Thank God it didn’t end in handcuffs, which happened more times than I care to share in my previous drinking. It’s still early days for me in our new home in the South, but I have found a circle of like-minded friends that continues to grow, and for that, I am so very grateful. I already feel like I fit in and that is such a blessing for an alcoholic like me. Last week, we went to an AA meeting and because there was a newcomer in the room, the topic was the first step. They help keep everything fresh for me.

I was reading book after book , trying to change every aspect of myself. My unhealthy obsession with personal development got even worse when I was introduced to the concept of vision and goal setting and began attending intensive “development” seminars.

Contact Your First Step’s National Hotline

We compute sentiment scores for each retweet or reply from friends to users using SentiWordNet in natural language tool kit in Python . SentiWordNet gives the number of positive and negative words in the document. We normalize the scores and treat scores closer to 1.0 as having positive sentiment and scores closer to 0.0 as negative sentiment. I wish that when I had come home from rehab I had known what I know now. I wish that I had been as strong as I am now. I wish that I could’ve shown my daughter that even when you screw up, you can rebound; that even when you’re an alcoholic, you can get better. And I wish that she knew that no matter what my drinking caused me to do, I never stopped loving her.

Support groups like AA encourage people to be open about their recovery without the fear of being shamed or judged. Even timid people like me can feel comfortable sharing in recovery groups because it’s pretty likely that someone else in the group has experienced the same feelings or thoughts that I’m having. I don’t have to be fearful, embarrassed, or ashamed about what I’m going through, and I will probably get some good advice about how others have gotten through similar things. My drinking made me a different person, someone who was unrecognizable to me and to the people who knew me. My behavior created so much guilt and shame in me that I thought I would never be able to let go of my past. Fortunately, working the 12 steps of AA helped me work through a lot of it, especially steps 4 and 9.

Feeling Like Being Sober Sucks? 12 Tips for Feeling Better

We have been conditioned to believe that alcohol is a necessary way to deal with the stressors of life. It felt really empowering to share my story and to let them know sobriety sucks I am not just surviving, but thriving in sobriety. These were a few of many thoughts I had that kept me stuck in the cycle of alcohol addiction for many years.

• I feared I would move from being chained to alcohol to being chained to sobriety.
• It’s the connection and being able to feel the love and having a place to be of service.
• We conduct experiments on variations of PSL-Relational by incrementally adding other linguistic/psycho-linguistic features extracted from friends’ tweets and combining them with structural features.
• Second, we calculate the similarity between the LIWC scores for pairs of AA users calculated on concatenated user tweets before and after the user joins AA.
• So, there’s been a lot going on in my life in the last couple of months, some truly awesome things that I never thought would happen, despite the fact that I prayed about them daily.

We need a community, a circle of friends, in which we can find and offer support to other addicts. Recently, for the first time since I quit drinking, I had to think about finding a new recovery community to fit into – a daunting task for introverts like me. We conduct experiments on variations of PSL-Relational by incrementally adding other linguistic/psycho-linguistic features extracted from friends’ tweets and combining them with structural features. These models do not use any linguistic features on user’s tweets and solely rely on linguistic analysis of friends’ tweets and structural features to predict AA user’s recovery.

Finding and practicing grace in recovery

It’s a symbiotic relationship, in which we are helped by helping. It isn’t just while getting sober that rigorous honesty is important, it’s important in staying sober as well. It requires that we are honest in all our affairs – and that means things big and small. Lying, even small lies, can keep us trapped in old behaviors. Being truthful, to others and ourselves, helps us stay the path. That means being honest about thoughts and feelings even when it would be easier to lie. Since the last time I posted, my daughter Kari has moved here from Arizona.

Tamersoy et al. , Harikumar et al. , and Maclean et al. analyze recovery forums on alcohol and other substance abuse. We model the dependencies between linguistic and structural information, thus helping in understanding both their individual and combined contribution to predicting recovery. Next, we consider the model with structural features from interactions with friends in the network and dependencies among them, as captured in rules in sets B, D, https://ecosoberhouse.com/ and E. The performance scores for this model is captured immediately after PSL-Linguistic in Figure 4. We notice that even without linguistic features from AA users’ tweets and including only structural interactions with friends in the network, we can achieve reasonably high prediction scores. This demonstrates the importance of modeling structural interactions for understanding recovery and relapse. 4.3.2 Combining Linguistic and Structural Features.

Sober Senorita

The only thing different about my drinking when I relapsed in relation to my old, active addiction drinking, was that I no longer had a tolerance to the booze. One of my last drunks in 2012 ended with me in the hospital following a blackout and a handful of pills. My relapse, though not as serious, ended up with a blackout and a trip to the hospital.

• Either way, there is an unhealthy connection to alcohol, and something needs to change.
• Acceptance in recovery has taught me that I can live life on life’s terms.
• I finally had a conversation with both of my parents about my previous drinking problems and why I am now sober.
• Listen, I love you guys- I’m not going to sugarcoat anything, I’m going to be honest with you- building sustainable sobriety takes hard work and consistency.

We need the willingness to try new techniques that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable for us. We need the confidence to use new, healthy tools that paint a whole different picture. And we need the courage to see the canvas as it really is. True recovery means that we have to embrace the art of self-awareness and leave self-sabotage in the past where it belongs.

Another powerful practice to lift your mood is gratitude, which means being grateful for a single little thing (even the things we’re not supposed to be grateful for, like our depression). I love Melody Beattie’s book,Make Miracles In Forty Days, which gives a great system for practicing gratitude. 1) I started counting the days until the sun stayed up past 7 pm, and checking off each day like I was waiting for Christmas. It helped, I still do it, March 14, 2021, is going to be great. Sobriety is NOT always fun and it’s NOT always easy. Just try to live a normal life in America and not drink or be tempted to drink.

I also recommend that you go to a few different locations. You might find a perfect group for you and find that AA is just the right thing for you. Reality is the enemy of drunkenness. Living sober will improve your chances of enjoying a happier, healthier and more engaged life.