Thanks
MesaMan that's a great post!
What an accurate analogy!
ZeldaFan yes I would highly recommend giving it a read
For me there was a big change in my thinking when I began to think of my addiction as my responsibility, it sounds so obvious now but for many years I was under the impression I had some kind of mysterious 'disease', I saw myself as an Edgar Allen Poe-esque figure troubled and tortured and destined to die by the bottle.
What a load of nonsense, obviously the AV
LOVED this image and kept it nice and strong in my mind, in reality, I drank too much all the time. Now I see that really, it was incredibly selfish behaviour and I'm glad that it's over.
And yes, it IS over AV, you're finished.
It was uncomfortable at first giving up the 'disease' concept, the issue with the disease concept is that suddenly you feel like you're not responsible for all the terrible things you've done, and so many people latch onto this concept because it frees them from personal responsibility. So it was uncomfortable having to go through a lot of old memories and realising that really, the bottom line is that I screwed up pretty badly. The plus side to this though, is that by making a choice to abstain forever, it won't happen again.
Human's make mistakes, sometimes those mistakes are huge, but humans also learn, turn things around and never make those mistakes again.
Loving sober life today.
Peace and strength all