Aw lovely Soma you are too kind! I'm all 
and 
now! 
Well done you on resisting the devil on your shoulder without the antabuse - I have, as always, been reading and following your trials and tribulations xx
Hello Ma I'm pretty good at the mo, thanks for asking.
Had a rocky few weeks but I've been having weekly CBT sessions for the last five weeks I was referred by GP 2 years ago 
and finally got my course... of a whole 6 sessions! Although I didn't have very high hopes, tbh, particularly due to the brevity of the course, I've actually found it very useful.
My drinking had crept back up again but over the past few weeks I've been drinking more mindfully again. Still too much, especially at the weekends, but more moderately and more mindfully. I've also had at least two (3 last week) AFDs per week for the last few weeks, and I really notice the difference that makes. Upping my dose of ADs helped too, I expect, and also gave me a bit of a boost and some perspective to resist the wine witch for my AFDs.
I had a bit of a bizarre experience today; a friend has recently done a practitioner course in matrix reimprinting (nope - I hadn't heard of it either) and invited me to be a body for her to practise her new skills on. Once I got over my initial disappointment that it wasn't going to involve Keanu Reeves in a long black coat, imprinting himself upon me at some length, I thought I'd give it a go anyway. Most of it was a sort of guided meditation where you go back to an early memory of something that triggered a negative feeling about yourself, and you sort of rewrite the memory, communicating with that earlier version of yourself. It sounds utterly a bit bonkers but actually it was very gentle and very moving to be kind to this child version of myself. I'm usually shit at meditation and visualisation but this felt different, probably because it was guided.
It came up early on in the CBT that I "have some intensely negative core beliefs which are far too deep to address in the limited sessions we have" (to which I couldn't resist saying "well what's the point of this then?" ) and the CBT therapist feels that I need to learn to be compassionate towards myself. The fact that I find that concept so cheesy and awkward was a bit of a sign that he was onto the right track, so what with that and the matrix reimprinting, I feel like I've been making some strides in that direction. Lots of realisations about why I drink, including that one of the few ways that I can manage to be nice to myself is by 'indulging' myself by drinking. It's not the most constructive way of nurturing myself though, is it.
Whew, what an emotional splurge. Bet you're glad you asked now ma, eh?