One way to distinguish how much of a problem alcohol is in your life, is to take a look at your decisions lately.
How have they turned out? Be honest.
Is your life a swirling mess of outcomes, leaving you breathless and hung over?
Or, do you take your time over events when they happen, keep your own counsel, then take action once you’ve thought things through?
Decisions, and their outcomes, are one of the fastest yardsticks to measure the chaos, and likelihood of spiralling addiction, as your daily life unfolds.
Do you make one too many decisions for a night out on the spur of the moment, then remember nothing in the morning?
What’s Motivating Your Decisions
Look closer to uncover – what are the underlying motivators behind the decisions you make?
Is it your *real* intention to forget your friends, take it to excess, and end up sleeping at a bus stop?
In which case, you will quickly run out of friends.
Look at where your intention is.
Comparing To The Past
As you contrast your decisions you’ve been making lately, with those from a non-alcohol-fuelled chapter of your life, what’s different?
Do your decisions nowadays seem more like excuses, compared to before? Do you commit to events that will only assist you in drinking to oblivion? Or are they balance and with holistic intentions at heart?
The Flipside – Inability To Make Decisions
When initially starting out on the sober journey, many find themselves unexpectedly in a place of total inability to make decisions at all.
More often than not, this is indicative of underlying self-esteem issues that may need resolved, or that didn’t surface to be addressed during treatment.
Ask yourself:
What could be the possible negative outcome of making the decision?
What was it that happened the last time you made a decision, and how did you cope with that?
Questions like these will lead you to the underlying issues.
Our issues like these will remain, even during stellar periods of unwavering sobriety, until we conquer them.
Usually this means, facing them head on, little by little, with help, if needed.
What Are The Decisions Trying To Get For You?
My friend went through the entire program at The Hygrove alcohol rehab in Gloucester, and came out ok.
She was challenged to look at her decision-making – it consistently came up as an issue when intoxicated, and it led her to piece together the threads – the commonalities of the experiences that the alcoholic in her, was trying to achieve, by making these decisions.
When she understood the desired outcome, and what it was achieving for her, the rest of her recovery plan fell into place.
If you can piece together the common threads in your decision making, it can shed enormous light on areas of your recovery, you’d never have realised, consciously.
Think – “what’s the fight I’m trying to win, by making decisions like this, consistently?”
Summary
Alcohol and drug addiction will challenge us, relentlessly. Even after detox, treatment and throughout our ongoing sobriety.
We should expect this.
But by doing the inner work required, you can get out in front of your own decisions, and make sure they’re in the best interests of all you, and your recovery, and not just the old addiction patterns controlling the outcome for negative motives.
Post Contributed by The Hygrove.
The Hygrove
Main Rd
Minsterworth
Gloucester GL2 8JG
01452 222480
51.860402,-2.312120.
VM6Q+55 Highnam, Gloucester