Liisa’s text on the support group page of the Free yourself from wine online course (permission to publish obtained):
YEARS behind soberism. I started with hope on the ” Get rid of wine easily and happily ” course on 1 December 2020: “if only this course would help me succeed”.
I had been living for years as a prisoner of alcohol. When I retired, my alcohol consumption got out of control.
When I no longer had to think about going to work in the morning, drinking became an everyday occurrence. Sometimes I started already during the day.
I was constantly feeling sick and depressed. I had originally started drinking for depression, anxiety and to drown my sorrows, but then alcohol made me feel worse and made me want to drink more. This created a self-feeding spiral.
I had read IRA’s book(Free from wine – how life changes when you close the cork) many times, but just reading the book was not enough.
This course, the exercises and the weekly zoom meetings helped. When the urge to drink came, I thought, how dare I go on a zoom date and tell people that I’d relapsed. It stopped me from falling apart.
ELIN some time from zoom to zoom. The peer support was really important to me, and the fact that I could for once talk directly about something I was ashamed of.
What I also learned from this online course is that once an addiction is formed, there is no delete key to erase it.
As long as I stay away from alcohol, I am free. But if I started to imagine I could drink in moderation, and I started drinking again, the slide back to baseline would be faster than the fall on the children’s slide.
This is the decision of the rest of my life.
I HAVE gained peace of mind, joy in life, freedom from prison. The “Granny sober project” was a success, and now it’s wonderful to continue.
Thank you Ira and all the other soberist sisters.
Liisa, a soberist for 365 days
***
