Hopefully this will put the absolutism of AVRT in perspective. Naturally, the black/white all-or-nothing paradigm of AVRT, if applied to other areas, would cause problems. Trimpey once wrote:
"Absolutism is ugly, I think, because by definition it deprives people of liberty. The words, autocratic, despotic, tyrannical, dictatorial, and arbitrary, are distasteful and even revolting to most free people, and rightly so. But I use them frequently to describe AVRT. Chemical dependency is an individual liberty, but when people find themselves in the grip of addiction, facing a relentless enemy within, they may choose to deprive themselves of one, single liberty through the specially-constructed, absolutistic logic of AVRT."
Within the AVRT paradigm, addiction is defined as "chemical use or dependence that exists
against one's own better judgment, and which persists in spite of efforts to control or eliminate the use of the substance."
At the end of the day, one is free to choose total, absolute mental war against one's addiction, or not.