Thanks for this.
What do you believe caused your substance abuse behavior?
Don't mean to sound glib, but I'm enjoying the fact that it no longer matters. I thought I had to understand the problem so I could construct a solution. Turns out I just had to start living a solution. As we all know the solutions are relative anyway. Life is too short. I still don't know how I got here - I could construct a belief, or two..
Where do you believe the power comes from to change?
The first imperative came from my own desperation. I believe that dependencies are first and foremost isolating activities. I became encased in my own self-loathing, fear, anger, guilt, shame, secrets. Inside that carapace I drank, fuelling my own isolation. Only when it became unbearable was I forced out. Simultaneously, the example of other people who had suffered as I did but now seemed well became an enticing force. So the "power" to change - it's a deliberately leading question, but hey ho - came as a result of my isolation being shattered. It comes from outside me, and that's all I need to be able to say about it. This part is about rebalancing myself, my malformed ego. I balance it - offset its negative qualities - with something other than me, and now that I do it I'm very glad that desperation forced me to undertake something I wouldn't otherwise have done.
What is the source of motivation to change, what sustains it, and what do you rely on when you have doubts or ambivalence?
The source of motivation? Myself obviously. I either changed or I died. By taking full responsibility for that choice, by making it honestly and genuinely, as opposed to self-pityingly and melodramatically, I was able to commence a process of catharsis - I only know this now, looking back of course. At the time it was too personal to be rational or considered. What sustains it? The company of other people who are undertaking the same process in their own way, using their own vocabularies. What do I rely on when I have doubts? Other people, my new sense of more appropriate self, the practises of tens of thousands of other alcoholics who got sober in AA. A proper scepticism, as opposed to the faux scepticism I used to have - I doubt everything, except whether I am right.