SoberAtheist

I woudl argue that thereis no one condition called 'alcoholism', with a singular cause and set of symptoms.

It seems that people drink for many different reasons, hence different solutions appear to work for different people.

Whilst some try to define it as a condition or disease in and of itself, I think this is highly unlikely.

I am not aware of any evidence that indicates what it is a condition of (i.e. a disease of the heart, liver, brain), nor a consitent causal factor.

I think if anything, we are talking about an addiction, which is a multi-faceted problem. We don't talk about heroin-ism, cocaine-ism or pokie-ism. We talking about heroin, cocaine or pokie addiction.

I am not aware of any credible, widely accepted evidence, that alcohol addiction is any different to the above. If its not special, why does it need its own special name?

Boleo

I would have agreed with that statement back when I was using psychological tricks & tips to stay sober and the only results were calander days with clean pee.

However, the instant I had a spiritual awakening, that part of me that always wanted to drink was completely removed, root and branch. The results were way bigger than anything I could have imagined or planned for myself.

I have "not even sworn off. Insead the problem has been removed."

Boleo

Duplicate

BackToSquareOne

I think all addictions are an effort to change the way we feel. They all affect the dopamine (reward) centers in the brain so the only difference is the effects on the body. Alcohol has one of the highest mortality rates because it affects every organ in the body.

As far as why alcoholism gets it's own name, I have no idea other than the ism works with it. Cocaineism, heroinism, pokieism, just doesn't seem to sound right.

RobbyRobot

"Tricks n' tips" -- hahaha
Seriously?!

Interesting, Boleo. I know I asked TU to more qualify his earlier statement, and what he came back with works for me with my experience with alcoholism. Your statement is more of what I thought he was gonna say, lol. Amazing.

Boleo, when you state "that part of me that always wanted to drink has been completely removed, root and branch" -- what part of *you* was that?

Of course, I agree with, and have experienced spiritual awakenings too, so can you expand on your statement with more than just saying "spiritual awakening"

Completely removed, eh?

I can agree that the "problem" is removed, but when you start talking about "parts of you", I don't follow...

BackToSquareOne

That's great if you're one of the lucky ones that has a "Spiritual Awakening" but what do you tell someone who does the steps to the best of their ability and nothing happens?

TheOnlyDryPaddy

Only AA's disease concept contextualizes alcoholism as a character defect. (Although it is interesting to note that RR and AVRT characterize the impetus to stay sober as a "moral imperative".)

The medical model of alcoholism is resoundingly silent on the charecterological and moral aspects of alcoholism. Instead, the medical model of alcoholism sees alcoholism as a pathological dysregulation of the consumption of alcohol. Now, the general public may see so-called diseases of lifestyle like alcoholism and obesity as primarily issues of laziness and weak moral fiber (which, I would note, is not helped by the idea, perpetuated by certain recovery programs, that diseases of lifestyle are in fact defects of character or that decision to quit is a "moral imperative"); however such a perception is not so much a result of the medical model as it is a result of the concept that a person's consumption is purely within their conscious control, which is neither fully true nor fully false. Blaming the medical model for predisposing alcoholics in remission to relapse is neither responsible nor true.

RobbyRobot

Anybody who does the Steps to the best of their ability has something happening, that is for sure. Not possible to have nothing going on...

I believe at the end of the day, we each walk our own path. We can walk it by choice, or we can fight it, but walk it, crawl it, trip through it, -- whatever -- we will indeed experience our own path through sobriety.

Spiritualism is such an subjective -- and yet -- objective experience too -- i suppose it matters who is saying whatever about whatever spiritual awakening, you know?

Or not.

TheOnlyDryPaddy

Oh....That was sooooo me!!

I got to Step 8, took a drink, drank for 3.5 month, got fed up with being miserable, set a date to quit, and haven't had a drink in 30 days. I'm still miserable, but I was miserable long before I took my first drink at 16.

Happiness is a f****** b****, but being miserable is better than being miserable and drinking.

BackToSquareOne

Depression alone is hard enough to deal with, depression complicated by alcohol withdrawal is a special kind of miserable. I just couldn't deal with it anymore, one of the main reasons I threw in the towel.

TheOnlyDryPaddy

I lived undiagnosed up until about 9 months ago. I just passed it of as being angsty in my teens (I'll be 30 in August); only, it was the lonely kind of angsty that you never tell anyone about.

Boleo

I spent 2 years trying to quit on my own using tricks & tips, with only 21 days being my best effort. I spent 3 years in meetings using fellowship and slogans, with only 45 days being my best effort. I spent 130 days in rehab with only clean pee being my best effort.

I dreamed every day about the day I would get out so I could drink again. The only thing keeping me sober was the near prison like environment and random drug testing. I was told by many of my fellow rehab friends that that particular rehab was the best of the best free rehabs in the country.

When I finally got out I thought to myself "You have tried every program, read every book and looked under every rock". The best I believed I could do was go back to drinking every day for the rest of my short life and die drunk enough to not fear death.

My spiritual awakening came at a very inconvenient time for me. I had planned on getting drunk. I had saved $8.00 in coins for the day I could get drunk. I had no job or family to interfere with getting drunk. I was determined to never waste another minute trying to "achieve" sobriety. All of my will-power was focused on my plans for getting drunk.

Wouldn't you know it, it was at the very moment I quit fighting the bottle, that the bottle lost it's luster. It was as if I wanted a nice cool glass of milk only to find all the milk in the world had turned sour.

I hoped and prayed that it was just a pink cloud experience and would fade away in time. I even hung out with homeless wino's and and hoped one of them would find a way to talk me into having a drink with them.

The attraction to liquor never did return. To this day I see a skull & cross-bones on every bottle the instant I lay eyes on it. Booze has no more attraction to me now than the toys I had as a 5 year-old.

I now realize that it was the surrender of the idea that I could somehow "achieve" sobriety that triggered the awakening. Even though I had been trying to use God to get sober, I was trying to manipulate God. For a tenacious brain-stormer like me, surrender is the final piece to the puzzle. I had to detach from the outcome.

TheOnlyDryPaddy

There's something about your posts that seems to me to be a bit snarky. Are you offering advice from the AA playbook? Or are making a subtle jab at AA for an apparently one-size-fits all approach to answering the questions of people who are not experiencing the Promises?

RobbyRobot

Thanks, Boleo. Your experience makes good sense to me explained out like you have. I understand first hand surrender, and then being detached from the "alcohol problem". Its a great way to live the sober life! Salut!

RobbyRobot

Sorry you have that take on me, Paddy. Being snarky (like being rude, sarcastic, etc) is not what I'm feeling in my posts, okay, but I'm willing to hear you out, no problem.

I'm not a poster child for AA, thats for sure. In the last decade, I've only been to a handful of meetings. I haven't read the Big Book from cover to cover for like twenty years or something now I suppose. I've been sober since 1981, so like 30 years now. AA was a big part of my life for the first ten years, and then not so much. I still live the program, I'm just not all that into meetings anymore is all. As for the Big Book, well, its unchanged from when I first stopped getting drunk, and I understand what is what for me within the book, so I don't need to read it just for the sake of reading it...

So based on that, I'm not one to offer whatever advice from the "playbook" --- I'm not a thumper.

As for taking a jab at AA, well, I'm certainly not one who agrees that one size fits all, and members telling members that if they dont get results, then it means they are not doing the program correctly, well, I dont talk that way.

For me, I think it is impossible to stop drinking and not have some kind of results. Things happen when we stop drinking, and thats just the facts, for any of us. What that something is exactly, is a personal matter for each of us to appreciate however we can or do. The more the appreciation of the differences between drinking and not drinking, the more sobriety becomes a way of living. Lacking appreciation always lead me back to drinking,no matter what my efforts were otherwise...

To claim that "nothing happens" is a bit disingenuous, and that is what I was saying to BTSO. I'm not saying AA worked out for him, and I'm not saying AA failed him. I'm saying "something" happened while he quit drinking and was doing/did the AA program to the best of his ability. And so why not share that "something" instead of just saying nothing happened? I mean, c'mon... something was going on while those steps were being done to the best of his ability, yes?

I tried quitting for six years before I started with AA, and my stopping drinking, just stopping without doing any kind of a program or whatever, just stopping had really strange results for me that I could not understand or appreciate, and so back to drinking I went. I understood being drunk way more than I understood being sober.

What AA did for me was give me an appreciation for the differences between my drunks and my efforts at staying sober. As I continued with the program, I gained an understanding of sobriety, and eventually, I came to live a spiritual sober life.

So I hope that offers some explaination of where I'm coming from in my posts in this thread. Yeah, AA works. Yeah, not for everybody, and no one, or AA is to blame for that either. Yeah, when alcoholics stop drinking, things happen... and those ongoing results lead to more eventual drinking or otherwise to continued sobriety, program or no program.

I'm sorry if things have been understood otherwise.

TheOnlyDryPaddy

RobbyRobot-

Thank you for clarifying. I just couldn't get an accurate understanding of your posts. There were at least conflicting readings, and I thought you had some informative and insightful things to say, but I also picked up an tension in what you saying that I misread as snark.

I apologize if I have offended you.

RobbyRobot

Paddy,

Not at all. You know, its a pleasure to have someone make a comment on what I'm posting, and I enjoy a good back and forth when all parties are interested in being mutually supportive. I'm glad things became clearer as we came to a better understanding of each other. Thanks for that.

Congrats on your 30+ days of sobriety. I'm hopeful that it just keeps on getting better for you. I know for myself backwhen I started, sobriety was just such an impossible thing for me, and so I put most of my early efforts into not getting drunk anymore rather than in trying to stay sober. I just couldn't wait for my understanding of what sobriety was for me to kick in... i just needed more than was readily available to me... so for me, working on not getting another drunk going was work I understood well enough, and it kept me busy while I chewed on what the hell was this thing they called sobriety. I really was just so clueless.

I hope for all that is good and well for you, Paddy.

Terminally Unique

AA's model contextualizes alcoholism as a spiritual deficiency which is fueled by character defects. The text is fairly clear in stating that "liquor was but a symptom," and accordingly, you will never see "drinking" on a 4th Step fearless moral inventory.

AVRT actually goes further than that. Since the Addictive Voice will invariably try to excuse drinking from moral judgement, claiming that "it is not a moral issue, and there is nothing wrong with getting drunk," AVRT identifies this phenomenon as a key problem. It even has a name for the denial of the moral dimension of addiction: original denial.

We now have three distinct disease models, all of which deny the moral dimension of addiction, considering it a symptom of something else. There is the spiritual disease model of Bill Wilson, the medical disease model of Benjamin Rush, Jellenik, AA/NCADD and AMA, and the psychological disease model of Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, et al.

Terminally Unique

This might be a good place to post this article, which TheJungianThing has previously posted on the 12-Step alcoholism forum. One of the better comparisons I have read on the subject, although AVRT doesn't quite fit into any of the three views.

Three Views of Recovery

Terminally Unique

If this were truly the case, Boleo, you would have more than just a daily reprieve. You would have a lifetime reprieve instead, and it wouldn't be contingent on anything.