EndGameNYC

And again:

Reminds me of Brooks, the librarian, in The Shawshank Redemption. We often don't realize we're imprisoned unless and until something changes dramatically, and we tend to grab what's on the top of the pile when we're afraid which, for most of us, is living an extremely narrow life within the confines that we allow alcohol to set for us. When we do realize where we are, we convince ourselves that the relative "safety" of our self-constructed walls afford us much more safety than stepping into what is possible for us in our lives would provide. So we live and die in captivity.

Not only do caged animals choose to remain in their cages when they have the option to roam freely, it's extremely difficult to coax them to come out, even with the lure of extra food or companionship.

There was a growing moral conundrum that continued through the 1980s, at least, that arose from the growing success of medications that helped people with schizophrenia (Sz) and other psychotic disorders. The dilemma was as follows: What if, after living their lives in a very frightening alternate reality, completely cut off from the real world as we know it, people with Sz were to become asymptomatic, and then came to learn that their thinking and behaviors were quite literally insane for their entire lives? How would someone in their thirties, forties, fifties and beyond cope with this disturbing awareness? Do we have the right to resolve their symptoms, knowing and believing what would happen with this newly gained and potentially terrifying insight?

The result of all this, fortunately, was a focus on what came to be known as "community reentry" for those who suffered Sz, and experienced symptom relief. Psychiatric rehab trumped keeping these people in the dark around what is considered to be the most serious and most terrifying among all psychiatric conditions. Many patients, perhaps most, balked at this opportunity, choosing instead to remain in the "safety" of the world they had not only come to know, but which they had also learned to prefer, given their largely incidental and often terrifying experiences with what we refer to as "reality." They generally were noncompliant with medications that resolved their symptoms and with treatment programs that prepared them to begin a very new life.

We see it here all the time on SR. Personally, I simply did not want to return to what had become for me a harsh reality when I was in the throes of my relapse. The motivation to get sober is not a simple or unitary phenomenon. It demands a level of courage and a way of thinking that is alien to many of us. People who don't have problems with alcohol rarely ask of themselves the kinds of things that someone who struggles with alcohol do in order to achieve sobriety. The process of moving from a drunken life to a life of sobriety is a dramatic departure from everything we know and everything we only seem to love. Many of us seemed to know everything while we were drinking, only to find that we know nothing when we first get sober. We've all but burned through the hope of a better life, and we seek certainty that things will improve after we put down the drink, rather than embrace an uneasy and untested faith that there is a better way for us. We put down the drink and make few if any other meaningful changes in our lives, and then complain that sobriety sucks.

In the end, and as Dee any many others here have rightly claimed, if getting sober and living a sober life were only to produce additional, though somewhat different states of misery, then none of us would be here.