I think i need to get knocked down a peg or two.
I drank consistently for the last ~7 years, almost always one or two beers a night.
Since 2018 and into 2019, it escalated to having 3-5 strong beers every night, followed by wine at dinner. i knew it was an issue (wasn't recalling the arguments with my wife at night, failed to recall the plot of whatever TV show we watched or book i read before passing out).
i admitted i had a problem and went alcohol free 17 days ago.
The reason for the "knock me down" request: it has been surprisingly easy. i am on my first out of town work trip since ditching the booze, in a town i know well with many pubs i also know well. last night i marched right into the same bar i always visit. i had no doubt i could skip the booze, and skip it i did.
no one would recommend walking into a bar by yourself to someone that drank like i did for as long as i did, if that someone was just recently sober.
but i did it, and knew i could. ordered the same meal i usually did and got weird looks from the bartender when i ordered club soda.
i don't want to get overconfident, but is it common to be able to do these kinds of things with such confidence?
does it in any way indicate that maybe i am the type of person that can drink once a week, or occasionally, without getting out of control? i honestly don't know because up until now, i never tried to exercise self control.
The annoying answer is: it seems like everyone is different. Unless there is a big physical dependency, most people can stop/control intake for some period of time if sufficiently motivated, even if they have problematic psychological relationships with drinking. I feel like the question is, what was your motivation to stop and more importantly, what is your motivation to keep drinking?
You started out drinking 'moderately' and gradually you increased your intake. That's natural, b/c the substance is addictive...it's not a character flaw in you. Now you are abstaining, but it seems like you are still viewing it as a test of your own willpower over a feeling of deprivation. I might be wrong, but you haven't seemed to have changed your beliefs or assumptions about what you 'gain' from drinking...and you are feeling really good about even being able to stop at all (I've been there!). But once you succeed in moderating for a while, you will feel confident that you can moderate in the future. At the same time, you presumably haven't changed any of your beliefs about alcohol, so the 'attractions' of drinking will be the same as before, right? In the past when you were drinking moderately, you didn't mean to become someone who drank 3-6 drinks/night, either, did you? But eventually you got there.
It might be that simple mindfulness and setting some rules for yourself will keep you on track in the future. But the problem for a lot of people seems to be that the more confident they are that they can moderate, the more flexible their rules get over time: occasional drink becomes one glass of wine with dinner, which becomes multiple glasses, etc.
Personally, I did the moderation thing for almost 20 years (and relatively 'successfully'). I never drank enough to have any traditional negative consequences of daily drinking b/c I capped my amount. Drinking would 'creep up' over several years, and I'd dial it back for a while, and then it would inevitably creep again. It was very mentally tiring, but it never occurred to me to just stop b/c that seemed like 'punishment'. It wasn't until I did that Alcohol Experiment program that my entire thought process changed, and I began to view not drinking as the 'reward' sort of thing, rather than deprivation.
You are in the early stages of really examining your relationship with drinking. If you stay mindful, you'll eventually figure out how it's going to work for you going forward.
Self monitoring on all this stuff is very illuminating.