011: 7 characteristics of a dry drunk and how to avoid this
Recovery Elevator
Paul
4.7 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2015
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Moira has 9 months of sobriety, has lost 55 pounds and explains how her life is so much better without alcohol.
A dry drunk is someone who:
1. Has made no emotional or behavioral changes.
2. Someone who simply doesn't drink and does not work a programs or invest time into their recovery
7 Characteristics of a Dry Drunk:
1. Selfish
a. Alcoholics are all extremely selfish and we think we are in total control at all times. We think we have beat the system
2. My Way or the Highway – Tom Cochrane "Life is a highway"
a. Spontaneous decisions with only one person in mind
3. The Blah……
a. Things are getting boring. You’ve quit drinking, you're riding the pink cloud, but soon things start to get mundane and boring
4. We start to forget
a. The magic of how our brains are wired to forget the past
5. Sunsets aren’t quite as magnificent
a. Interesting things in life have lost their allure
6. Negativity
a. A continuous trend in negativity
7. You’re still bat shit crazy
a. Drinking is a thinking disease and not a drinking disease
b. Our drinking is but a symptom of our disease
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Recovery elevator, episode 11. |
| 0:03.0 | I'm going to just drink on the weekends, and then of course Sunday would turn into Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, so that didn't work. According to my Recovery Elevator Subriety app on my iPhone, I have been sober for seven months, |
| 0:26.7 | three weeks, four days, 12 hours, 51 minutes and 19 seconds. Oh my gosh, and check this out. and 3, 325, 51 cents since September 7, 2014 is when I decided to quit drinking. |
| 0:51.1 | On today's podcast, I'm going to talk about a dry drunk, explain what it is and |
| 0:55.4 | how it's not enough just to simply not drink. I've got Ella from On Air with Ella. She is going to talk |
| 1:01.8 | to us about how getting in the right mindset is imperative to your recovery. |
| 1:06.2 | I've also got more on the podcast who's been sober for nine months and this is the second time we did this interview because after the first |
| 1:13.9 | interview I wanted to hear more. Let's talk about a dry drunk. First off what the heck is a |
| 1:20.8 | dry drunk that really makes no sense to me |
| 1:23.7 | somebody who's dry not wet or not drinking yet they're still a drunk I don't really |
| 1:28.6 | understand that |
| 1:30.1 | basically a dry drunk is a slang expression in the recovery community that describes somebody who simply just doesn't drink and that was myself from January 1st 2010 to roughly about two and a half years later after that when I relapsed. |
| 1:46.1 | I was a dry drunk and I almost made it two and a half years. |
| 1:50.3 | My plan was simply not drink. That was my program. Not drink. |
| 1:55.2 | Sweep everything under the rug. Not talk about it. Don't open up to anybody. |
| 2:00.0 | Completely deny that I had a drinking problem. I just didn't drink. |
| 2:04.4 | At first, being a dry drunk was pretty cool. |
| 2:07.7 | I lost weight, my thoughts were more clear, there was this mental fog that just disappeared and that is also |
| 2:14.4 | called a pink cloud but like any storm front of clouds and sunshine it |
| 2:19.5 | eventually blows through after about six months of this pink cloud, my recovery was regressing. |
| 2:28.7 | I was simply not drinking, but the mental disease, alcoholism, was progressing. I wasn't addressing the root of the problem and life |
| 2:37.7 | Temporarily got better in the pink cloud, but eventually it went downhill. My life did not get better, and then I relapsed. I got |
... |
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