The Alcohol Experiment

So this happened yesterday.

I’ve been pretty excited about this, as I signed up for it a couple of weeks ago.  I was pumped about going a whole month AF and how good I was going to feel.  I chose this time frame, as I tend to do because it will lead up to the trip back home to Maine that we are taking in a month.  I’m really hoping it will help calm my anxiety so that I won’t be as petrified of flying.

The closer it got, the more I drank of course and the more nervous I was to know that I would have to go 30 days without a drink.

To the point that yesterday during the afternoon at work I had worked myself into a frenzy.

It didn’t help that my husband was threatening to quit his job due to circumstances that had happened that day. In addition, my best friend was messaging me from the hospital in Maine telling me how her lungs are filling up with fluid (the very same thing that happened to my mother before she passed) and she was having trouble breathing and telling me that it was just going to get worse.  And all the while this is happening, I am at work with a bunch of suits skulking around analyzing our office since they plan to buy it and put us all out of our jobs by the end of the year.

I mean, it was comical how all this literally happened within hours of each other and all I wanted to do was go home and drown it all out with vodka.

Thankfully, I had told my husband about starting the experiment and he was of course 100% supportive.  On the drive home from work, he asked what I would like to do when we got home.  He was making himself available if I wanted to go for a walk, or watch TV or maybe get in some exercise … anything to take my mind off of drinking.

In the end, I opted to lay down and do my first day of “homework” in the Alcohol Experiment book.
After that something amazing happened.  Because I wasn’t sitting in my bedroom soaking my emotions in alcohol like I normally do, my husband was able to talk to me and explain and vent a bit about his work situation that day.

This is significant because my husband tends to shut down and stuff all of his emotions inside until he eventually explodes or implodes, depending on his mood when it finally happens.

Because I made myself emotionally available to him, he was able to use me as a sounding board and his mood improved after that.  I know it’s not a permanent fix to his problem but it made me feel both good and bad.

Good, that I was able to help him but also bad, that there is a very good chance that I have caused him emotional distress for many years by shutting myself off with booze and not giving him a chance to do what couples should do — use your partner as a sounding board/therapist to get things off of your chest (he has very few friends outside of me).

I choose now to feel good that I was there in that particular instance and work on being there more in the future instead of dwelling on the negative.

I was in bed by seven reading and he joined me shortly after.  We talked and giggled about the dog passing gas under the covers and it felt so good to be present and just be stupid with him instead of passing out cold before he came to bed or continuing to drink long after he had gone to bed as usual.
And I actually managed to get about 6 hours of sleep total.  Usually my first AF night in a bit is very little and very choppy sleep so this pleased me, as did waking up hangover free.  Six hours of sober sleep is way better than 12 hours of drunk “sleep” any day!

Anyhoo…here is my homework from Day One:

 

 

 

#recovery #thealcoholexperiment #anniegrace #thisnakedmind