Old 04-29-2012, 05:20 PM
  # 213 (permalink)  
Terminally Unique
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Location:   « USA »                       Recovered with AVRT  (Rational Recovery)  ___________
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Originally Posted by kanamit View Post
I still cannot get over how, with hindsight, how obvious the AV is and why I didn't pick up on it earlier.
You have the machinery of AVRT at your disposal, and the view through the lens of AVRT is very different indeed. The addictive voice is a universal phenomenon, and all addicted people have one, but they don't often recognize it as such. What often takes people years or decades to figure out, we can learn in weeks or months, but only because most of the work has already been done for us, and we don't have to waste time reinventing the wheel.

Originally Posted by kanamit View Post
I was talking to an old friend the other day who is abstinent via traditional treatment methods and he was adamant he drank due to childhood “issues”. I know we have touched on the fact issues, unlike problems, do not get solved. How can you convince such a person they drank for pleasure rather than so called issues?
Most people in recovery recognize some forms of the addictive voice, which they usually refer to as 'my disease talking', but AV recognition is not their primary focus. They simply won't achieve the level of refinement that we do with AVRT. How could they? They don't even have a working definition of the AV. Accordingly, they won't usually recognize its more subtle and insidious forms, many of which are taught. To expect your friend to grasp the purposeful reductionism of AVRT might be wishful thinking.
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