Drinking becomes a recognised problem when we have every intention to quit and find ourselves drunk again and again. The existing external circumstances of our present lives is
always secondary to how the internal realities within our respective selves are lived and experienced.
When we continue to drink after promising to ourselves we have quit, then we are indeed self-medicating ourselves. Self-medicating ourselves does not require scientific/medical diagnoses of conditions, traumas, syndromes, etc.. -- it simply requires us to want to "feel and think and act" as we selfishly want. We become important to ourselves in a selfish fashion, and we nourish that selfishness more easily and with more intense self-gratification while drinking. Drinking becomes a highly desired reward in and of itself no matter even when drinking has realised clearly destructive consequences for being drunk. Selfishness slowly becomes the tyrannical master of the enslaved drinker.
It matters not if anyone experiences that selfishness as "good and/or bad" or as "right and/or wrong" or as "living
or dying" -- what is important is that selfishness more and more continues to take over a drinkers life and as is well known, drinkers can literally drink themselves into horrific lifetime consequences all the while still making promises to quit drinking.
I think it important to realise selfishness alone is enough of a "reason to drink" when attempting to make sense of for what reason does a drinker still drink after swearing drinking off.
Funny thing about money/wealth -- wealth can too bring its own set of stresses and distresses. As well, being wealthy implies being happy with such a life, and this is not always so, since money of course does not secure happiness. In fact, unhappiness is often more keenly felt for those with wealth then those without. I speak from personal experience of having been extremely poor and now being wealthy. Whatever health, marriage, or family circumstances also
do not keep a person to be sober or drunk either...
External circumstances can be allowed to affect us to the point of drunkenness or sobriety of course,
but that allowance requires us to first empower it with our agreement to the conditional circumstances. We
choose our personal justifications and they do not cannot exist without our ongoing acquiesce.
When we have all that life has to offer the common man or woman which defines the so-called "good life" and we still seek being drunk at the risk of losing all, we then indeed have a decidedly selfishness wanting which is personal to ourselves which is the greater challenge to meet and remedy then is what is demanded by quitting drinking.
In other words, neither sobriety or abstinence or drunkenness in themselves will ever be a remedy for selfishness. This is why quitting or drinking makes little difference with solving our life-long problems although with quitting we at least have chances, while with drinking, we have zero chances.
Hey Paul, you got it going on. Stay with it!
