Originally Posted by StevenSlate
TFM fits with your plan to not drink. It's saying that you desire abstinence more than you desire drinking - or that you want abstinence more, or that abstinence is your happier option - even if you use none of those words to describe it. It's saying your perspective now is that abstinence is better. If you didn't see it this way, you'd keep drinking.
I could easily see that a part of me wanted abstinence and a part of me wanted to drink. That is common among the addicted as you will hear ppl say "Why do I keep doing this to myself?" Why was it that when I was adamant at 8am that I was going to abstain because that would make me happier, by noon I decided in fact a drink or two would make me happier? How can *I* truly want two completely opposite things? I realized that I absolutely can want two opposing things with the same amount of desire. I feel like this kind of "being of two minds" about lots of things in life has been a part of the human condition since the beginning of time. So it's not really about weighing my desire, so much as it is about accepting that I can have a desire that is not in my best interest and I can learn to separate from that desire and not act on it.
I can't rely on the idea that I can decide that "abstinence is my happier option", because there is another part of me that calls bowlshit on that, rather persistently and adeptly, and there I am again wondering wtf and why I do this to myself. Instead of waffling with this I decided to accept that I have these "two minds" about it and I acknowledged that part of me thinks drinking is super and part of me def does not. It's kind of like the tale of the two wolves (you know, the one about which one will win? the one you feed). I don't have to decide my happier option, since that can change with the damned wind blowing. I just have to recognize and dismiss the part of me that loves drinking, which is pretty easy to spot since it suggests drinking. And no amount of "reasoning" is ever going to "fix" that part. That's cool, it doesn't need to be fixed, it just needs to be ignored.
If it sounds like the above is AVRTish, that is not my intention. If you've been here since 2011 and have read my earlier posts, I did not even know AVRT was a thing when I quit in 2007. I came upon lots of these ideas in Buddhists teachings, where I came to realize just how complex the human mind is.