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If we are planning to stop drinking, there must be no reservation of any kind, nor any lurking notion that someday we will be immune to alcohol.
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To stop drinking permanently requires the abandoment of all reservations.
Some of us have fallen prey to the idea that we will quit drinking until the current crisis we are facing passes, then we can begin again. Perhaps a judge has threatened us with fines or imprisonment. Or maybe our spouse is ready to leave us. We quit drinking for the length of the sentance or until our spouse cools off. We may attend AA meetings. When the crisis has passed, we stop going to meetings and resume our drinking. This is compliance rather than surrender. Compliance will only keep us sober for as long as the threat of unfavorable consequences hangs over our head.
AA is an entirely voluntary program. We can take it or leave it. Should we decide to take it, there are certatin things that the authors found they must do to gain permanent success. They found that their reservations about quitting for good and delusions that time would resolve their control over alcohol had to be abandoned.
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Young people may be encouraged by this man's experience to think that they can stop, as he did, on their own willpower. We doubt if many of them can do it, because none will really want to stop, and hardly one of them, because of the peculiar mental twist already acquired, will find he can win out. Several of our crowd, men of thirty-five or less, had been drinking only a few years, but they found themselves as helpless as those who had been drinking twenty years.
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May of us feel we are under control and can quit drinking when we want to. This may be true in the earliest stages of alcoholism. Unfortunately, we could not foresee that when the consequences of drinking got bad enough to warrent quitting, the alcohol would have warped our minds producing an overwhelming desire to continue regardless of the consequences. Through our alcoholic haze we may see that the consequences of drinking are becoming more severe but invariably we will attribute the resulting problems to other causes.
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To be gravely affected, one does not necessarily have to drink a long time, nor take the quantities some of us have.
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The earlier we are able to spot the symptoms of alcoholism in ourselves the sooner we can move toward recovery. We need not continue drinking ourselves to death in ignorance believing ourselves weak or immoral. We can now see that we are physically and menatlly affected by this illness, admit our poweless and seek a Power sufficient to solve our proglem.
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Certain drinkers, who would be greatly insulted if called alcoholics, are astonished at their inability to stop.
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Nobody like to be called an alcoholic because of the negative images associated with the term. The insult we feel at this label is due to our lack of humility. We have a lack of understanding of who and what we really are. If we are alcoholic, the sooner we are able to diagnose ourselves, by comparing our drinking to that of the authors, the sooner we can admit that we are powerless over alcohol and begin to recover.
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We, who are familiar with the symptoms, see large numbers of potential alcoholics among young people everywhere.
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Now, thanks to the authors, we are familiar with the symptoms of alcoholism; the inability to control the amount we drink once we begin and the inability to stop drinking entirely despite our most urgent need or most sincere desire.
Source:
The Annotated AA Handbook
a companion to the Big Book
Frank D.