Alcohol Addiction Recovery

Recovering from alcohol addiction can be the battle of a lifetime for just about anyone that happens to be afflicted with the disease of alcoholism.  Many who fall victim to this disease will never recover, and a fairly large percentage of this group will never even seek treatment at all.  The numbers are stacked against you.  People do recover though, and find long term sobriety and a new life that is worth living without alcohol.  If that is what you want, then consider the idea of getting help and seeking treatment.

It has been said that we cannot solve a problem by using the same level of thinking that created the problem.  And yet that is what alcoholics do all the time when they attempt to control their drinking.  They try tactics such as switching from liquor to beer, or only drinking after 5PM, or only drinking on weekends, and so on.  None of these internal tactics ever work in the least.  In fact they miss the boat entirely.  If these sort of tactics actually worked in controlling someone's drinking, then they would not be an alcoholic.  The fact of the matter is that alcoholism can deceive people for years and years because these tactics fool us into thinking that they might work. 

For example, take an alcoholic who normally drinks hard liquor every night.  He finds himself blacking out and completely losing control.  This scares him badly, or maybe his family threatens him that he has to change something.  So change he does.  He switches to beer.  The next day he buys a case of beer instead of a fifth of whiskey.  And it works!  He drinks the beer the next night and does not even black out.  He stays in control for the entire evening, pretty much enjoys himself, and passes out quite peacefully. 

So the following day he does it again and buys more beer.  Now at this point you should be getting an idea of how insidious this disease is.  What is going to happen is that the beer is not really going to do the job for the guy.  Maybe it will work for a few days but soon he will realize that he is not really getting properly buzzed.  Because he is intoxicated from drinking so many beers, but not really as drunk as he wants to be, he will eventually venture out and purchase his real drug of choice and get some more liquor. 

The point here is not that beer will lead you back to liquor.  The point is that putting any alcohol into your system is going to be bad news for the alcoholic.  It will always spiral out of control eventually.  We trick ourselves because we can maintain control in the short run and actually control our booze for a short time.  But eventually, we always lose control.  This is why alcoholism is so cunning and difficult to beat.  This is why people spend their entire lives struggling with alcoholism and end up dying from it.

Now if you actually want to change your life and give alcohol addiction recovery a try, then you have to make a decision to do so.  Sounds obvious, but most people miss out on this crucial detail.  You have to surrender fully to the idea that you cannot drink like a normal person. 

There are programs out there that attempt to teach you how to moderate and control your drinking.  I have never had any success with such programs.  The only solution I have found is to quit drinking entirely.  This is the only thing that has produced real results in my life and maintaining abstinence from alcohol has opened the door to many wonderful things for me. 

It sounds like a death sentence to go entirely without alcohol.  Or, at least it sounds like that to the alcoholic.  It is in fact a very scary step for someone to take.  The plunge into abstinence is a scary adventure indeed.  The only way you can really do it is with an open mind.  If you have a closed mind, or think that you have all the answers in your own head, then you will not figure out how to stop drinking.  Remember that we cannot solve our own problem with the same level of thinking that created it.  Alcoholism tricks us into thinking that we are in control.  We tell ourselves that we drink because we like to drink.  In fact, we drink because we have become addicted to alcohol.  Our denial tells us that we are choosing to drink because we enjoy being drunk.  In fact, if we honestly look at our life, we will see that we are miserable most of the time, even while we are drinking.  This happens because we tend to remember the good times.  Our selective memory remembers when we were drunk and having fun, but blocks out the numerous times when we are bored, miserable, or angry.