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Old 11-14-2010, 11:41 AM
  # 17 (permalink)  
DesertEyes
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Starting over all over again
Posts: 4,426
Originally Posted by Bucyn View Post
.... I think the book is outdated and very heavy on what we unfortunately see here sometimes: poor, poor alkie who needs everyone to understand him and focus on his recovery .....
That's a popular misconception.

The book was written for the kind of alkie we very rarely see here. Perhaps never have. The alkie who's lying in a hospital bed, or locked up in jail, and has realized they _want_ to quit drinking but don't know how. You will never see such an alkie on SR because they are too sick and have no access to a computer. The _purpose_ of the book is to give that low-bottom drunk a sense of _hope_, that there is the possibility of turning their life around.

Once that alkie has gotten thru the weeks of detox, couple months of wet-brain, and starts to string more than a couple words together in a sensible manner is when you start to tighten the screws and shine a little responsibility on them. Such an alkie has never graced SR because they can't _write_. Their brains are too scrambled.

That's the difference between amateurs who think they know all about this disease and professionals who have been educated in the different stages of recovery and how to bait, cajole, feed, shove and rejoice with an alkie who actually becomes a healthy, productive person. If you do things in the wrong order, you'll just loose the alkie and they'll end up dead.

Not that different from working with an abused woman. They go thru their own stages as well, and if you use the wrong approach at the wrong time she'll end up just as dead as the alkie.

When you see the Moderators here at SR removing posts and locking threads that's the reason why. Some amateur has gotten a big head and is interfering in the work that is being done by people who actually know what they are doing.

Mike
Moderator, SR
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