There's a lot of stuff to respond to here, but I just want to say that I think we agree more than we appear to.
TFM is saying that "addicts and alcoholics" are in full control of themselves, acting by their own judgment. Since we control our own minds, we can choose to judge our options differently, and thus make different choices than we have in the past. To make a different choice, you have to see a different option as better - but we use the word happier in TFM, and that's where a lot of the disagreement seems to be coming from on this thread.
Aleric just did a good job of explaining that we're talking about movement towards happiness - in a better/happier direction - so I won't run that point into the ground. I'll just note, we're not saying that quitting or moderating will make you immediately blissful, or that you have to be 100% sure it will make you happier. We are just saying that for you to commit to a change, their has to be sufficient belief in the possibility that the change can be really worth it to you - that it can be more rewarding than your current problematic level of use. And accordingly, that the problematic use pattern will probably result in less happiness than a change would. The more convinced you become, the quicker and easier your change can be. The more convinced you become that anything is better than the old pattern of use, the more you take it off the table as a potential option to return to. But, it can still take a leap of faith to get started, as one commenter said.
I understand the pitfalls of the terms happiness and happier. They've been demonstrated in this thread. Luckily though, the people I meet who've read the book get it, because we deal with all the nuances of it in the book. But in brief presentations it's hard to get those nuances across, and this gave me pause about using these terms, but my co-author pushed to keep the happiness terminology. He'd been using it for almost 30 years at our retreats, he has important reasons for that, and he's right. And to boot, it had worked in my own case to see it this way when I finally quit in 2002.
We use the term happier to keep the focus on the emotional element of human motivation and subsequent behavior.
The term "better" is not technically incorrect, and in fact we use it often in TFM, but it doesn't have the same connotation as happier. It doesn't tie you to the emotional reality of how we're motivated and behave. It connotes cold rationality. Allen Carr wrote magnificently on how we all know that it would be better and logical to quit cigarettes in the long run, and yet we still light up a cigarette in the moment because we think we'll be miserable without it today. We may live 20 years longer if we quit smoking today, but we think they'd be 20 years of misery and thus worth sacrificing. We know we'd save $100,000 eventually if we quit today. There's a lot we know about how it doesn't make any rational sense to keep on smoking, yet we continue to do it as long as we think cigarettes provide the comfort we need and that living without them is going to be hell. In short, we know it would be "better" in a coldly rational sense to quit, but we think that to be anything near happy now and in the near future, we need to keep smoking.
It is for these same reasons that Mark Scheeren has always used the word happiness in what was called The Saint Jude Program, and has now become The Freedom Model - to aim directly at the emotions of the individual that are keeping him continuing at a destructive level of substance use, and awaken him to something that he hasn't considered: that quitting doesn't have to be hell. It can be wonderful. It can be happier and more personally rewarding. It isn't something that you just "have to" do because you "should" according to societal standards or cold rationality (you can keep doing it to your death - nobody "has to" quit). It is something you can be excited to do. You can really want to do it. You can look forward to it. You can be happy you did it. You can enjoy your life more instead of feeling deprived if you let go of a destructive pattern of substance use.
To choose is to look at more than one option, judge them, and pick the one that looks best from your point of view. Being human, emotion will always be involved in this calculus. We pursue happiness in everything we do. So we use the terms happiness, and happier options, to encourage the open consideration of the emotional value of our various options. The most confused, most stuck, most lost people with substance use problems try for years or even decades to motivate themselves with fear, and with focus on the negative consequences of their habits, while looking only at the heavy usage itself. They try to resist what they want to do. They try to suppress their desires. They focus on stopping one option, while never developing a positive perspective of their other options (moderation or abstinence). As a result, moderation and abstinence just hang there as lesser options where you don't get what you think you need to be happy. They then have no motivation to follow through on those options. They then fail to follow through over and over again, returning to (or sticking with) the only option they're looking at. By definition, you can never make a different choice if you don't look at more than one option. Choices are made among two or more options.
TFM is not a model based on resistance of desire/craving/wants, nor is it a model that includes strength or weakness as issues. Heavy substance users are very strong in their pursuit of heavy substance use - they show no signs of weakness in getting what they know they want. Resistance against yourself is an impossibility. When you want heavy substance use, you want it - it is what you freely will for yourself by your judgment. It isn't an amorphous "addiction" that wants it - it is you, it is your judgment of your options (of which you may think you have only one). You can't split yourself in two and fight yourself. [I understand some of these last few points may be at odds with those who subscribe to RR and its concept of the beast if I understand it correctly. We'll have to agree to disagree, even though I think there are many other significant points of agreement between these two models.]
Most models of addiction/recovery focus on deterring substance use. They teach how to deter yourself by focusing on all the downsides of substance use. TFM focuses on motivation - motivating yourself to make new choices. It is a theory of motivation applied to the problems of substance use. It shows that you can decrease motivation to use substances problematically, and increase motivation to make a change to moderation or abstinence on the grounds that those options can be seen as genuinely happier, more rewarding options. It shows that you don't have to try to resist doing what you want to do, but that you can stop wanting it, and start wanting the rewards of moderation or abstinence more. It is based in the reality that we are not coldly rational robots, but emotionally driven humans with the power to reason and find more rewarding choices to make throughout our lives.