Lost the Ability

[RufusACanal]

"We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know that no real alcoholic ever recoveredever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals—usually brief—were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. We are convinced to a man that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better.

We are like men who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones. Neither does there appear to be any kind of treatment which will make alcoholics of our kind like other men. We have tried every imaginable remedy. In some instances there has been brief recovery, followed always by a still worse relapse. Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it evidently hasn’t done so yet."


Excerpt from the First Edition of the Big Bokk of Alcoholics Anonymous

[nandm]

Such an accurate description of alcoholism for me. I had lost the ability to control my drinking long before I ever found sobriety. I can not ever say for sure when that happened. It was such an invisible line that I crossed somewhere in my mid twenties. By then every time I would do something stupid while drinking and swear off I would wind up drinking again no matter how ademant I was that I was not going to drink again. Each time I drank after a short intermission (one intermission lasted nearly a year) I found that when I started back again my drinking always got worse than it was before I quit, never better. Even though there were times when that first drink, after a period of being dry, might only be one or two it wouldn't be long before that insanity of never knowing how much I was going to drink once I picked up returned. The hangovers, blackouts, blank spots, idiotic behavior (instant a**hole just add alcohol), frustration, anger, remorse, pity, and pushing people away and isolating so people would not realize how much I was drinking, all the behaviors that go hand in hand with alcoholism were right back staring me in the face.

I am so grateful today to have come to that point of desperation as the life I have today no longer includes that misery and insanity King Alcohol brought me.

Thanks for the reminder and 12 Step, Rufus. I always need these reminders.

[Tazman53]

Thanks Rufus, every time I read that it just jumps off of the page at me, there is nothing I can add to what it says, nor a thing I could take from it.