I'm sorry but if you're here, have tried to control your drinking in the past to no avail then you have a drinking problem. There are no cures that will turn a person from one who simply can't control their drinking in to someone who can..
Most of the people here I'm sure, are strong willed, intelligent, caring, good people who if possible would never intentionally drink too much and hurt themselves or others.
but we do, and we do it over and over. Not because we don't care but simply because we can't control it. There are of course different stages, degrees of loss of control but ultimately we are different than others.
I have maybe 7 close friends that I can compare myself to. Two drink a lot, are often drunk and though they are not exactly like me often say they wish they could stop drinking. The others, simply never get too drunk, never have regrets about drinking, never mention not drinking and it's simply not anything they don't have complete control over...
I'll apologize in advance for the poor analogy but If I ate pizza 5 or six times a week and it made me sick sometimes, say every time or every 4th time or every 20th time but I knew that for sure at some point when I ate it again it would make me sick I'd probably give up eating pizza.
My brother, the normal one not the drunk like me, contracted hepatitis after a surgery many years ago and was told he could not drink any more or he could die. He didn't and hasn't. That's what a normal person would do...
We make this difficult only because we are who we are, people who can't control our drinking because we are different. Part of the difference is that though we know we can't we don't want to believe it because we want to be able to drink more than anything and that's what we have to deal with. Only if we are able to realize that there is something more important than being able to drink (like being a happy, healthy, confident, proud etc. person) can we then accept that we are not like others and that we simply can't control our drinking.
Oh and tomorrow when I start thinking I can control my drinking would someone please remind me of this, thanks.