Santiago,

I have a feeling this time around is going to be better sober. You will be able to see things and appreciate them more. Sometimes I think when I am in a drunken state I forget to look at the beauty in the world. Please let us know about this experience for I love to hear about others travels.

And, please post if you need help. We all care what your progress is whether you are doing TSM or not. This forum is about not letting al. controlling our lives and different ways we cope with it.

Happy trails,

Jaba

TSM for me was/is nothing like drinking non-al beer.

TSM does not block the effects of alcohol.

It can however make the effects very different, and that is also very individual, but you still feel the alcohol.

For me it sort of blunted the euphoria and started to bore me, I was however still p1ssed [drunk] when I drank. In the end I didn't like the effect of even one glass, so I said hey ho I'll quit. When I think about the taste of wine or beer, I feel sick. I couldn't stomach it. Sure that's what TSM did to me, but it took a fair few years to get there, and many ups and downs.

As retread has already said, it is possible to overdrink on TSM if you really want to.

One thing I have noticed since I sobered up is I take pleasure in the simple things in life like walking the dog on the beach,a cup of coffee and reading the paper in the morning,all with a fresh head not some drunken fuzzy state or recovering from a binge.

That's the way I imagined it would be kinda meh! Or like trying to smoke while taking champix.I get times like yourself were even the thoughts of alcohol make me feel sick.it sounds like you've reached the end as far as drink is concerned,what a great achievement! It's a rough road sometimes.

My father 'quit' drinking for a year and only drank nonalcoholic beer. It really did work well for him though, he was not drunk for an entire year. I tried NA beer and tend to agree with those who say that it's not like drinking on Naltrexone at all. In fact I think that's part of the success of TSM. I was just thinking of this whole thing this morning. Last night I had one glass of wine with dinner, something that would have been absolutely impossible just 11 weeks ago. So it got me to thinking. I am doing counseling right now, for other reasons, but my counselor always asks me 'do you miss it?' What a great question. Do those of us who practice TSM actually miss getting drunk? For me the clear answer is no, absolutely not.

For some the answer may very well be yes and in fact those people may be struggling more with TSM because of that reason but I digress. I don't miss it and the reason why is because TSM is empowering. Not only do you still feel at least some of the affect of alcohol but you can now control the intake. In fact it's getting to the point with me that I don't even really think of 'controlling' it, it's sort of self controlling. Again thinking about last night after I had a glass of wine with dinner. We have a refrigerator in our detached garage where I keep all the beer and my wife asked me if She should shut the garage door, with the automatic button in the kitchen. I thought about it for just a second, I did leave the door open so I could walk out and get a beer for desert but then yeah sure go ahead shut the door I don't need it. IT just happened naturally.

That won't happen with abstinence and NA beer. The reason is well explained by Dr. Sinclair and called the alcohol deprivation syndrome. And I remember that very very well. The longest periods of abstinence I ever had since I was probably 18 years old was about 6 weeks. If my councilor had asked me 5 weeks into one of those periods, 'do you miss it.' Oh God yeah I miss it! In fact I have my target date set to start drinking again almost right on down to the second and the exact bar stool I plan on sitting on to celebrate my 6 week dry run. No I don't need to plan anything except splitting a 50mg pill of Naltrexone into quarters and taking a quarter pill an hour before I drink. Easy peasy.

Right now I am going on my 12th week. Like I said in the last 15-20 years I have only not been drunk for about a 6 week run. I'm now going on a 12 week run where I've not been drunk. I've kept careful records and on only about 4 or 5 days in the last 12 weeks have I had 5 drinks, and even then it was over many hours and my BAC did not achieve a drunken level. So there is something going on here behind the scenes so to speak with TSM. In short, it's empowering. I can still drink, there is still a 'feeling' with the alcohol but I am not building up the resentment of deprivation and am learning new ways of living a normal life.

So Santiago, I do not think that after your long abstinence you will see the benefits of TSM if you start drinking on Naltrexone. Even though I am a fast responder it still took me a lot of work to get to this point and much more work for other posters here on the forum and in this thread. It's really not a magic pill such that it will just work right off the bat. It very well may mean that you will drink less, especially if like me and most here it's that chase that causes you to drink the most. It will cut that off but you will still be lacking the sweat and blood hard work that goes into getting us who practice TSM where we are today.