Why Oh Why Don't You Just Stop !?

I guess that's where "Its a simple program" comes from??  I have no problem stopping...I did it every time I passed out or overdosed or ran out of what ever it was i was doing. My problem was staying stopped.

Why didn't they just sop??How many times has that been said by family, friends, police, judges, misinformed physicians, or under educated professionals? I have heard it from so called LCSW & addictionologist ...Gee, Why did I not think of that???dam...I must surly suffer from some learning disability....

The truth of the matter for me is, Addiction is by all means the most complicated disease to understand.

when I was 14 yrs. old I was cutting hay and was to close to the fence row and a limb knocked me of the tractor and into the mower. A sickle mower. Looks like a giant hedge trimmer. Well it dragged me about 500 yards before finally cutting my right leg off and filleting my left leg to the bone from the knee down. I lay in the hot June heat for over seven hrs before I was found. Never passed out. Infection almost killed me but I was fitted with a prosthesis and was good as could hope to be in that day and time after numerous surgeries and a very long recovery. I lost most of my bodies blood supply and with all the surgeries I received around 45 units of blood during the summer of 1979.  What was not known then was in 1979 blood was not screened as well as it is today.They paid cash for donor blood. Blood which had diseases like Hepatitis C which was totally unknown to the medical profession then. So for 35 years I was being consumed by Hep C virus and had no Idea. Just knew I felt bad most of the time but thought I just needed a more powerful drug. Was seen by many docs and my liver functions were Always elevated. However when they seen the amount of prescribed dope I was getting they had their answer to that..case closed. If they only knew of all the drugs I was buying besides that they would have surly fainted.

In 2006 I went jaundiced. was a yellow as a pumpkin. had a gall bladder full of stones...remove gal bladder and case closed again. They did the surgery laparoscopicry. When the surgeon looked through the scope he said he could see the scaring of my liver from the years of cirrhosis that had turned it into a concrete football.I do have several complications that goes along with cirrhosis and it is no fun. However God has seen fit not to let me go just yet. I'm on the Transplant list and my health although not good...is actually better than most in End Stage Liver Disease.

My point in telling that is all this bad stuff is a walk in the park compared to the fight with the disease of addiction.I've been through a hell that only an addict knows. Just like all of us have. We fight a disease that has no cure and if left untreated will kill us. How do we do it?? A day at a time. And our reward is beyond anything we could ever imagine. My thinking is that we are the chosen ones that have been selected to experience this, why? I do not have a clue. But after going through what you and I have been through and we can look at ourselves in the mirror and be thankful for going through it...is all the evidence I need that a Higher Power is at work in my life and chose the right ones.

I am grateful To be clean and in recovery today.

ONE PILL.......or........TWELVE STEPS ?????? Just Keep It Simple...That Part Is ALREADY Proven

By Jodi Sh. Doff for The Fix

Who needs AA when you've got naltrexone? Anyone with a screaming void in their core that they've filled with alcohol, of course. People have strong feelings about Alcoholics Anonymous--it's that program we love or hate, it's everything or it's nothing. A recent Atlantic article that lauded the drug naltrexone while denigrating 12-step recovery is part of the growing firestorm of anti-Alcoholics Anonymousism.

Naltrexone was developed 20 years ago to treat drug addiction because of the way it competed with opium, heroin, and morphine for the opioid receptors in the brain--those tiny little receptors that can bring you oh-so-much pleasure, or so much pain. Based on the theory that if it could also stop the endorphins released by alcohol from reaching those same opiate receptors, it would reduce your urge to drink and gradually your cravings would subside. You'd learn to control your consumption and be free of your alcoholism, right?

But craving Georgi or Jameson isn't the problem. Stopping is not the problem. And really, even drinking is not the problem. Drinking, as every alcoholic knows, was the solution. Alcohol helped us feel whatever it was we didn't: brave, beautiful, handsome, smart, funny, enough, attractive, older, younger, bigger...better. Even those of us who wound up vomiting it all up on ourselves remembered the part where it made us feel better for a while. When it worked, booze made the pain go away. It made us more of who we wanted to be.

Most alcoholics don't even start thinking about rehab, or detox, or AA until the day comes when they drink and it doesn't work. When that happens, if you're an alcoholic, you'll take another drink, and another, and another because if the booze has really stopped working, it's just you and that overflowing barge of shame and garbage and fear floating around inside you. When the booze stops working, you are left with no way to quell that screaming void in your core. That, my friend, is a problem.

Naltrexone stops the booze from working--it speeds up the inevitable.

You can't take away a person's solution--even one that doesn't work anymore--without offering them something else, some other way to handle whatever the problem was that left booze as the solution. Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't claim to be the only way to stop drinking for everyone, but for millions of alcoholics AA has been that something else that has made the post-booze difference between a life worth living and one that is not. The spiritual aspect of AA--what detractors label religious or cultish--the part that all the finger-pointing always seems to focus on, is not necessarily religion or prayer. Some recovering alcoholics are active in organized religion, attending services at their church, temple, mosque, or synagogue. Others find they're more comfortable with something smaller or more intimate such as private prayer, a regular yoga practice, nature walks, meditation, or music.

It can be as simple as being part of a recovery community--a gathering together with people who are alike in one essential way: they understand what it feels like to need a drink, several drinks, something, anything, to get through, sometimes, something as simple as putting on your makeup. When people of like purpose gather together, they're stronger. That's simply a fact. You see it in the success of everything from cancer support groups and bereavement groups to armies. Recovering alcoholics in AA come together in that place where no matter what our outside circumstances, our inner lives intersect. This is the place in our lives where we need support, we learn to accept someone else's experience and advice, where we come to know for sure that we're not the only one out there struggling with fear, darkness, alcohol, self-loathing or self-doubt.

You'd better believe if we could do it alone, we would. If we could take a pill, or an injection, or slap on a patch and be done with it, we would. What's missing from most medical equations is that "bridge back to life" part those AAers are always going on about. What the alcoholic needs help with more than putting down the drink is living life without the drink. Sans buffer between ourselves and the outside world, and even more so, between ourselves and our inner world. The inability to be in one's own skin is a hallmark of the stories you hear repeated when you listen to alcoholics talk about life without a drink. The drink enabled us to do that, wear our own skin out in the world.

In general, alcoholics haven't a single clue how to just be in a social situation without booze, or pot, or Valium or something; how to be comfortable in their own skin and not drown in self-hate or shame. Alcoholics Anonymous is a set of instructions for how to get through the process, heal, and then pass the knowledge on by helping someone else going through the same thing. Those instructions are best passed on through the community--the fellowship--of recovering alcoholics who have already done the work. More than a century before Bill Wilson met Dr. Bob Smith, before either of them were even born, Native Americans had "sobriety circles" and encouraged recovering alcoholics to come together and get in touch with their ancestral heritage and beliefs. They understood that the alcoholic needs something bigger to believe in to stay sober, and bigger is only defined as bigger than the alcoholic themselves. The "we" part of the equation.

The program of AA as written down in the Big Book was the culmination of centuries of trial and error. There have always been cures and solutions--and what the right answer is depends on who you ask, and when.

oAncient Greeks crafted wine glasses from amethysts believing that the gemstone would keep them from getting drunk. #AncientGreekFail

oInebriate asylums combined forced abstinence with opium, morphine, cocaine, ether, and chloroform to treat alcoholics and addicts in the 1860s. #BetterLivingThruChemistry #Fail

oThe option of pre-frontal lobotomies as a cure began in 1935. Think: Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. #RandallMcMurphyFail

oThe mid-1900s gave birth to Hazelden, the Minnesota Model, and the introduction of barbiturates, amphetamines, and hallucinogenics to treat alcoholism, as well as aversion therapy with Antabuse. The Hazelden model has worked for a lot of people, but better living through the wonders of LSD? #TimothyLearyFail

Designed to take you one step at a time, like babies learning to walk for the first time, each step builds on the one before, to a life worth living. Only the very first of those steps even mentions alcohol. That's where we admit we're screwed, we've fucked it all up, possibly beyond repair and redemption. We know we can't fix it, can't fix ourselves, and quickly, or slowly, we take a second step and begin to believe that someone or something outside of us can fix our crazy.

And then, that giant third step, saying okay to that someone or something. Allowing ourselves a little bit of trust for maybe the first time in years and meaning it, even if hesitantly, we let go of having to engineer every little goddamned thing in the world, in our lives. We stop fighting--we know we've lost the war. Like Chinese handcuffs, the harder we fought, the harder it was to escape, but once we start to loosen our grip, everything around us relaxed. We surrender and we begin to be free.

That freedom is found not in conquering our alcoholism, but in discovering a way to be right-sized in the world, the willingness to be a worker among workers, being neither above nor below anyone--being humble rather than humiliated. Getting comfortable in our own skin is a result of helping others and being of service in the world. Practicing being honest with ourselves and others to the best of our ability. We are reminded constantly--in meetings, by our sponsors, by the literature, and our community--to live in the now, neither obsessing about past mistakes nor living in some imagined future glory or destruction. Being right here, where we are. Look down. See those feet? That's where you are. We reach out to hold someone's hand, and we let them hold ours. Share a laugh, a story, our trepidation, or confusion, over a cup of coffee with someone we just met and feel like we've known forever.

We come together to learn how to be together.

Putting down the drink? Hell, we'd put down that drink every time we passed out. Don't Drink. Go to Meetings. Help Another Alcoholic. Drugs like naltrexone can probably help with the first part of that standard AA chant, but it's also where the help ends. Unless "combined with counseling or interventions like Alcoholics Anonymous," medical treatments only offer short-term crisis intervention for the alcoholic.

With nothing else in his arsenal, the alcoholic will do one of three options: Go right back to drinking; pick up something else; or lose his mind.

Jodi Sh. Doff has written for Bust, Cosmopolitan, xoJane and Penthouse among many other publications. Her last pieces for The Fix were about non-celebrity overdoses, the Hangover Club and powdered booze.

Mama Take This Badge From Me

Yesterday, I had Lunch with probably the only woman I have ever loved in my life .We Met In Memphis Some 10 years ago. I was 4 years clean at the time and just divorced from my wife. Less than a week latter, I had a kidney stone the size of a walnut removed surgically that left me flat on my back (Supposedly) for 6 weeks. But for some reason we were UN-separable. She took care of me and didn't have to.  I doubt at the time if I was willing to do the same.

Time passed I healed and being the addict that I am, I latched on this beautiful lady with everything that I had!  Fell T-Totally in love with each other. Man what a ride!!! We traveled all over the country with the company i was working for. Never been more happy and content in my entire life.... So much so before I even knew what happened she was my Higher Power. Fun, Fun, Fun, If it feels good we did it. But I did not use....Did not have to..she made me comfortable in my own skin. She was now my HP and My Drug of choice.

With all going "perfect" for me for the first time in my existence on this planet, I was to soon find it necessary to make things even better. ....It started slow.just doing a few a day. I could manage this!  With no more need to attend meetings, work my program nor pray to God for help to stay clean...I was back in a desperation that even my new higher power could not help.

As we sat there Yesterday....going over the good, ..She suddenly lost all expression and her eyes were full of brutal truth but also hurt and pain and disappointment  "do you remember the day you looked at me and said.....We have decided its time for you to go?"........  of course I had no clue. I only remember begging her not to walk out that door.....for what was then around the 10th time she had. But this was to be the final one

Through the Grace of God I started over that day. I ended up , that time a ward of the state. I was sent to a mental institution because by all standards I was crazy as hell. Soon the docs and psychiatrist, physiologist, counselors labeled me what I always will be. Just simple addict suffering some days and living some days with this disease of addiction.

It has been my experience that some people are put in our lives just for a season. ...They make such an impact on us, we find it hard to believe that they were only meant to be.that....I also find that God does the same thing with this old junkie....Today I know who I am and who has me.

Oh....BTW......We continued to talk till the late afternoon yesterday. And not one time did I want to jump up and tear her cloths off....well, maybe once.    We did more than mutually agree that we would be having many more lunch dates to come.................

Clean/jft  

No Angle Born In Hell Could Break That Satans Spell...But Can You still Teach Me How To Dance Real Slow

Its February 2, in the year 2015....And I'm still alive...Sure as hell didnt see that coming!!!   Just like everything else that I assume I have Control over, This to proves to the contrary. God, As only I understand him today, is the operator of this machine.

What a ride!!!  The last several months of my life have played out exactly as planned wheather I think so or not.  I was sick as hell with this Cirrhosis monster.for the most of the ending  months of 2014. In and out of hospitals, New meds, New symptoms, Old symptoms getting worse and basically loosing my mind in the process....I, the addict that I am will forget the misery that this disease caused me. Like thinking...."oh well I'm dying...whats the use??"   Bring on those marvelous (see how I can glorify the disease) pharmaceuticals...    That change the way I feel."   But Somewhere between my first day clean and that moment,, something changed in my thinking, that I, had not even realized. I had fought the fight of my life for the last 3 years...I had prayed to a Higher Power like my life depended on it weather I felt good or bad. I had got off my ass and showed up at meetings when my head was so full of despair and confusion (caused by a condition that goes with cirrhosis of the liver called Hepatic Encephalopathy, the liver starts making ammonia, very toxic to the brain) I was not sure why I was even there. 20 minutes earlier, I was waiting in the drive thru at the bank ordering food.  Only through Grace I did make it to a meeting none the less.  lived my live a day or even a minute at a time. Took suggestions from you and the doctors. Did what was done in the beginning when I was just as desperate and dying as I was then.........That first day, weeks, months whatever. Between then and that moment as I was saying...contemplating listen to that oh so to familiar voice in my head that will still say to me on cold nights or any given time, as I make my way to my truck to go to the grocery store or wal-mart  or a meeting......That tingle runs up my back and electric fire shoots out my finger tips and that feeling.... oh that feeling where I am most comfortable takes me over and the voice speaks "We ain't coming back home tonite...at least not alone"   ....... For this addict, dope is but a symptom of my real problem...Thats when I had a choice. Something that in active addiction that i did not have....I chose not to listen to the beast that i call my disease.  I was just simply tired of starting my life over every 2 weeks. I refused the drugs....just for that day is all I had to it.....I refused the drugs just for today...is all i have to do to experience what I never had before.  I have a life today. I am living with, no longer just dying from the disease of addiction.

I have a Power in me that is just as destructive and equally as deadly to me as my Higher Power is loving and caring and wants only good for me..... The one I give the most attention to is the one who is the main operator of this machine.

Clean JFT

All we have to fear is fear itself....FEAR???.... Fear This!!

Hav'nt been writting. Havn't been doing much of anything recovery related, with the exception of alot of praying....

I've been wrestling with this fear thing. You know,.. Face Everything And Recover,.. Fuck Everything And Run....and my favorite,.. Fighting Egotistically Against Reality. I ain't been winning either. Not even close!

Fear is what kept me out there for so many years.. I thought I had pushed it so far down that I would not have to worry about it EVER... Nor would I have to confront it or deal with that irrational thinking it possess once I started recovery.   I was confident that once I started doing what I should have been doing,. It would magically leave or just not be a problem.. Wrong. I was driven by thousands of forms of fear. And although many and I do mean many have dissipated to some degree, I have so many more to deal with. ...I am not exhuming things that are better left alone...Can't bury them deep enough anyway it seems.

 I could write for days about this..and maybe I should?? This is not phobia's,,..then again, Fear of Fear itself is just that.. a phobia. I can get real discombobulated real fast....lol.

I would like to get a discussion started right here, on this blog about fear and what it is, was, doing to you, done to you etc. etc. I need Help with this...Its very apparent to me. Have talked with others in recovery, have brought it up in meetings...The suggestions I hear tell me I have to deal with it..or I will use it as an excuse to do other things..that come way to easy to me.

Your comments are so welcome!!

Clean  jft

Every Silver Lining Has a Touch of Grey

For the past 2 months I could count on one thing. The fact that my ex GF would be calling and texting me every hour or so. I try not to take someone elses  inventory other than mine, so I will not start doing so now. She is an addict. The only difference between she and I is, I am not using. Enough said about that.
I did answer the phone today when she called. She had called to tell me that a mutual acquaintance of ours had over-dosed and was dead. I have received far to many of those calls.... She had been one of the first to find him. It was her first time of seeing this part of this disease. I know how it feels. So does she.

All of us addicts do not always recover. I've read and heard it said many times, "Some of us will die so that others can live" But it is our choice. Sometime all of this just doesn't make sense...There is one thing that does make sense to me, If I am clean today and If I do tomorrow what I did today, there is a good chance I will stay clean tomorrow. I pray for this addict and his family, that they may find the comfort that is in understanding.

Clean JFT.

She had been born with a face that would let her get her way, he saw that face and he lost all control..

Live and let live or loose your mind worrying .Just because i think a certain way or choose to live my life a certain way does not mean anyone should follow. In fact you would be a hell of a lot better off if you don't follow me. I might really fuck someone up or more realistically you would fuck you own self up.  This is always a sore subject with me. I would go to meetings all over Memphis in the early 90s and would see some of the same people at each meeting I went to.  I was sick as dog physically and as empty on the inside as a human could possibly get. I was totally bankrupt spiritually and I attended meeting because that's where I got to feeling better. I would calm down listening to others share. There always was one person out of the group that would say something that would help me. Then that same person would be at the next meeting and would do it again on another topic. I got to looking forward to seeing that person at meetings because I knew that I was going to feel better. I had heard it said before not to put others on a pedestal that I was surely setting myself up for a let down. But what was it hurting by me taking what this addict said to heart? Well I found out that when early recovery like I was then that i would latch on to another in ways I should not and not even know I was doing it. It got to be where i looked for this addict to say what I needed to hear for me to stay clean that day or for me just to find a little hope that I wasn't going to die. And by doing this I would not be growing in recovery. I would forget or never know he is sick just like i am and is only another recovering addict. Yes he has many years of clean time and a very good recovery program that he works daily. But he will no doubt have a bad day here
and