Originally Posted by
harry101 
Hi RobbyRobot,
For me, abstinence and sobriety mean the same thing but you differentiate between the two. What do you see as the difference?
What are the conditions for your sobriety?
Don't ask much, do you, eh?!
No problemo, thanks for asking, harry.
My conditions for sobriety exist because of my existing conditions for alcoholism, which are defined as described within the pages of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, 1st ed., and as well as AA's Twelve Step program.
To be clear, I am a recovered alcoholic drug addict, and I live a sustained spiritual life of sobriety. My alcoholism illness is not cured, but arrested. My alcoholic mind is alseep, unempowered. I have a new sober mind, a new sans-alcohol psyche, and have had for almost as much time as i have been not drinking, back when I detoxed in 1981. My sobriety, to be clear, is AA, and includes my work with gestalt therapy.
I was a very sick puppy.
There are increasingly disturbing gaps in my living experience, which
are not being answered by my AA sobriety, and so, I'm looking into AVRT to have another honest look at myself, with fresh 'eyes' so to speak. So far, its working well.
Spiritual sobriety and abstinence are not the same experience, yeah?
This is not the thread for much discussion of AA, of course. We can finish this quickly with our agreement that
obvious conditions exist to maintain my AA sobriety.
No conditions exist to maintain abstinence. Awesome times for me in both cases, and I'll never trade one for the other, and they don't cancel each other out either, is my experience.
