Promoted to the front page from the user blogs, Toby12321 shares the latest blog of several front page posts this week on the topic of fear. I know from personal experience that sinking feeling in the stomach when one realizes the only thing scarier than living the life of an alcoholic… is living without drinking. Thanks for sharing Toby!

I spent many years wanting to stop drinking but my biggest fear was could I live without alcohol. See, I had a slogan “Live to Drink and Drink to Live”. I firmly believed this. There wasn’t a day went by that I didn’t drink. Once I started I kept drinking until I went to bed or passed out.

I carried a cooler with me all the time. I was never without a cold beer. My days and weekends were planned around alcohol. Back then you couldn’t buy beer on Sundays in PA but eventually they changed the law. Now you can buy beer on Sundays from the distributors. I was known at all the watering holes. You would have thought I had my mail sent there.

To stop drinking meant I would have to learn to live a new life in a very different way. I would have to become an earth person as they say in AA. Until I quit the alcohol I never realized just how many people actually played golf without it. I will tell you that I didn’t get any better at golf from being sober though. In fact I hardly play anymore because it is a very frustrating sport to me. I have enough frustrations at times in life so I don’t go out just to find it.

Click “Read more” to continue…

The first time I got sober it lasted for two and a half years. Then on a ski trip in CO with a few old friends who still drink I decided I knew how to drink like a normal person. That one drink lasted for a year and a half. It was the worst time of my life. My drinking was worse than I had ever imagined. My last real binge lasted 42 days, yes it did. See, in my later years I had to drink when I woke each morning to be able to function. It was ugly because one drink led to many and there I was drunk again.

Needless to say, one morning I rose and looked in the mirror and said I hate you. I then proceeded to get drunk, called a Rehab and was in a Detox unit by the end of the afternoon. That was one of the best days of my life. I know now I’ll never be able to drink alcohol of any kind again.

The F–k It Effect!

Abstinence-Violation Effect (AVE) is what Alan Marlatt, director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington, describes as the technical term for the relapse behavior commonly known in meetings across the world as the “f—k it effect”. It’s that feeling of total resignation to failure an addict or alcoholic gets after relapsing for the 100th time that often powers progressively worse binges. Check out this Time article in which Dr. Marlatt describes several ways to deal with and prevent future relapse including “urge surfing”.

Call me old fashion, but I was just too embarrassed to use the title, this next one is just corny.

Trouble: Doing Shots with a Pistol in Rifle

That’s right, just a few days before Christmas Heath Johnston of Rifle, Colorado killed his brother with a pistol after the two drained a bottle of whiskey.

Heath’s defense? He said his depressed brother requested that he shoot him. It comes as no suprise that he wasn’t too worked up at his initial hearing for first degree murder as “Johnston yawned as he took a seat next to a deputy public defender who spoke on his behalf.” Maybe he is just masking his grief, nah.