Originally Posted by JeffreyAK

I think this is a good takeaway. Drinking enough, often enough, to experience significant withdrawals (major shakes and sweats, can't sleep, balance is off, feel sick, etc.) indicates a problem, one that you now have an opportunity to do something about before it gets worse and you start racking up significant negative consequences.

Whether or not this means you're an "alcoholic" depends how you define the word, but one way might be, if you now realize you have a problem, and you choose to do nothing about it and rationalize it away as "not a big deal after all", and it continues and gets worse, welcome to our world. So you might make a sticky note to look back at this thread in a few months, and see where you are then compared to now.