the AF days will get easier and easier. keep it up!

Thanks Deuce and Zontar,
Wishing you both the best as well!

Deuce I hope we are both success stories that Dr. Scott tells in the very near future!

It's not a crazy question at all. Mindfulness comes easier as time goes on. at first, oddly enough, you really should drink at will and in theory let TSM run it's course. When I was a raging alcoholic I would dread the day that I decided to stop drinking for a week or as long as I could. I used to call it my 'day of suffering'. It took a very serious effort in mindfulness to overcome the physical and mental withdrawal that would occur. Sometimes I just could not do it and would give in and then I might drink for another 3 days or 3 months before I struggle to do it again. Now when I decide to not drink on any given night I still have that apprehension simply because I've got 25 years of hard drinking experience behind me and I expect the worse and then I wait for it, and wait for it, and it just no longer ever comes. The nag is still there but it's much easier to overcome.

I think now if I drink a few days straight then I can still feel very very subtle physical desire for the alcohol but the mental desire is completely gone. I know now, which is the complete opposite of what I thought before, that the mental desire is way more powerful then the physical one. So much so that it was the mental desire that would actually cause the physical suffering (withdrawal). Alcohol is technically a poison so any amount of drinking will cause some sort of physical response. For some people those are sugar imbalances and or what ever it might be. And as such you might feel a slight physical inconvenience the next day even after having only 3 or 4 drinks. But when I was an alcoholic if I had only 2 or 3 beers in one night, a very rare occasion indeed, I would physically suffer the next day (well almost immediately actually), in fact often items even worse then if I had 15 beers.

So my point being that if you are just starting TSM then you might suffer both a physical (pharmacological) and a psychological withdrawal. In time with TSM the psychological one fades away and since you are drinking less and less of the poison then so does the physical one and then it's easier to use mindfulless to stay alcohol free for a day or two or more.

Thank you Ocean,
I have felt all along I was fighting both. I remember 9 plus years ago when I quit smoking that I would still catch myself cracking my window in the car even though I was not smoking.

So I am now trying to beat both sides of the addiction with the help of TSM, and the advice of those that have gone before me!