To be honest, at the beginning it was negative reinforcement that helped. Playing the tape through to the end and seeing that on Monday morning I will be miserable again. I had reached a point where I hated drinking and the way it made me feel, and the pain it caused me finally tipped the scales and became worse than the pain of not drinking was.
Then I put a plan in place when I had that short grace period of being able to stop the cycle of drinking on willpower alone. I knew it wasn't going to last long so I got into treatment and then into a recovery program (AA for me). It's when you start to feel better that you know you are running out of time to stop the cycle. When I started feeling better my memory of bad stuff started getting fuzzy and then Mr. AV started having his way with me.