Starting all over again

[gnein]

Yes, I'm back again. Yes, I know I've tried and come up short in the past yada yada yada. I'm not going to talk about my past attempts, you can find them in the archives if you want. I'm making a fresh start. Right now I'm feeling nervous and a sense of "loss" about quitting P, knowing I've been so dependent on it for almost 18 years now. This, for me, is the thing I find hardest to get over. I just can't seem to completely fill the void left by P. I've tried exercise, yoga, meditation, travel and probably a million other things that i'll think of later.

Yet I know that I can't just give up. It's caused me to miss out on too much in life, and it's been an impediment to my self-esteem. This is actually day 2, but I was just too busy to post yesterday. I had been planning to go away camping for about six days to get right away from it, but some flooding put paid to that idea. Instead, I'll just have to stick it out.

One thing I'll be doing now that I'm back at work is to start regularly exercising after work, just to burn off the day's frustrations and keep me away from P. I'm also going to work at getting out of my apartment on weekends as much as possible. I do that a fair bit now, but I can do it more, and there's plenty to do around here to keep me occupied. Either way, I am not giving this up.

[rosie]

Welcome back and congrats on taking this step (regardless of how many times you have prior).

Wohoo! Another Aussie :D

[gnein]

Yep, there are a few Aussies on here. It's a great part of the world, but there seem to be more and more PAs turning up here all the time. :(

Oh well, if a few more of us can find this site, we might all be better off in the end.

[Vorlan]

Hey Gnein!

Welcome back, it's good to see friends returning to the site. It's just a shame it's for all the wrong reasons.

But yeah I'm only 20 days down the line myself at the moment but like me you have a good chance to get it right this time. It's all down to three things you're probably already familiar with:

1. Planning:

I can't emphasise this enough, if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. Triggers are everywhere in our everyday life and you need some serious willpower to get through all that if you don't plan to avoid the obvious ones. For example I think one which is universal to PAs is that we can't be left alone with internet access without putting ourselves in the way of temptation. If you can avoid this then do, if you can't then take precautions to make sure you are not tempted. (for example in an office environment arrange your desk so anyone coming in the door can see what you're doing on the computer)

Simple things like this make the whole thing easier to deal with, you can't eliminate triggers totally but you can massively minimise them.

2. Taking it slow:

As I'm sure you've heard again and again here the best way to do this is in small steps. The most dramatic gestures tend to be the least lasting. Small changes and challenges are far easier to deal with and they all add up. The best example of this is where you get people who focus on the big "year clean" or worse "never again" goals and then forget that they should be focussing on getting through today. You can't do much about tomorrow till then so there's no sense in burdening yourself with tomorrow's problems today. Being clean forever is a huge burden and a huge challenge but being clean today is far more manageable. It's something everyone knows they can do but the big, difficult goals in the end are just made up of lots of these little, achieveable ones.

3. Being prepared to change your life:

This is probably the one which is hardest of all to get to grips with. People in general don't like change. But our lives were based around P for years and because of that they can feel empty without P. That's natural but if we don't make real lifestyle changes then this will make it far more difficult to give up. It's good to see you're already recognising this by aiming to get back into excercise and planning on going camping. That's great stuff - make sure to keep it up and to make sure you fill your new free time with good healthy habits to replace your P-time.

As this is changing your whole life don't expect this to be easy. If you're only putting in 80% you will fail every single time because your PA is always putting in 100%. Therefore you need to be 110% committed, dedicated and disciplined. You have to really want this because you need to over-ride the default brain function here.

Also be aware that there is a deeper reason why people become addicted to P. Most PAs use P to medicate pain or insecurity, where that comes from, how important it is and how to deal with it varys from PA to PA but you will have to deal with that if you are every going to break this addiction for good. This isn't the first thing to do but once you've got a few weeks behind you start thinking it over - why did you look at P. What were you trying not to think about, what were you hiding from. For me it was my insecurity about myself, particularly around girls. I was lonely and felt rejected - I used P to try to forget and medicate this but it just made me feel more depressed. I got two years clean but because I didn't take out the roots of these insecurities fully I'm back to 20 days. In the end PA is a symptom rather than the real problem.

But you can get through all this, we've plenty of stunning examples who I'm sure you know well; FM, Daniel and Farmer are the obvious ones. PA can be beat but you've got to beat it yourself, don't look at that as a burden though, look at it as an opportunity! Not everyone gets a chance to radically change their life for the better and not everyone gets a second chance at living a full and exciting life.

I'm sure you already know most of this but I don't think it ever hurts to hear it again. I think just writing it probably will help me almost as much! :) You don't have to make the same mistakes this time that you did last time.

Best of luck to you but don't leave anything to chance,

Ben

[mell]

Welcome back G,

I've always held onto "the only way we lose is to quit". Glad to see you back and on the good path again.

[Daniel]

Gnein,

I'm glad to see you here again. Of course I wish the circumstances were different, nevertheless, as Mell said, you only really lose when you quit trying.

Vorlan's advice is golden.

I appreciate is high compliment. I still have my own struggles, now boiled down to levels that would have seemed very tame compared to +2 years ago. But the battle, though slowed down and not as pressing as it used to be, is still there.

The concept of taking things one day at a time really stands out. I am wary of the "never again!" mantra because I probably said it 10,000X when I was using and going into another use-regret-repent spin-wash cycle.

All that only to run over my last committment with glee when the next urge came down the pike.

One simple trick I've been using: music.

For whatever reason, back in the evil day, I did not mix music with P use. Thus music remains one of those precious activities that is untarnished -like a new PC that has never "been there" if you know what I mean.

So when I play music I automatically will not be thinking about P or about looking, etc. It helps as a short-cycle distraction, to stay focused on the task at hand, to execute to completion even the smallest commitment, to keep promises.

Doing even the smallest thing right brings satisfaction which helps reduce some of the emotions that drag you down.

One minute at a time if necessary!,

Go Big,

Daniel

PS: another "no suprise" observation: the more active you are on here, the more help you can provide to others, or to start you're online activity here, the better off you'll be!

[gnein]

Thanks for your replies everyone. I probably don't have time to reply to everyone individually right now, but you've all made some great points, and I really appreciated it. Last night at around 2.30am the urges hit me pretty hard. I managed to draw my mind away from them for an hour or so until I fell asleep again. I survived that one. Right now I'm feeling simultaneously buzzed and exhausted after some pretty intense exercise. I think I'll be in bed pretty soon with another clean day behind me.

Daniel -- I have music playing on my computer right now actually. A really old album from Mike McClellan from about 1979 that I managed to download. I remember my mother used to play it a lot when I was just a kid, but I didn't appreciate how good it was back in the day. Like you, I never used to play music when I was using P, I guess at the time I thought it was just a distraction. I guess now it's a weapon against P, too. I just have to remember to start up a CD as soon as I come home.

Vorlan -- there's some great advice in your post. I'm sorry to hear you had a relapse, but you got through two years, that's pretty good. The planning is important because there's a lot of "trigger" material around these parts. Virtually every surf shop on the coast has posters of bikini-clad girls in the window. I have to learn to deal with that, because it's going to be there everytime I go outside. I can also relate to medicating pain and insecurity, I had a lot of that when I was growing up. I have actually tried to address that in recent times by making some new friends, people I look foward to seeing when the opportunity arises (I didn't always feel that way about people). I now feel as though I'm actually part of the community now.

One problem I've always had is looking for the worst in people, or looking for an ulterior motive behind their actions, often when there isn't one. I have to stop taking things people say and do personally, because those actions usually have nothing at all to do with me. It's easier to talk about making that change than to actually do it of course, but at least I'm aware of it. Another piece of advice I received about this is not to bottle up emotions. I've always done that throughout my life, but I need to find positive ways to release them. It's a work in progress, but I'll get there in the end.