JeffreyAK

These are your words, not mine. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a "disease theorist", and I'm certainly not.

Here's the core, I think. I assert, without proof except from countless other examples and not a single counter-example that I've ever met (not to mention the mutual agreement of every single addiction recovery approach I can think of, including RR, that all focus on abstinence), that you cannot do that, if you were an addict. Perhaps you can, but you'd be a rare exception.

It's not about happiness or unhappiness. I'm very happy being a non-drinker, and I haven't the slightest interest anymore in drinking alcohol again. But I also know what would happen if I did drink - I'd be able to drink moderately for a little while, but gradually I'd slide back down the hole. That doesn't make me feel inadequate or disabled or diseased, it just is what it is. And it's irrelevant, because I have no desire to go there.

Being happy, and knowing there is something you cannot do, are not incompatible. And by not continuing to try to do the thing you cannot do, often you find happiness you didn't know was there. I know the first step for me was not to change my outlook or think any more than I already had, it was to stop drinking and stay stopped at highest priority. Then, I was able to think straight enough to evaluate reality as it was, not as I had seen it through an alcohol haze. Happiness came later, but it came.

It sounds like you are telling people, they can go back if they stop thinking of themselves in some particular way. Well, I've never seen it work for a former addict, but lots of people die trying, including some I've known, so in that sense I think it's a dangerous message. I don't have any desire to argue the point with you, only to leave a counterpoint for someone else down the road in a month or a year who reads this thread.