Corking the Bottle

(Reprinted from my blog post July 28, 2018) We store pains in our brains and issues in our tissues. Sounds to me like a good excuse to drink, huh? At least it was a good excuse for me. If you think too much, you may drink too much. Go ahead, self-medicate, that evil little voice inside me used to say. Did it work? You know the answer already. If it did, my brain right now would be fogging, not blogging. My corpuscles would be clogging. I'm going to stop this rhyme, just in time. (It sounds pretty stupid, and I don't want you to miss the point.) That is that alcohol is poison, bad medicine, addictive, and dangerous. To remove pain from your brain and issues from your tissues, try God. Pray daily. Take your higher power on vacation with you. It will fit in a carry-on. Your gray matter matters.

[First published July 28, 2018] We store pains in our brains and issues in our tissues. Sounds to me like a good excuse to drink, huh? At least it was a good excuse for me. If you think too much, you may drink too much. Go ahead, self-medicate, that evil little voice inside me used to say. Did it work? You know the answer already. If it did, my brain right now would be fogging, not blogging. My corpuscles would be clogging. I'm going to stop this rhyme, just in time. (It sounds pretty stupid, and I don't want you to miss the point.) That is that alcohol is poison, bad medicine, addictive, and dangerous. To remove pain from your brain and issues from your tissues, try God. Pray daily. Take your higher power on vacation with you. It will fit in a carry-on. Your gray matter matters.

I hope this series of blog posts will enable you to recognize some symptoms of relapse. I meant well and tried hard, but I kept relapsing anyway. There was often a nagging little voice telling me to go ahead and try a drink. Maybe this series of blog posts will help you or a loved one break out of the relapse pattern sooner and easier than I did. Terence T. Gorski, co-author of  Staying Sober , identified 11 phases of relapse in his book Staying Sober ( https://www.amazon.com/Terence-T.-Gorski/e/B001JSA9K8 ). I hope you will find this series helpful enough to review again and again -- at once or in parts. An idea might be to checkmark symptoms in the 11 phases to see if you or a loved one is in danger of relapsing. Then take action. Gorski's research involved 118 recovering patients who had four things in common: They completed a 21- or 28-day rehab program; They recognized they could never again safely use alcohol; They intended to remain sober forever through A.A. and out...

We store pains in our brains and issues in our tissues. Sounds to me like a good excuse to drink, huh? At least it was a good excuse for me. If you think too much, you may drink too much. Go ahead, self-medicate, that evil little voice inside me used to say. Did it work? You know the answer already. If it did, my brain right now would be fogging, not blogging. My corpuscles would be clogging. I'm going to stop this rhyme, just in time. (It sounds pretty stupid, and I don't want you to miss the point.) That is that alcohol is poison, bad medicine, addictive, and dangerous. To remove pain from your brain and issues from your tissues, try God. Pray daily. Take your higher power on vacation with you. It will fit in a carry-on. Your gray matter matters.