How An Alcohol Slip Showed Me How Much I've Grown!

In an ideal world, we’d never fail!

We’d never mess up, have to pick ourselves up after a defeat, dust ourselves off and face the world again! Life would be in easy mode.

Unfortunately, we do not live in that world. We are all fallible beings known as humans, and the defining characteristic is that we make mistakes.

And that’s okay, you learn more from messing up than you do from getting things right.

I had a recent slip with alcohol which would have normally destroyed my mental and physical health, and make me feel like a piece of crap inside and out!

However, instead of dwelling on it and bathing in the shame of it all, I got proactive!

First I called the detox center but the wait was four to five days, and I didn’t want to continue drinking that long and wait. So then I called my doctor and was lucky enough to get an appointment.

He gave me some meds and I detoxed at home with the help of my dad who controlled my meds and checked my blood pressure periodically, with instructions to go to the emergency if anything got out of hand.

Fortunately, everything went well and I’m feeling great now.

One thing I noticed was I didn’t play the shame, guilt, and blame game. That serves a purpose if you caused harm to anyone, yourself, or weren’t doing anything to address my problems.

However, I didn’t really do much more than the average drinker would do on a bad weekend and I’m doing everything in my power to change my behaviour, so what the hell is beating myself up going to accomplish?

Nothing!

Instead, I treated it like flu that knocked me out of commission for a few days but now I’m back feeling better, not dwelling on it.

Because that’s what it is to me, a mental health slip or an alcohol slip is the same to me as a physical injury except for one essential fact, the self-blame that comes with them.

Without the shame and self-blame, I focused on just getting well and back to myself again and it made the process a whole lot easier.

It’s a long slow grind, figuring out how to use your tools, finding the will to fight for yourself, and dealing with all the inevitable setbacks.

I think I’m only recently accepting this fact. Up until recently, really up until I started therapy I still believed all of this would just fix itself somehow.

But it won’t.

I have to keep collecting tools, learn how to use them and practice them daily while fighting the demons in my mind.

It’s bleak when you look at it like that but I’m hopeful, I’m accepting I’m fucked up and I’m accepting that I have the power to fix me.

It just won’t be overnight as I had previously hoped.

Thanks to you all I have even more tools, your comments with tips and tricks to battle this illness, I write them all down.

Much Love,

Patrick

So I’ll leave you with this, have your own back like a best friend! You’re human so you’ll keep making mistakes, but if you are actively trying to fix those mistakes or improve your behaviour, don’t go overboard on the self-blame and shame, it’s a surefire way to slip back into old behaviours!

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