At the lip of the slough of despond.

I've never been to Slough (which may have been unfairly maligned in all sorts of way), I have been to despond quite regularly and I don't wish to go there again, have I ever been to me? Not sure, I'm working on it in counselling... In fact, I think I have - I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how terrible/awful/cowardly/stupid/pointless and so on and so on I am, and, I've thought a good deal about how to change that.

I did go into a down recently. People who read this at all regularly will be unsurprised that it coincided with MRS Cardiff Drunk going away for work again.

I haven't drunk, so that's a good thing. But I overdid it on the wacky backy (I was at the Community Addiction Unit this morning and got talking to a lad who was weaning himself off Cider, and, with the help of an increased marijuana intake, he reckoned, had got down from 16 pints a day to four or five) and got lazy and scared again.

Idiot!

Not as scared as I have been actually and here I can see that the work I do after counselling does have some effect, so a plus point in the 'does it work' debate. Constantly visualising myself as having a strong core really is helping. In anxiety terms I'm not so bad.

But dope makes you introverted and makes your thoughts more important - that's the effect on me anyway, others claim to be immune and we're all our own unique little balls of chemicals and neurons and string and paper aren't we. So, it's ergo, a bad thing for me, who is far too inclined that way.

I slipped into that slough for a couple of days and was coming out of it today - getting out of bed, going down to the CAU to take my Antabuse, doing some shopping, feeling a bit busy - until some loon shouted at me from a passing car. It happened a few weeks ago too, when Mrs CD and I were walking along a busy main road near here. Now, I'm pretty convinced that this was the same car and I'm wracking my brains as to who I might have offended. It's not great, but I could cope with a bit of random abuse and put it down to idiocy, but why twice? I haven't come into contact with anyone who, offended by me, would act in such a manner. All I can do is hope it goes away, but it's a tiny little piece of grit in my pearl.

So, I do feel better today and I have counselling tomorrow, which I'm looking forward to. My homework was to be more assertive in my day to day life, which I don't know if I've achieved.

I think I'm going to go back to the does it work question with my counsellor - we've come to a fair few conclusions about the whys of my addictive behaviour, and I think I know a couple more I've kept to myself, but I really want to know that it works.

This post is going on a little bit, so I shall consign my other two thoughts (that's a lot for me) to another post.

If you spent it, thank you for your time - if you're struggling with something you have my love. Leave a comment, I do try and reply when I can.

Nos da.

I haven't drunk anything - er, that's it really.

I haven't been on here much of late. That's a bad thing in its way but not a disaster - I enjoy writing this and it feels like useful therapy. When I can't face it, that means there's something going on I can't face - facing things, we have been told, is a good thing.

I haven't drunk, I'm still sober. I haven't come close to drinking; I still think about it every day - the taste, the warmth, the freedom from fear.

My work on anxiety has gone on pretty well, I'm visualising myself as a super powerful metal ball and forswearing strong coffee has been a great success. The local children are much less a source of absolute, go-back-to-bed misery. They still make me jumpy, but I'm learning to cope with that.

Mrs CD went away last week - the first in a series of trips off - and I survived OK. I kept what appointments I had and took my medication with a decent amount of regularity. I cooked for myself and tried to keep busy. I wasted too much time in marijuana-monged, not quite misery, but nothingness and I need to watch myself with dope - you name it, I'll overdo it.

I've also had another counselling session since I've been here and that too continues to be useful and productive. My homework this time was to be more assertive of my own needs in my relationship with Mrs CD. Have I done much on this? No, not really. It's tough, I'm so grateful to her for her support and love that I don't want to deny her anything; usually that's OK, but it does mean going along with stuff I'm not so enamoured of - nothing like slaughtering whales when I don't think you should slaughter whales, just little things.

I'm looking forward to the next session. I always come out a little drained, in a good way, and feeling I've talked about something that I needed to talk about. I've been busy-ish on my other blog - the one that might become a business at some point, but I find myself shying away from it too much - thinking I'm not up to it and therefore not even trying anything.

There we go, quite a long way of saying I haven't drunk anything.

If you spent it, thank you for your time and I hope you're good too.

Hey, what's that noise

I'd say I'm going along pretty well at the moment. Considering. Considering what? Considering that I only stopped drinking three months and a few days ago.

I'm still jittery as hell and fearful and I still have up and down days - Rome wasn't built in a day and if it had have been it would have been crap and we wouldn't be making proverbs out of it.

I still don't like noises in the street. I still probably smoke too much dope - any dope may well be too much dope. Should I worry about this? I do, of course, and when I'm having a bad time with my nerves and racing thoughts then I worry about it and swear I won't smoke so much. And yet I do. Part of me justifies this as nothing too bad - nobody, or not many people, are completely clean and sober and it was drink I was physically addicted too. I know there's a basic human need to alter consciousness and I probably need to indulge it in some way or another. My intake is modest but it's quite routine now and not related to any particular ceremony or treat. We shall see how things go on that - alcohol and coffee gone, will I make it three?

I'm kind of looking forward to going to counselling. It's opened up something in me and I want to find out more. What I really want to know is will it work? There's something pretty clear we've identified, a deep-seated lack of self worth which almost certainly has its routes in my childhood. But does knowing this - which I guess on a subconscious level I already knew - make it go away. Is there a catharsis in which all that changes - poof, as if by magic. I f*****g hope so, that would be cracking - going through some sort of tearful door and walking out the other side with the self worth that should be there, with the wall to expressing any feeling, emotion, opinion or even acknowledgement of my own existence and importance as an individual broken down.

I'm guessing it doesn't work like that. I'm guessing I have to build that myself, which is fair enough, but it seems like quite a process at the moment; a long road to walk and I don't know if I have the energy for that.

I'm going to ask. I've managed to be more honest with this counsellor than I have before. I'm thinking about what I say rather than saying what I think she wants to hear.

This seems to be a post quite like life at the moment. Not a great deal of point to it really but quite slow and thoughtful. I think I'm marking today down as a bit of a low one really. I hope tomorrow is better. It usually is and I'm usually better in the mornings, then the day just seems to slip downhill somehow.

If you spent it, thank you for your time.

Cardiff Drunk.

Better times

Things have improved here at Cardiff Drunk Towers.

Stopping the coffee has been a big thing. A very big thing indeed. I'm writing this with a cup of green tea at my side, so I certainly haven't forsworn all caffeine, but ditching the enormous pot of syrupy black stuff with which I used to start each day has been so beneficial.

I've got more energy, I sleep better, I'm avoiding the hideous jitters that used to plague me, and Mrs CD has been delighted to note that the bags under my eyes have gone.

There's also been a circumstantial change that has made a huge, in fact the biggest, difference, and that is that the kids have gone. Where they've gone I don't know, but gone they have and that's fantastic. There are still kids around, of course, and still noisy and I still have to walk past them in the street, but apart from a flutter there's not much for me to deal with.

I've been back to counselling too and had another good session. A lot of it relates back to my childhood, when I got this idea of my own personal worthlessness - how this is defeated I don't know. But, I've done some good positive work with visualising - I was skeptical about this but it's working.

I initially chose a tree as the image of my inner core but that changed to a shiny steel ball. I don't really know why; it just came naturally and I guess subconsciously.

I've also done a little exercise. Nothing major, but more regular than I have done in the past. So, I now do 15 press ups-a-day. There's a big test for me today. I've been talking about going to a martial arts class for a while - talking and talking in fact - and this time I've gone as far as phoning an Aikido guy and tonight's the night of the class. Will I make it? My counsellor asked me how likely I thought it was that I would go - I said 50 - 60% and I reckon that still stands. My worries are about meeting new people and going out at night - which, up to now I've largely avoided.

I also stopped smoking dope for a few days when my nerves were at their worst but now I'm puffing again. In fact, I had a bad weekend in that respect - Mrs CD was away and that's always been a signal for binging while drinking. Nothing bad happened, apart from the fact that I was rather lazier than I should have been. I still ate properly and took my medication but I have to avoid this now I think. Mrs CD is away quite a bit over the next few months and, if I am to be able to say that I'm getting better and working hard at it in order to make a new life then I can't have times like these when I switch off my life and indulge myself.

I'm also keen to get into more of a routine. The website work is becoming quite an issue - there's simply too much of it for me to manage and I run away from it too easily thinking it's a big scary thing. But the web guy and I are now meeting regularly and looking at ways we can make a business out of this that might pay us both. In fact, tomorrow, we're both at a business start up course which is exciting.

I've also been asked to do some writing for another project - an exciting new sort of political movement. I've so far just managed to get myself into a tizzy about all this, but, hopefully we'll see the improvements continuing, and, if I make it Aikido class tonight I think I'll really have something to congratulate myself for - the obverse must not result in too much in the way of self-recrimination.

Mrs CD seems almost blissfully happy with how things are going with us and I'm quite a good house husband, keeping on top of washing, washing up and bits of cleaning. Next weekend we're going to try and move some stuff around to give me a proper office in which to work.

If you spent it, thank you for your time.

What anxiety is doing to me.

I want to be sick. Right now, I want to throw up and it's all because of anxiety.

I spoke in my last post about what counselling had dug up - a heart, not even of glass, but of nothing. Now the counsellor said that the amount of skill and energy I devote to my anxiety shows that, in fact, I am at least a capable person. Building that core is going take time and I've only just started.

So, at the moment, I am trapped in anxiety hell.

First of all, I should make clear, some of this anxiety is rational, the consequences I create are not. It has a very specific focus at that moment but I've always been anxious around other people and feared them to a degree that is out of all proportion to any real threat.

This fear, of course, is much worse in cities simply because there are more people.

At the moment my focus is entirely on a group of kids who gather and play in our street; I would guess they range in age from six to 11. The rational part of my fear is that they are bad, nasty, naughty kids (or so I have convinced myself, maybe I am wrong and they're just mischievous and noisy). However, I know that they roam the streets till around 10pm or 11pm each night. I know their language is appalling, that they bully each other and fight terribly, that they throw rubbish wherever they feel like throwing it, including our garden and that a couple of them I've seen getting up to other stuff like throwing stones at people's doors. They run in and out of people's gardens, ride their bikes like lunatics up and down the pavements and basically show no consideration for anyone. Their only means of communication is screaming; which like everything else they get from their parents.

You'll see already what anxiety is doing to me. How much time I've wasted on these kids and what they do. And that's what it's doing to me - it's eating my life.

It's the consequences I create that are the reason that I am so upset by this. If they shout at me (as they have not, as they show no signs of doing) I believe I will be destroyed. It's hard to describe what I mean by destroyed beyond what it says on the tin - I will in some important way cease to exist. My mind races on to this conclusion without regard to logic or evidence, something like this: they will shout at me, I will shout back, they will follow me shouting this abuse, they will follow me home, I will be forced to confront them and say 'shut up' they will wait outside the house shouting this abuse and throwing stones at the door and window and what? And, blackness. I can't imagine anything or describe it as anything other than destruction, inside I know I mean running home to my parents, losing my relationship and any good I had done in my life, and a suicide attempt is likely.

I'm paranoid. I won't go in the front room without the blinds down. Whenever I go out - and it takes a while to get up the courage to do this - I scan for them everywhere. This is bringing me to their attention because I'm always looking at them and in my mind I believe they can sense my fear and will therefore see their prey. I go through an elaborate mental dance each time I have to walk past them - should I cross the road early, possibly showing fear, should I carry on and possibly invite words, should I try and say 'all right' to them in the vain hope they will like me (this pathetic craven belief has been with me for a long time; as a child I sought the approval of bullies in a desperate attempt to escape being their victim - the upshot, I made lots of crap friends.)

So, this is killing my life and endangering my recovery. I have no appetite and I often feel sick. I'm putting a lot of things off limits and I'm exhausted all the time for this expending constant nervous energy. It is upsetting Mrs CD and spoiling our relationship. I'm getting headaches. It takes me ages of psyching to get out of the house and when I do I stay out all day stopping me getting on with my volunteering on the computer, I shelter naturally in the pub and that's not a good thing.

But, I am fighting it. First of all, I have started repeating mantra-like to myself that I am strong and using the visualisation techniques I've been taught. I am forcing myself to do what I have to do. I am turning up radios and television in the house so I simply don't have to hear their noise. Today, I've gone cold turkey on caffeine, which is why I currently have a splitting headache.

It's hard and it's dangerous and it will take a long time. This helps. I have historically used alcohol to self-medicate for anxiety, but I've never really had it this badly - when I was drunk and living here I didn't notice them so much. It has got worse lately as two little groups have made friends and they gather round our neighbours' house.

I want a drink so badly and were I not on antabuse I would have had one by now. (I typed one, that's ridiculous, I would have drunk myself insensible).

The struggle continues. I have good times too, but they are getting increasingly fleeting.

Counselling again - a much better experience.

I'm back in counselling, through the Cardiff Alcohol and Drugs Team (CADT). My last experience was bad: alienating and even damaging to my mental health, although the caveat must be added that I was drinking and fighting a fruitless and painful battle to control it.

This time has started better. I went on Thursday and saw a very nice lady who had given me my assessment interview. I was amazed at the speed at which things happened and how skillfully she guided the conversation.

Initially, she just asked me how I was. I told her I thought that the entirely positive golden days of early sobriety were passed and my anxiety was ramping up and endangering my sobriety, because my way of dealing with fear is to drown it and it works, in the moment as my counsellor said.

From there it went so quickly that I'm struggling to recall the session properly. I'm sure she asked me what the cause of my anxiety was - I told her about the noisy local children. She asked me what I was scared of - I told her I feared being mocked. She asked me what would happen, what could be the worst thing that could happen in that event - I said I would be destroyed, my being would vanish.

Again, it was so fast and so emotional - and I've waited an unpardonable three days before blogging it - I can't recall everything, but, I broke down when she asked me to start visualising. See yourself as a little child she said - and that was enough, I broke down, describing how scared that little child was. "No-one ever told him things would be safe and it would be alright," she said. And it was true so I cried.

Before long I was visualising the children. I told he I would think of them as angry chimpanzees turning on one of their own number, bullying and victimising. She asked me to think of a more positive image and we agreed on baby orang utans playing. As to myself. My inner core became dust - nothing, blown away in an instant by the slightest breath of wind, by any criticism or mockery or conflict or abuse.

And that's my homework. To work on visualising myself as having a stronger sense of my own worth. And, that will take time. I have tried however, trying to tell myself my core is first a tree (what we agreed on in the session) and more recently as a metal ball and I'm trying to work on it. She pointed out that my constant monitoring of the world for threats was, in itself, a capability of a sort - a debilitating and exhausting one but one requiring some sort of skill.

This may sound ridiculous, particularly to those who don't have much time for counselling and who will find all this talk of trees and orang utans ridiculous, but to me it felt enormously powerful.

As a result, I've had a bit of an emotional week. My anxiety hasn't of course vanished, like my dusty inner core, but I felt those tears presaged some breakthrough and I know that my self-image is the one thing I have to change if I am ever going to learn to live in this world without smashing my self out with drugs or alcohol, if I am able to live without fear being my constant companion.

Ever since I can remember I have wanted not to be myself, to alter my consciousness in whatever way I possibly can. As a child by spinning, then by hyper ventilating, then by drinking, later with drugs. So, I need to go back to that to sort this all out - and it's going to be frooking hard, but it feels like the start of something.

I got myself a book on meditation out of the library and have collected another couple of numbers for martial arts groups - a way of building self-confidence. So far no call has been made, but I've made the first steps in meditation and Mrs CD very kindly just gave me a very calming massage. Both of which helped in a small way.

Because it's there and it's a real danger that could so easily push me to breakdown. The noise of children has already made me far too ready to leave the house and stay out all day to escape their noise and their conflict, and I often shelter in the pub. I do sincerely believe that a certain amount of altering of the consciousness is an entirely natural and healthy thing and maybe something like that will come through meditation. My other alternatives of choice - coffee and marijuana are starting to assume damaging characteristics. Coffee you might thing is nothing, but the amount and strength of it I drink is quite enough to cause a high - it's a cause of anxiety, so I'm an idiot inflicting pain on myself. I'm so nervous already that a spliff brings the terror of paranoia to the table, added to coffee and I'm off to the bath (the quietest room in the house) and then to bed. It's a shame, but in this state I really can't be doing with it - my intake is incredibly minimal, especially compared to my friends, but it's going to have to get lesser still.

So, a good start and two weeks to work on what I've learned about myself.

A bad day and a slipping mask...

WHEN I go and take my antabuse every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I am breathalysed - and I pass. No health professional wants to poison a patient of course so that's understandable - I do smile at the nonchalant "Avoid Alcohol" warning on the tablets, like the warnings I've been so gaily avoiding these past twenty odd years, seeking out in fact in the hope that there might even be an extra buzz in the interaction.

They also check the tablets; seeing that they come out of an official looking bottle and looking to see that the logo on the tablet itself is the real deal. I asked one week why that was.

"Does anyone ever fake it?" I asked.

Well, it turns out someone once did and that is why they now check the tablets.

"I wonder why?" I asked, "it seems pretty pointless."

The answer the nurse gave me though was quite simple and immediately I recognised the same symptoms in myself.

"They wanted people to think they were doing well," she told me.

This patient had been doing enough to get through the breath test, coming in and then getting drunk on Monday night, then stopping and being clean again on Wednesday and clean again on Friday. Until, maybe inevitably they failed a test and their subterfuge was revealed.

We're all like that I would imagine. I want people to think I'm doing well, that I'm being successful in my new life and my treatment is going well, to the extent that I have probably, if not exactly lied, then gone out of my way to accentuate the positive even on this blog - anonymously! To people I will never meet and who don't know me from David Beckham (to whom, of course, I bear a striking resemblance, we are the proverbial peas in the proverbial pod).

I think staying positive, is a good and important thing and part of getting better. I enjoy the praise I get, which I even get in my local pub - 'we're very proud of you' a couple of people have told me. But, beneath the super-happy, all is progress mask, it is a struggle and some days are more struggly than others.

Yesterday is the first time I can say I really had a bad day. When I really got depressed and upset. And it's days like those that make the yearning for drink stronger and stronger.

I always knew I was drinking to treat anxiety and depression, and it works let me tell you, in its own way and in the short term if there's a better courage than dutch courage I don't think I've found it - not even when I was shoving gramme after gramme of amphetamine up my nose. So, now I'm a sober anxious person. I have my skills, my toolkit I've been taught - question the anxiety, deal with the physical symptoms and remember that what you fear is almost certainly not as bad as the possibility of a full-blown panic attack. I try to use my skills. It doesn't always work and then I start to remember the foolproof 5% proof anxiety medicine.

I've managed to get myself extremely anxious this week. The local kids - some of whom, and their families, I flat out fear and despise - are on holiday and screaming obscenities up and down the streets all day every day. My terror is that they will see me, they will mock me, they will see my weakness and prey upon it. Some of this fear is, by the way, entirely rational - I've seen some of them do it to others. They live lives entirely free of discipline or control and seem to fear nothing - children of about six are out on the streets playing at 11pm. We've got a friend staying - he's working at Mrs CD's work this week - and he's brought his 11-year-old son and I fear (not for him, don't go thinking I'm altruistic) he'll go out and about and have some sort of trouble with these nasty kids and it will come back on us, actually even that's too altruistic, it will come back on me.

However, the local kids haven't bothered me - not at all, not once, not ever. And some of the fear is irrational - most of them are just what I was when I was their age, a bit noisy, a bit unconcerned about upsetting other people, a bit into themselves and their game and nothing else.

I also do it to myself (I do and that's what makes it worse) - the best anxiety treatment I had I wrote about at length and the lovely psychologist who provided it was unequivocal on one point: caffeine is like amphetamine and it is terrible for anxiety. Cigarettes are too. So what am I doing? Yes indeed, every day a pot of the stuff, nice and strong too; add to that a paranoia inducing joint and there you go, the perfect recipe for a quaking Cardiff Drunk hiding behind closed curtains and looking for incoming attacks from every angle.

However. I AM NOT DRUNK. My physical health is MUCH MUCH BETTER, my eczema (which was making me so miserable and paranoid in itself) IS UNDER CONTROL. I am not working and that causes me a great deal of pain some days - BUT I AM DOING VOLUNTARY WORK AND DOING A GOOD JOB HELPING OUT AT A WEBSITE. I haven't got round to doing all the exciting physical things I was going to do, martial arts to help my fitness and confidence BUT I WALK SOMEWHERE EVERY DAY AND I EAR THREE MEALS EVERY DAY.

Is that overly accentuating the positive? I don't know. It feels more honest to admit that, yes, this is hard and may be harder as time passes - maybe it'll be easier, who knows?

If you spent it, thank you for your time.

CD.