Stories about alcoholism. Life stories

After school I entered the Faculty of Journalism. In my second year, I got married and transferred to correspondence courses: I was too lazy to go to college.

She got married simply to get away from her parents. No, I remember being deeply in love, but I also remember my own thoughts before the wedding.

I smoke in the yard and think: maybe, why am I doing this? But there is nowhere to go - the banquet is scheduled. Okay, I think I’ll go, and if anything happens, I’ll get a divorce.

I almost don’t remember that wedding: when my parents left, I started drinking vodka with my friends - and that’s it, then failure. Memory lapses, by the way, are also a bad sign.

Future husband at that time he lived in the editorial office of the newspaper where he worked. My parents rented an apartment for us and we started living together.

I always considered myself ugly and unworthy of love and respect. Perhaps for this reason all my men were either drinkers or drug addicts, or both. One day my husband brought heroin and we got hooked. Gradually they sold everything that could be sold. There was often no food at home, but there was almost always heroin, cheap vodka or port.

One day my mother and I went to buy clothes for me. July, it's hot, I'm wearing a T-shirt. Mom noticed traces of injections on her arm and asked: “Are you injecting yourself?” “The mosquitoes bit me,” I answer. And mom believes.

About trying to quit drinking

I was hostile when someone hinted to me about my problems with alcohol. At the same time, I considered myself so terrible that when people laughed on the street, I looked around, sure that they were laughing at me, and if they said a compliment, I snapped back - they were probably mocking me or wanted to borrow money.

There was a time when I thought about committing suicide, but after making a couple of demonstrative attempts, I realized that I didn’t have enough gunpowder for real suicide. I considered the world a disgusting place, and myself the most unfortunate person on earth, it was unclear why I ended up here.

Alcohol helped me survive, with it I at least occasionally felt some semblance of peace and joy, but it also brought more and more problems. All this resembled a pit into which stones were flying at great speed.

It was bound to overflow at some point.

The last straw was the story of the stolen money. Summer of 2005, I'm working on a reality show.

There is a lot of work, the launch is coming soon, we work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. And here's luck - for once we were released early, at 20.

00. My friend and I grab some cognac and fly to relieve stress in grandma’s long-suffering apartment.

Afterwards (I don’t remember this), my friend put me in a taxi and told me the address of my parents. I had about $1,200 with me - it wasn’t my money, it was “working money”, it was the taxi driver who stole it from me. And, judging by the state of my clothes, he simply threw me out of the car.

Thank you for not raping or killing me.

I remember how, having distinguished myself once again, I told my mother: maybe I should get coded? She answered: “What are you making up? You just need to pull yourself together. You’re not an alcoholic!” Mom didn’t want to acknowledge reality simply because she didn’t know what to do with it.

Out of desperation, I still went to get coded. I wanted to take a break from the troubles that kept befalling me every now and then. I wasn’t planning on quitting drinking forever, but rather taking a sober vacation.

About the pain peak

I didn’t think about having a child (to be honest, I’m still not sure that motherhood is for me), but my mother constantly said: “I was born when your grandmother was 27, I also gave birth to you at 27, it’s time for you to give birth to a girl.” .

I thought that maybe my mother was right: I’m married, and besides, all people give birth. At the same time, I didn’t ask myself: “Why do you need a child? Do you want to look after him, be responsible for him?” Then I didn’t ask myself questions, I didn’t know how to talk to myself, to hear myself.

About living with sobriety

Alcohol is a very difficult form of recreation. Now I’m amazed how my body survived all this. I was treated, tried to quit and relapsed again, almost lost faith in myself.

I finally stopped drinking on March 22, 2010. It’s not that I decided that it was on the 22nd, on the bright day of the spring equinox, that I would stop drinking, hurray. It was just one of the many attempts that led to me not drinking for almost seven years. Not a bit. My husband doesn’t drink, my parents don’t drink - without this support, I think nothing would have worked out.

At first I thought something like this: when he saw that I had stopped drinking, God would come down to me and say: “Yulyasha, how smart you are, well, we finally waited, now everything will be fine! I will now reward you as expected - you will be the happiest with me.”

To my surprise, everything was wrong. Gifts did not fall from the sky.

I was sober - and that was it. Here it is, my whole life - the light is like in an operating room, you can’t hide.

Mostly I felt lonely and terribly unhappy. But amid this global misfortune, for the first time I tried to do other things, for example, talk about my feelings or train my willpower.

This is the most important thing - if you can’t walk in the other direction, you need to at least lie down in that direction and make at least some kind of body movement.

About alcoholic traditions

My mother is the daughter of an alcoholic, her father died at 40 from a heart attack. All I know about my grandfather is that he drank and raised aquarium fish. Mom never told me anything - neither about her childhood, nor about her first husband. I think she has a lot of unspoken pain in her soul. I don’t ask questions: in our family it’s not customary to get into each other’s souls. We suffer in silence, like partisans, with expressions of love, by the way, it’s about the same story.

I have never seen my mother drunk, which I can’t say about my father. Mom drank like everyone else - on holidays. Grandmothers also drank, preferring strong drinks. I remember these family holidays: kind, cheerful adults, gifts, delicious table, good mood and bottles. Of course, no one could have thought that I would grow up and become an alcoholic. I saw that all the adults were drinking, and I knew that when I grew up, I would too, because drinking on a holiday is as natural as eating a goose or a cake.

I tried beer early, at the age of six (my parents gave me a sip), and at the age of thirteen or fourteen festive table They were already pouring me champagne little by little. In high school I learned what vodka is.

I almost don’t remember my wedding: when my parents left, I started drinking vodka with my friends - and that’s it, then failure

My boyfriend introduced me to vodka - we started dating in the 10th grade. I didn't really like him, but everyone thought he was cool. After a couple of months, we drank a bottle of vodka together every day. After school, we bought a bottle, drank it at the guy’s house and had sex. Then I went to my home and sat down to do my homework. My parents never suspected me of anything. I quickly developed a tolerance to alcohol - it was only bad the first couple of times. This is a wake-up call: if you feel fine after large quantity alcohol, it means your body has adjusted.

How an alcoholic talks

After school I entered the Faculty of Journalism. In my second year, I got married and transferred to correspondence courses: I was too lazy to go to college. She got married simply to get away from her parents. No, I remember being deeply in love, but I also remember my own thoughts before the wedding. I smoke in the yard and think: maybe, why am I doing this? But there is nowhere to go - the banquet is scheduled. Okay, I think I’ll go, and if anything happens, I’ll get a divorce! I almost don’t remember that wedding: when my parents left, I started drinking vodka with my friends - and that’s it, then failure. Memory lapses, by the way, are also a bad sign.

At that time, the future husband lived in the editorial office of the newspaper where he worked. My parents rented an apartment for us and we started living together.

I always considered myself ugly and unworthy of love and respect. Perhaps for this reason all my men were either drinkers or drug addicts, or both. One day my husband brought heroin and we got hooked. Gradually they sold everything that could be sold. There was often no food at home, but there was almost always heroin, cheap vodka or port.

One day my mother and I went to buy clothes for me. July, it's hot, I'm wearing a T-shirt. Mom noticed traces of injections on her arm and asked: “Are you injecting yourself?” “The mosquitoes bit me,” I answer. And mom believes.

Typical logic of an alcoholic: he never takes responsibility for what happens to him

I remember one day from that period in detail. A couple of my classmates came to visit us. In the midst of drinking, we go to a cafe, there we run out of money, and a classmate leaves a gold ring as collateral. We go outside to catch a taxi. Here a police car slows down in front of us. We are drunk, my husband has an open bottle of champagne in his hands. They want to take the guys to the police department, and I, being so brave, declare that I have friends in the traffic police. I walk around the car to write down the number, it’s winter, it’s slippery - I fall, look at my leg and realize that it’s somehow strangely twisted. A second later - hellish pain. The cops immediately turned around and left, and I ended up in the hospital. For nine months with two fractures of the tibia.

One fracture turned out to be complex. I had two surgeries and an Ilizarov apparatus was installed. At the same time, I continued to drink, even while lying in the hospital - my husband brought port wine. Once I got drunk while in a cast, fell and broke my lower lip with a tooth. But there was no cause-and-effect relationship in my head between what happened to me and alcohol. I thought that it happened by accident, that I was simply unlucky, because anyone can fall, and in general “the cops are to blame for everything.” Typical logic of an alcoholic: he never takes responsibility for what happens to him.

About memory lapses

We divorced our first husband a couple of years after our wedding. I fell in love with his friend. Then into someone else and someone else...

When I was twenty-two, my father’s acquaintance invited me to write scripts for a youth series. It was pleasant work in all respects: I wrote for at most a week a month, and spent the rest of the time walking and drinking. That same year, my grandmother died, leaving me her apartment, in which I set up a real hangout.

In a relatively sober state, fear and anxiety were the main feelings of those years. It's scary when you don't remember what happened to you yesterday. Just once - and consciousness wakes up. You can find your body anywhere - in a friend's apartment, in a hotel room, on the bare ground outside the city or on a bench in the park. At the same time, you have only a vague idea of ​​how you got here, and you have no idea at all what you have done and what the consequences will be. You're just scared and dark. Why is it dark? Is it still morning or already evening? What day is today? Have your parents seen you? You start checking your phone, but it’s not there—apparently, you’ve lost it again. You are trying to put together a puzzle. Does not work.

About trying to quit drinking

I was hostile when someone hinted to me about my problems with alcohol. At the same time, I considered myself so terrible that when people laughed on the street, I looked around, sure that they were laughing at me, and if they said a compliment, I snapped back - they were probably mocking me or wanted to borrow money.

There was a time when I thought about committing suicide, but after making a couple of demonstrative attempts, I realized that I didn’t have enough gunpowder for real suicide. I considered the world a disgusting place, and myself the most unfortunate person on earth, it was unclear why I ended up here. Alcohol helped me survive, with it I at least occasionally felt some semblance of peace and joy, but it also brought more and more problems. All this resembled a pit into which stones were flying at great speed. It was bound to overflow at some point.

The last straw was the story of the stolen money. Summer of 2005, I'm working on a reality show. There is a lot of work, the launch is coming soon, we work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. And here's our luck - for once we were released early, at 20.00. My friend and I grab some cognac and fly to relieve stress in grandma’s long-suffering apartment. Afterwards (I don’t remember this), my friend put me in a taxi and told me the address of my parents. I had about $1,200 with me - it wasn’t my money, it was “working money”, it was the taxi driver who stole it from me. And, judging by the state of my clothes, he simply threw me out of the car. Thank you for not raping or killing me.

I remember how, having distinguished myself once again, I told my mother: maybe I should get coded? She answered: “What are you making up? You just need to pull yourself together. You’re not an alcoholic!” Mom didn’t want to acknowledge reality simply because she didn’t know what to do with it.

Out of desperation, I still went to get coded. I wanted to take a break from the troubles that kept befalling me every now and then. I wasn’t planning on quitting drinking forever, but rather taking a sober vacation.

I didn't get sober, I just didn't drink alcohol.

In honor of the coding, my parents gave me a trip to St. Petersburg. The three of us went and stayed with my relatives. Their parents, naturally, drank with them - what would they do without it on vacation. I couldn't bear to see them drunk. I somehow couldn’t stand it and said in a rage: “Why can’t you not drink at all?” Petersburg saved me. I ran away into the rain, got lost among the canals, and then I definitely decided that I would come back to live here.

I lasted a year and a half during the encoding (it was a standard hypnosis encoding), and my affairs seemed to go smoothly: I met my future husband, there were much fewer problems at work, I began to look decent and earn money, I stopped losing phones and money, I got my license, my parents bought me a car. But almost every day I drank non-alcoholic beer, and my husband drank alcoholic beer with me for company. I didn't get sober, I just didn't drink alcohol.

Non-alcoholic beer is a ticking time bomb. Someday it will be replaced by alcohol, and then dynamite will work. One evening, when the store didn’t have my zero, I decided to try drinking a regular one. It was scary (if accepted, the coder promised a stroke and heart attack), but I’m brave.

Coding is not a bad thing under one condition: if, after putting yourself on pause, you begin to change your life, actively develop towards sobriety, and solve the problems that led you to alcoholism. It's important to move in a different direction.

Having decoded, I, as they say, got my hands on alcohol. It was a huge - even by my standards - drinking binge. Alcohol returned to my life as if it had never left. And six months later I find out that I am pregnant.

About the pain peak

I didn’t think about having a child (to be honest, I’m still not sure that motherhood is for me), but my mother constantly said: “I was born when your grandmother was 27, I also gave birth to you at 27, it’s time for you to give birth to a girl.” .

I thought that maybe my mother was right: I’m married, and besides, all people give birth. At the same time, I didn’t ask myself: “Why do you need a child? Do you want to look after him, be responsible for him?” Then I didn’t ask myself questions, I didn’t know how to talk to myself, to hear myself.

I searched the Internet for stories of women who also drank and gave birth to healthy children.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was not at all happy, but I promised myself that I would quit drinking and smoking. Gradually. I managed to slow down by giving up my favorite strong drinks, but I couldn’t stop drinking completely. Every day I promised myself that I would quit tomorrow, and searched on the Internet for stories of women who also drank and gave birth to healthy children.

In the seventh month of pregnancy, a placental abruption occurred, I had an emergency cesarean section, the baby died, and I went on a drinking binge, consumed by a sense of guilt for drinking and refusing to go to the hospital for preservation. Blaming myself was commonplace. You did it, you apologized, and you can move on with your life without changing anything.

At that time I already had very bad hangovers, I was seriously afraid of delirium tremens. Now it’s difficult to describe this state... You can’t do anything. My head is pounding. It grabs your heart. It’s either hot or cold, you can’t lie still, your body is twitching, you’re unable to eat or drink, you throw yourself in vitamins - nothing helps. You can’t fall asleep without light and TV, and you can’t do much with them - sleep is intermittent and sticky. And a huge anxiety, one that is bigger than you: now something is going to happen.

I remember sitting in a car with a friend, and I said: my husband forbids me to drink, I’ll probably have to quit, otherwise he’ll leave. The friend nods sympathetically - it’s hard, they say, for you, I understand. It was August 2008: my first attempt at getting married on my own.

About living with sobriety

Alcohol is a very difficult form of recreation. Now I’m amazed how my body survived all this. I was treated, tried to quit and relapsed again, almost lost faith in myself.

I finally stopped drinking on March 22, 2010. It’s not that I decided that it was on the 22nd, on the bright day of the spring equinox, that I would stop drinking, hurray. It was just one of the many attempts that led to me not drinking for almost seven years. Not a bit. My husband doesn’t drink, my parents don’t drink - without this support, I think nothing would have worked out.

At first I thought something like this: when he saw that I had stopped drinking, God would come down to me and say: “Yulyasha, how smart you are, well, we finally waited, now everything will be fine! I will now reward you as expected - you will be the happiest with me.”

To my surprise, everything was wrong. Gifts did not fall from the sky. I was sober - and that was it. Here it is, my whole life - the light is like in an operating room, you can’t hide. Mostly I felt lonely and terribly unhappy. But amid this global misfortune, for the first time I tried to do other things, for example, talk about my feelings or train my willpower. This is the most important thing - if you can’t walk in the other direction, you need to at least lie down in that direction and make at least some kind of body movement.

The first year sober is hard. You feel such shame for your past that you want one thing: to dissolve, to go underground. I took my husband's last name, changed my phone number and address Email, left social networks and distanced herself from friends as much as possible. All I had was me, who drank fourteen years of my life. Who didn't know herself. For the first time I was left alone with myself, I learned to talk to myself. It was unusual to live completely without anesthesia, to be constantly present in your life, without hiding or running away. I don't think I've ever cried so much in my life.

A couple of years before I stopped drinking completely, I became a vegetarian. I think the recovery process started right when for the first time I thought about what (or rather, who) I was eating, that in the world, besides me, there are other creatures who live and suffer, that someone else might have worse than me. Asceticism appeared in my life, which developed me and made me stronger.

Sometimes I remember myself and don’t believe that it was me, and not a character from the movie “Trainspotting”. Thank God, I was able to forgive myself and finally begin to treat myself well - with love and care. It was not easy and took a lot of time, but I managed (with the help of a psychotherapist). The next step is to develop, albeit slowly and little by little, but to move forward every day.

In the summer of 2010, my husband and I quit smoking. I started meditating. Every free minute I read affirmations and convinced myself that I could handle everything.

Three years ago I started . At first it was like a diary for me, a platform for reflection: I wrote because I felt an inner need. At first no one read the blog, but, one way or another, it was a statement about myself - I exist, yes, I drank, but I was able to quit, I live.

Beautiful, wealthy women come to me, they have husbands and children, and everything seems to be fine. Only every day they secretly drink a bottle of red wine

Then I realized that sitting and reflecting is the same as doing nothing. Because there are thousands like me. They are also helpless, they do not understand how to stop the war within themselves. Therefore, now I provide consultations for people with similar problems. Everyone has different degrees of dependence: beautiful, wealthy women come to me, they have husbands and children, and everything seems to be fine. Only every day they secretly drink a bottle of red wine. It’s not customary to talk about this, but almost every second person in our country drinks at one time or another. That is, he drinks regularly. And few people admit this to themselves.

I didn’t want to be ashamed of myself and my past - it bothered me, I felt unfree. Therefore, I plucked up courage and began to talk about the topic of alcohol addiction, so that alcoholism would no longer be treated as something shameful or top-secret.

I’m being honest: I’m not a psychologist or a narcologist. I am a former alcoholic. And, unfortunately or fortunately, I know too much about how to stop drinking and how not to do it. I try to help those who have realized that they want to live soberly and are ready to do something for this. In this matter, the more information, the better. That's why I'm here and sharing my experience - how I drank and how I live now.

Thanks to the photographer Ivan Troyanovsky, stylist and cafe "Ukrop" for assistance in the shooting.

I know firsthand about the problem of female alcoholism. My mother was an alcoholic. In her youth, she and her father liked to drink a little beer after work or on days off, like most people. Then the amount of alcohol gradually increased, especially on holidays. After my mother gave birth to me, she was 29 years old at the time, she went to work (I was 4 months old) and ended up in a women’s group, where they often drank alcohol. She didn’t even notice how she became dependent on alcohol. She started drinking all the time, and then binge drinking.

It is impossible to convey in words what it is like to live in a family of alcoholics (later the father also began to drink heavily with his mother). While my grandfather was alive, my parents were a little afraid of him and hid, and did not drink water openly. But after his death, complete horror began. But today I don’t want to talk about it. At 48, my mother died. As far as I remember, she did not have all her teeth, she looked terrible, much older than her age, although she was quite young.

I had a friend when I was a child. After school, the connection was broken, but then when I returned home and gave birth to the child, we started communicating again. In the end, they decided to take her as godfather. We were friends after that for about a year, then we stopped, because she threw in her lot with a person who was against her communicating with our family, that is, with me and my husband. Now she comes mainly just to congratulate the child on his birthday. This was a short introduction, and now the story itself on the topic of female alcoholism.

Kuma started drinking. It’s not just drinking alcohol on holidays, but almost anyone who drinks can go on a binge. Sometimes I meet her, because she lives nearby, she always makes me smell of fumes. She became really scary. Her face is red and swollen, covered in some kind of pimples, which she doesn’t even try to fight. The hair is long, but not well-groomed, dirty, so greasy that it immediately catches your eye. The front teeth are all black. She is only 27 years old, but looks about 40 years old. My husband once saw her from afar, didn’t recognize her, says what kind of aunt she is.

She has a 4 year old child. Now her mother is mainly taking care of her daughter. The girl never leaves her grandmother's side. Both the godfather and her husband do not work anywhere; her mother provides for them, but at the same time they find money for alcohol. I feel very sorry for her child. She is so young and already an alcoholic. Simply terrible. The man himself ruined his life.

But they are constantly jealous of us because we either bought a car or did repairs. But we strive for better life. Honestly, I probably have some kind of fear of alcohol addiction. There is no way I will allow my children to go through what I once did. Although they say there is no need to promise. At least I will try my best for this.

The article mentions famous people who talk about their lives before and after drinking alcohol, as well as how they came to absolute sobriety.

They come to the consensus that without alcohol, their reality has become brighter and much more interesting - this is the main reason for the complete loss of interest in alcohol.

“All drunkards stop drinking, but some manage to do this while they are still alive.” Sad joke. Alcohol addiction is very serious, and indeed not everyone who acquires it manages to stop. Once you become an alcoholic, then it is no longer possible to stop being one, you can only move into the category of quitting alcoholics if you try really hard.

One of my friends once said that a person stops drinking when he reaches the end. But this concept is different for everyone. For some, this is if he has been demoted from general to colonel, but for others, lying under the fence is not yet an end. He himself, from time to time, and in between, actively promoted sobriety. Eventually, his wife kicked him out of the house. I don’t know whether he reached his end, or whether he’s alive at all. Sometimes the signal is very clear and unambiguous. Alexander Rosenbaum, for example, considered himself a strong drinker, believed that he could drink a lot without harm to his health, and even claimed that there was no such disease as. He quit drinking after he got drunk, and only the timely arrival of an ambulance saved the singer’s life.

However, a threat to life does not always stop alcohol consumption. Grigory Leps drunkenness led to the hardest. One day, during another attack, doctors literally pulled him out of the other world. This made a strong impression on the artist, and for a long time he abstained from drinking, but then began to allow himself to drink alcohol again.

Sometimes, it is not fear for one’s life at all, but shame, the awareness of how far one has fallen, that helps a person stop drinking. In young age Raymond Pauls was a pianist in an orchestra who often performed in restaurants and at dances, where alcohol was a necessity. Life gradually turned into one continuous binge. It got to the point that friends took Pauls to a special clinic. The sight of degenerate alcoholics gathered together, and the understanding that he himself had become one, led the musician into a state of shock. According to him, he stopped drinking: “immediately, in a second and completely - not at all and never.”

Here's a famous actor Alexey Nilov(Captain Larin in “Cops”), went to the hospital more than once in order to stop drinking. But he lasted no more than 2-3 days, and again “took it to his chest,” finding drinking buddies among the patients of the same hospital, and sometimes among doctors. Alexey believes that it is impossible to code him, but if he really wants to, he himself can give up alcohol for a while. As an example, he gives a story when he, but was not encoded, without telling anyone about it. And yet, I didn’t drink for a year after that, and everyone thought that coding helped.

There is still no consensus in society about what it is: some consider drunkards to be irresponsible egoists who need to be punished, others as sick people who need to be treated.

According to Larisa Guzeeva: “Alcoholism is a terrible disease, like the flu or jaundice; alcoholics should be treated, not scolded.” Larisa herself began drinking to spite her drug addict husband, trying to somehow influence him. It ended with treatment, and not only for alcoholism, but also for chronic diseases caused by drunkenness. Now all this is in the past. Drinking, as it were, places a person in another reality, very limited and distorted, but which makes it possible to solve all the problems that arise with another dose of alcohol.

As a result, the whole meaning of life comes down to the opportunity to take this very dose, and only then does interest in other aspects of life appear. And the further you go, the more difficult it is to get out of this.

According to the testimonies of various people who managed to get rid of cravings for alcohol, there is no universal solution for everyone. Someone can really stop drinking on their own by finding a serious reason for this. Such, for example, as your health or the well-being of loved ones. Some people cannot do this, and such a person needs help, support and treatment.

However, what all former drinkers agree on is that without alcohol, their reality has become much brighter, more interesting and multifaceted. And according to them, this is the main reason for the complete loss of interest in alcohol in present life.

You can find out about those actors who were unable to overcome alcohol addiction and left for another world from.

Stop drinking. Good sobriety to you!