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Old 10-19-2016, 11:44 PM
  # 39 (permalink)  
GerandTwine
Not The Way way, Just the way
 
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: US
Posts: 1,413
After many years of “never drinking” taking up zero minutes in my life, I joined SR in 2012 to engage in AVRT discussions in SC. This is one of those good threads in Secular Recovery that will serve people well over time, and I believe will become part of the multifarious history of addiction recovery itself.

Regarding chemical dependency upon alcohol and drugs, a phenomenal paradigm shift occurred in Western thought in 1840-1843, when it became common knowledge that drunkards could quit for good upon making a pledge of total abstinence, because many tens of thousands did just that. It was the original Washingtonian Movement. It took only three years for social forces to attack, devour, digest, and destroy that movement which was based on the pristine pledge of total abstinence. Even the history of the original Washingtonians has been skewed to give it some semblance to AA. In essence, they were polar opposites.

Rational Recovery re-introduced that pledge in the Big Plan several decades ago. The pledge mode of quitting has never gone away and can never be eliminated, because it is so individually empowered and it makes such good sense for so many reasons. But that didn’t keep predators away, or many drunkards from lying about making the pledge.

Over the last 175 years, the history of the Recovery Group Movement and the Addiction Treatment Industry is an amazingly convoluted one of opportunism practiced by people from all walks of life: in churches, in governments, doctors, lawyers, non-profits, to name a few. A prime directive of these parties involvement in recovery was and still is (except for RR) to bastardize the pristine pledge by adding special interest clauses, or to declare the pledge as bad or impossible to begin with. There are simply not a lot of services to be provided when the unconditional pledge of permanent abstinence is taken. And then, of course, those newly abstinent people need to be shown the correct way of living and believing! So pledging required Way of Life codicils rendering them ineffective against the AV, there was always a way out - to drink again. "Oh, doggonnit, God isn't helping me, ... so I might as well have a drink."

Addiction scientists use the plasticity of the brain to create a questionable construct of physical areas of disease or behavioral phases of disease that can be changed over time. Every time I have brought up the effect of The Big Plan upon the plasticity of the brain with addiction scientists, they all immediately associate it to someone going through a huge religious re-birth, or “I found Jesus” type of experience. Not so at all.

There is every likelihood the Big Plan DOES exert the greatest possible mind-driven influence upon the plasticity of the brain when it is made. But it is a very specific change. I believe that happened to me and it had nothing to do with being reborn. It was like learning whether or not to touch the glowing orange circle on the glass stovetop. The Big Plan, the Washingtonian Pledge of 1840, created a very real and major short circuit to every option leading to drinking again.

And because of that plan, “I cannot drink anymore.” Hah, yes, that sentence does make sense to me here way, way, on the other side of addiction. It doesn’t even matter why I quit. I just know I did.
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