Originally Posted by
jazzfish 
Thanks, and this hits upon a subtlety I have been wondering about. What is the difference between saying the words of The Big Plan while feeling completely convinced you mean them, but it isn't the Big Plan, and saying the words and making the commitment and it really is the Big Plan? Especially know that decisions can always be changed including the part about never changing my mind. How do you tell the difference? Or more importantly, how do you ensure you are doing the real one?
Originally Posted by
fini it's my limited understanding that RR says if you make a BP and drink again, clearly you hadn't really made a real BP.
circular reasoning.
Yes this seems to be a tautology, an example of the "no true Scotsman" logic. It would seem to go like this.
1)Make a big plan to never drink again.
2)If you drink again then you did not in fact 'really' make a big plan (or at least not a proper big plan).
BTW, I have applied this same criticism to my own preferred method of achieving sobriety. It goes like this.
1)Take these specific steps to achieve sobriety
2)If you drink again you did not do the steps (or you did not do them adequately).
In both cases the program or method is always faultless with regard to the outcome.
jazzfish, My advice (regardless of procedure/method/program) would be to identify what went wrong... exactly what went wrong. If you feel that fixing this will produce a good result, then do it. If you cannot identify what went wrong, or if the identification of that problem does not produce ideas of how to move forward with that same procedure/method/program, then move on to another approach.