Stop Drinking

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This is a place to motivate each other to control or stop drinking. It is also a place for non drinkers to discuss and share.

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Are gradual, but significant, personality changes normal after muti-year sobriety? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by remotelove@lemmy.ca to c/stopdrinking@lemmy.world

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So, yeah. It's been a few years sober now, so that is nice.

One thing I have noticed about myself is the actual existence of a personality. It wasn't a change that happened within the first few months of being sober, but over the following years.

Strangely enough, a bizarre trait is that if given the chance, I can talk about just about anything for hours. My saving grace is that I was always a repository for massive amounts of random information, but now, I can string all of that data together into coherent sentences then easily pivot into all related sub-topics and associated information on top of that.

I make a ton more off-the-cuff jokes now and I don't even know where they come from. It seems I have the ability to make people laugh, which I never thought possible.

Overall, my personality has become extremely broad these days and the above is just a couple of examples. One might say that I am a pleasant person to be around? (That is a very strange feeling, BTW.)

Has anyone else seen themselves or others go through massive personality shifts like I describe? I am not understating "massive". I surprise myself nearly every day with how intense I can get.

FWIW, I was an extremely heavy drinker when I quit and was about a year into serious dependency.

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[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I also have ADD. Nice combo, no? ;)

You do know that ADHD people also have a very large percentage of substance abusers? Self medication...

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

Self-medication was absolutely a factor for me, and I still see it all the time amongst my peers. As such, I am extremely open about my place on the spectrum and extremely open about my alcoholism. (My goal is not to "diagnose" people with a disorder, but to hopefully trigger a chain of events that leads to a person seeking assistance on their own.)

If I had to speculate, alcohol tempered my hyperactivity for a good number of years. While I am aware that is a huge part of my personality change, it's absolutely not the complete picture.