I re-read the first post in the top sticky thread and it's a moving and very human and full description of AVRT and ending addiction for good.
'Saying sober' suggests to me that not-drinking is not my natural state, that my 'real state' is me-as-a-drinker and that it's only by constant vigilance and effort that I'm able to stay in a sober state and that one mistake will send me plummeting back to my real drinking self.
AVRT defines addiction as being in a state of ambivalence about drinking/drugging. You want to quit but you also want to allow yourself the possibility of drinking again if you really want to. When I was in addiction I felt that if I was totally honest the real me was the second one, the one who wanted to keep the option of drinking on the table, and the one who wanted to quit was an insubstantial, aspirational self who existed only as a hoped for possibility.
But this was an arbitrary choice I made. I could just as easily have said that the real me was the non-drinking self and the drinking-me was the inauthentic self. And this is what I feel now after making my Big Plan. I don't drink and I don't even want to drink. My desire to do so is merely the false survival drive that AVRT talks about.