Old 12-19-2011, 06:32 AM
  # 102 (permalink)  
FT
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Join Date: Dec 2010
Posts: 3,677
I agree April, I mean TU, no I mean April, no I mean.... never mind!

Lots of good posting going on here!

Seriously though, April, your point is well taken. I talked AROUND drinking for many years before I realized what I was doing. I even "succeeded" at not drinking few times, for short bursts, but never took up the persona of a non drinker until I realized that doing that was not just PART of the game, it WAS the game.

Before that, I had considered non drinkers to be "teetotallers", considering them some kind of prudes who either "could not hold their liquor" or just didn't get it that some of us "needed" to drink. Of course, isn't that what Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart taught us (plus John Wayne -- don't forget John Wayne!). Ha!

Geez, a whole generation+ of us grew up with that mentality in our face, so is it any wonder we all drank without a second thought? And yet, I still contend that drinking in and of itself is not "bad". With all my first attempts at quitting, I DID view it as bad, in the misconception that telling myself that would make me stop.

Substance abuse is interesting that way. Demonizing "the stuff", whatever it is, never has worked on us as a society to force us to stop abusing it, be it alcohol, drugs, gambling, even obesity. It is my opinion that categorizing these things as diseases is not going to work either, whether or not that is true (which debate I do not want to begin over again here). It doesn't really even matter if "it" is bad or is a disease. The subset of users who chooses to view "it" from a different angle and self-select ourselves OUT of the main set are the ones with the highest likelihood of leaving "it" behind.
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