness and failure and moral decay. It's shameful and a stain on society and everything else you can think of to kick a man when he's down.

So what do we do? We enable the alcoholic and his denial because we are in it too and we watch a man or a women struggle so that we don't have to loose face and make them aware of their shame when there is no shame to be had at all in any of this especially in light of this new medical treatment or cure we call TSM.

I hate it.

Ocean,

Sorry to hear about your issue with your family and dad. But I am very happy to hear things are still going well for you. You certainly have a great reason to be thankful for this year.

Best of luck with your dad.

Ocean: I am very sorry to hear about the situation with your dad. Hard to see someone you love suffer like that, ESPECIALLY when you know something relatively easy and risk free that might help him.

Still, I am very happy to read of your continued success.

Nal on!! Newlife

It's been a while since I posted anything so I thought I'd catch up. Hopefully what I have to say will benefit anyone who is struggling with TSM. Our shared stories resonate with people I think who are looking for hope and a way out. I know it did for me when I first came here. If you have read from the beginning you know I was a fast responder, instant responder really. But in time that meaning has taken on a new shape in my mind. I'll get to that point in a sec...

It's been about 7 months for me now. From the very first dose of Naltrexone I noticed immediately that the 'chase' for the next rush from the next drink was pretty much squashed. It just plain and simply was gone. But because I was drinking so much prior to that I continued to drink through that first night as I could feel my body telling me too. That was the physical addiction kicking in. What I came to soon realize was that the physical addiction, that biological response to drinking (or I should say to NOT drinking), which includes, headache, nausea, panic, irregular heartbeat, sense of dire emergency and so on, which would be 'cured' by drinking more was not as big a player in my addiction as I once thought.

My motto has always been, I drink because I drank. So in other words the only reason I drink is because last night I drank, went to bed passed out, woke up went to work, fought withdrawal all day long, feel sick, need a drink to cure it - full circle. What I had soon come to realize with TSM was that the physical manifestation of my addiction was really my brain torturing my body into drinking. I know this because I went from drinking 15 or more drinks a night with the accompanying withdrawal symptoms down to three drinks a night within two days. Without Naltrexone if I had a 15 drink night and tried to follow that up with a 3 drink night it would have been physical torture. So I can almost only conclude that it was not the actual alcohol molecule that was causing the physical withdrawal but the brain that demands the byproduct, endorphin, of drinking alcohol that would then place these physical demands on my body to get it!

In short, I was a text book Sinclair Method patient.

Of course alcohol is a poison and there is some physical dependency on it outside the opoidergic system but it played a much smaller role then I previously thought.

So that was very easy for me to conclude. TSM pretty much nipped that one in the bud. I could now have one beer, two or maybe three a night and suffer absolutely no physical withdrawal at all. But.....

I still drank.

So this brings on part deux of my whole experience. Oh yes sure I could stop drinking if I wanted too right? Sure yeah no probs. But I kept at it. Mind you it was nothing and I mean NOTHING like it was in the past. In fact I can honestly say I have been semi sort of buzzed drunk maybe 3 times in the last 7 months and most of that was over the Holidays. Over the holidays my consumption did start going up. Two beer nights became three and even four and on a few occasions six or seven. I actually started to get a bit concerned and had thoughts that TSM was failing. I upped my 1/4 dose to a half and even a full dose which I'd never taken before. The irony there is that full dose almost made me feel like that was and excuse to drink more. I really could not tell if the higher dose was actually doing anything.

We've all talked about this in the past here and what I have been fighting with drinking since I started TSM is purely habit. The fact that it's New Years, I have to drink. I just got finished with a hard day at work, I have to drink. I just went for a nice run or bike ride, I have to drink... All these times in the past you know pretty much like in the beer commercials always an excuse for a drink. ONly for us that one drink leads to a night of drunkenness. TSM has cut that part out but still I'm left with this nasty nasty habit.

So what I did?

I just stopped. I finally said ok, I'm gonna not drink this week. It was not a forced decision really at all but I still had to exercise some mindfulness. I picked a date, a Monday, and stuck to it. When I was drinking prior to TSM I'd always do this. Pick a target date and prepare myself mentally for the suffering that would incur so that's kind of what I expected, it's what I have always feared. Even though I went from 15 drinks a night to three thanks to TSM I still had that old habit of fear that comes with jumping on the wagon. But I went for it and you know what? It was like nothing. It was not a Eureka moment per se but at the same time there was just nothing. I jsut simply chose not to drink on Monday and after work on Monday... nothing.

Just take it or leave it.

Moral of my story is this I guess, if you are struggling with TSM and still drinking just try a bit of mindfulness and dip your toe in the water. You may be surprised at what you see. If not then maybe you have to go back in the oven a little longer so to speak. But beware of the habit. What I have found is that post-TSM the mere habit of taking drinks for any given occasion was actually stronger then the physical addiction. TSM took care of the psyco-physical variable out of the equation and left me with raw habit. That's now become the hard part.

After not drinking for a week I took a half dose of Naltrexone and had two beers. I can live with that. In the meantime I'll continue to exercise my choice as to drink or not to drink.