Brian316

Something else I've been thinking about tonight I wanted to get the group's input on. In AA I have been told we drink mainly because we are selfish, self-willed and fearful. Now I am NOT doubting that I am those things. But, I was told by a counseler this evening, that we become alcoholics and addicts because we seek love and acceptance. That really hit home with me. Like we do not feel like we are accepted and/or loved or love others and the chemicals (in early use) falsely give us those things. Thoughts?

sugarbear1

nature vs nurture.....

for me, it was several factors playing at once since as long as I could remember......

maybe I'm just built to be alcoholic....started with a love of sugar, plain ol' sugar....so metabolism disorder?? who knows.....lack of love and acceptance, there is that, too.

does it matter? to me it matters what I am doing today....action....acceptance....

BarrelRoll

I've always been self-willed, but I didn't become selfish or fearful until drinking entered the picture.

I hesitate to call myself an alcoholic, I prefer to think of myself an immature and dependant problem drinker. But that's really just a matter of label. When one drinks, it's all the same: a problem.

In college, I felt that alcohol gave me something. I was always studious and uptight but when drinking, I'd loosen up, be social, and get laid. Things I couldn't normally do because I couldn't break out of my shell. That made me see drinking in a false light. If it wasn't affecting my school or later my job and I could afford it, so what? Kind of tuning out the negatives while continually over-hyping the positives until several years had gone by. I was drinking alone and way too often because life stressed me out and everything and everyone was a bother.

So in short, alcohol added (or at least greatly fueled) 2 of the 3 things you're suggesting.

Johno1967

I started and continued drinking to feel accepted and loved. I only ever got the illusion of both
As an alcoholic my drinking became fear based or me exercising obstinacy and reckless self will.
Both AA and your therapist are right.
I never seen a hopeless alcoholic drink because he wanted to be loved and accepted though.

Johno1967

Barrelroll,
You could have copied that from my life story except for one point. I never had a "drinking problem". I could drink just fine. Rather I had a motivation, stopping and timing problem. A great propensity for getting drunk at just the wrong moment for reasons that now seem insane.

JustODAAT

I believe I have a strong genetic predisposition to alcoholism (I can trace it back several generations). I also "learned" by example to numb myself to uncomfortable situations and painful feelings through alcohol. Nature or nurture...I don't think I'll ever have a definitive answer to that.

It never helped me much to spend a lot of time figuring out the "why." It seems once a month on this forum someone starts a thread that starts a debate about the "true" nature of alcoholism.

At this point, I only care about what's true for me in sobriety.

instant

The stuff is addicted for those with a biological predisposition. I think lab rats can get addicted and I am not sure if they have deep dark mysterious psychological problems.

I was a normal pathetic human before I got addicted. I drank and never grew up- and revelled in the fact. Getting sober I have a lot of catching up to do

Ghostlight1

I was a drunk. That's my reason. I had a lot of fun drinking in my 20's. Later, it became a crutch as a social lubricant and a cure for anxiety.
Somewhere I crossed a line into being an alcoholic. Soon, I was addicted and had to drink, and believe me, it was no longer fun. It was a nightmare.

My reason? I don't know. I come from a long line of drunks. I was never abused, grew up fine and later had a great job. I do tend to believe it's hereditary.
Add to that equation the plain ole fact that I just liked to drink, and you've got a combustable mess that my life turned into.

wheresthefun

RobbyRobot

Being selfish, self-willed and fearful are human traits in themselves. My drinking made them worse, didn't create them. So as an alcoholic while I drank those traits helped put my life in the toilet.

Quitting drinking, I still had those traits, still had to work them out of my life, still had to be responsible for being human.

I also don't think I became an alcoholic because I was looking for love. Again this is a human trait to seek love. Being drunk, I looked in all the wrong places, but looking is as normal as one can be with love. Nothing wrong in looking or in finding. What can be problematic is HOW we do so and WHAT we find that isn't love but in desperation we CALL it love...

As a drunk, I called a lot of things love that when sober no way would I call the same things love.

Many healthy people seek love everyday. They don't become alcoholics.

deeker

This is an interesting link for you Brian316.

The Missing Piece: The Spiritual Malady - Big Book Sponsorship

Linked with permission of AA World Services, inc

Joe Nerv

Like RR said, those are human traits that we all share. And alcohol kicked them into high gear with me. I wouldn't say they were the cause of my drinking, but I think being aware of them and having them healed through the steps is an important part of my staying sober. Happily sober, anyway.

I never got too deeply into figuring out the reasons I drank. It was pretty clear to me that I felt very uncomfortable with myself and the world, and alcohol took that feeling away. My job after putting the drink down was to figure out how to feel comfortable without it. For some people getting to the root of what caused those initial feelings of uncomfortablity are very helpful. For me, learning how to feel comfortable regardless of what caused it was more important. I think it's an individual thing.

Music

Two things. First, don't compare what a counselor says with what AA says. Apples and oranges in some cases. Second, I became an alcoholic because I have what's sometimes referred to as an allergic reaction to alcohol. When I drink one, I don't stop. When I took my first drink, it felt like the answer to my problems but at age 18, it could be said that I didn't have a clue what my problems were, nor what problems would be created by continuing to drink. Put simply, I'm an alcoholic because I drank alcohol. I (personally) believe alcoholics physically process alcohol differently than other people. It can be genetic, or a learned behavior, neither of which applies to me but nevertheless, the truth is, alcohol caused me to act, talk, think and reason differently from other people.

Now here's the kicker. When I asked my very first sponsor, years ago, why I was alcoholic, his short answer was, "why not?" His longer answer was "if alcohol causes you problems, alcohol is a problem, and if you can't stop on your own, you need help." He went further. "It's not my job to tell you whether or not you're an alcoholic. Only you can make that judgment based on your past experiences with alcohol. If when you drink, drinking causes problems and you can't quit on your own, maybe you should think about going to AA meetings." He said, "analyzing paralyses so keep things simple. Do you want to stop drinking or not?" My answer was "yes" I want to stop drinking and I've been sober since.

EndGameNYC

Yes, they can. And they have. Also cocaine. And heroin. The rats just don't know that they're addicted, and they don't have the capacity or need to rationalize their drinking. But they can be taught to moderate their drinking under certain conditions. Consciousness gives us a way out, but it can also make things much worse.

digderidoo

Who cares? All I know is that I have alcoholism

wheresthefun

Yeah, see, who's the dirty rat that told ya that, see, yeah? Probably the dirty rat, who killed my brother, yeah, see.

(Sorry, just couldn't help myself. )

jdooner

I would love it if instead of simple opinion you could provide some evidence. I will provide the following from In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts to counter in favor of the environmental argument. Personally I believe there is a combination but to throw out environmental seems naive at best. Sort of like saying if you have two seeds and one gets water and sun and the other does not that they will both turn out the same, huh?

Dr. Alexander has conducted elegant experiments to show that even lab rats, given reasonably normal living situations, will resist the addictive appeal of drugs:

My colleagues and I built the most natural environment for rats that we could contrive in the laboratory. “Rat Park,” as it came to be called, was airy, spacious, with about 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. It was also scenic (with a peaceful British Columbia forest painted on the plywood walls), comfortable (with empty tins, wood scraps, and other desiderata strewn about on the floor), and sociable (with 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence at once). We built a short tunnel opening into Rat Park that was just large enough to accommodate one rat at a time. At the far end of the tunnel, the rats could release a fluid from either of two drop dispensers. One dispenser contained a morphine solution and the other an inert solution.

It turned out that for the Rat Park animals, morphine held little attraction, even when it was dissolved in a sickeningly sweet liquid usually irresistible to rodents and even after these rats were forced to consume morphine for weeks, to the point that they would develop distressing physical withdrawal symptoms if they didn’t use it. In other words, in this “natural” environment a rat will stay away from the drug if given a choice in the matter—even if it’s already physically dependent on the narcotic. “Nothing that we tried,” reported Bruce Alexander, “instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.” By contrast, caged rats consumed up to twenty times more morphine than their relatively free living relatives. Dr. Alexander first published these findings in 1981. In 1980 it had already been reported that social isolation increased animals’ intake of morphine. Other scientists have since confirmed that some environmental conditions are likely to induce animals to use drugs; given different conditions, even captive creatures can resist the lure of addiction. The Vietnam veterans study pointed to a similar conclusion: under certain conditions of stress many people can be made susceptible to addiction, but if circumstances change for the better, the addictive drive will abate. About half of all the American soldiers in Vietnam who began to use heroin developed addiction to the drug. Once the stress of military service in a brutal and dangerous war ended, so, in the vast majority of cases, did the addiction. The ones who persisted in heroin addiction back home were, for the most part, those with histories of unstable childhoods and previous drug use problems.14 In earlier military conflicts relatively few U.S. military personnel succumbed to addiction. What distinguished the Vietnam experience from these wars? The ready availability of pure heroin and of other drugs is only part of the answer. This war, unlike previous ones, quickly lost meaning for those ordered to fight and die in the faraway jungles and fields of Southeast Asia. There was too wide a gap between what they’d been told and the reality they witnessed and experienced.
Lack of meaning, not simply the dangers and privations of war, was the major source of the stress that triggered their flight to oblivion.

Mate Md, Gabor (2011-06-28). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (p. 146). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

Many rat and primate experiments are tested for detachment from mother issues and addiction rates are much higher suggesting and concluding in some cases that trauma plays a major role. Again, if you have any evidence to support the simple view that genetics are the sole reason behind addiction, would love to hear that perspective.

Whereisthefun...I am sorry for your loss but I really don't get your humor or the point of this post. Are these song lyrics or a quote from something?

jaynie04

Maybe I'll be a rat in my next life….is that where the notion of wine and cheese comes from?

silentrun

That selfishness and fearfulness thing came after I started abusing. Once I acquired the ability to drink to excess I just did it because it was fun. At the end it wasn't any fun at all but I still drank because I thought I had to.

Tetra

^^True.

I drank because I thought I needed to cover up my shyness (and to deal with my mom).

Turns out I am fine (better in fact) without and just being me.