Thanks, Zerlyna, I’ve got a bit of a chest infection and I’d missed posting the DCI today.

IWNDWYT

I’m not sure where you live, but I’m in the UK and it feels like it’s rained non-stop since before Christmas. Nobody wants to go out because it’s grey and wet.

It’ll improve when the weather does, I hope.

onward!

congratulations!

Nah, just estuary English. (thanks, fixed).

ooof, good luck, hopefully the potty training is easy and the snow isn’t too bad.

My ADHD therapist said it was very common for people with ADHD to use alcohol to mask symptoms, as well.

I didn’t see many of the much-vaunted health improvements, either, so I’m always cautious about saying that everything is going to be marvellous straight off the bat, because sometimes it isn’t.

My entirely unscientific thought process is that your body spends much of that first month going “wait, what?” and scrambling to get back to normality. You’ve spent however long bathing your system in a systemic poison and it takes a while for your body to adjust to that not happening any more, and it all takes time.

Sometimes not drinking also reveals that you were drinking for a reason - in my case it was self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD, and oh boy was that an interesting few months…

congratulations!

both?

I don’t want to second-guess your therapist, but I wonder if she’s thinking short-term vs long-term? Unless you have a trip planned or an upcoming wedding in your immediate future, a sudden urge to drink is a more immediate thing to need to have a plan for than something which is a way in the future, after you’ve got a good long stretch of sobriety under your belt.

Bear in mind that this lack of urges can change. I did dry January in 2022, and thought “this is great, no cravings, nothing.” By March I was drinking as much as I had been before I did dry January, and this is quite common.

So when I stopped again in May 2022, I recognised that I needed to spend some time building sober supports and scaffolding, so that when cravings arrived, I had tools to deal with them.

Everyone’s different. Some people find the “recovery” model helpful, some people don’t. Some people find the AA model helpful, but I gave many years of my life to a “higher power” as a lay member of a religious order, and so I don’t find that model helpful, and the people who say things like “but this doorknob could be your Higher Power” just make me laugh. I’m glad the AA model is there for people who find it helpful, but I’m not one of those people.

I drank too much, I got to the point where I decided that I didn’t want to do it any more, so I don’t. I dug into the science behind addiction, about what alcohol really does to you, and read books by people who modelled the sober life I wanted, eg “Sunshine Warm Sober”. And now I mostly don’t think about it, I just don’t drink.

Congratulations!