The Seven Year Itch

 I will never stop being amazed at how many people drift away from The Program around the five year mark.  Not saying they get drunk but that they quit attending meetings and - in my opinion - stagnate in their spiritual growth.  The big dramatic early gains are in the past and the deep contentment of long term sobriety is down the road so there's often a slow drift into obscurity.

Some more stuff from my buddy Dr. Gordon Livingston . . . 

"People are by nature risk-adverse.  It is often hard to sell unhappy people on the idea of taking the chances necessary to alter attitudes and behaviors that play a role in their chronic discouragement.  Every decision must be measure against the probability that it will  increase or decrease anxiety.  To the degree that one's choices become constrained by a need for anxiety avoidance, one's life shrinks.  As this happens, the anxiety is reinforced and soon the sufferer becomes fearful, not of anything external, but of anxiety itself."

So give it a whirl, right?  I often ponder a change and battle the feelings of resistance and anxiety by asking myself to imagine the most dire outcomes and to try to calculate how likely they are and what the consequences would be if they came to pass.  Which they almost never do.  It helps me take the leap.

"When we think about the things that alter our lives in a moment, nearly all of them are bad."