Boleo

Is alcohol a choice for everyone?

People here speck of of the affliction on alcoholism as if it were an exact science, which it is far from being. Modern medicine is still decades away from solving this mystery, if not centuries. There are as many fallacies and misconceptions about the subject as there are treatment centers and rehab facilities taking shots in the dark at trying to treat it.

Even within this forum there are different schools of thought attempting to describe the differences when the truth is they are really just talking about "shadows on the wall". Alcoholism is an experience - pure and simple. For those who do have experience with it, there is little documentation that can be used for a frame of reference. Thus,the language needed to articulate on the subject is so esoteric that it makes rocket science seem elementary in comparison. For those who do not have the obsession which takes away the choice factor, there is a plethora of misleading documentation to support their arguments.

Another adjunct issue is the problem is that society has mostly misconceptions to go on when even recognizing it in the first place. Judges frequently force people into recovery who have only early symptoms of the illness - Not that this is always a bad thing, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The real problem arises when those who have only alcohol-issues attempt to give advice to those who have alcohol-ISM. The advice that they give is based on speculation and conjecture, rather than on first hand experience.

The simple answer to the OP would be "NO - Alcoholism is an EXPERIENCE!!!"

Oldselfagain

Boleo interesting post. I must admit I had to read it a few times to try to understand your point. Correct me if I'm wrong but are you trying to say there is a lot of misinformation on alcoholism, and that people with "alcohol issues" don't really understand what alcoholism is? If so, that would lead me to the conclusion that you believe that someone with alcohol issues is not an alcoholic? If so, what would be the difference? And are you saying sobriety is "not" a choice for the alcoholic?

Again, I'm not sure I understood your post so looking for clarity.

Thanks!

jsprplc2006

Totally agree - alcohol dependence (the correct term for what pop-culture refers to as "alcoholism") is a choice. Every single drink I take is a choice - it just happens to be the wrong one.

"Alcoholism" is no different than any other addiction. I'm not addicted to heroin because I choose never to do heroin. I'm not addicted to crack because although I've had the opportunity, I chose not to try it.

Most people drink because the effect that alcohol has on the brain is intensely PLEASURABLE. Alcohol becomes an easy way to feel pleasure, and people get hooked. It's not complicated. I don't understand why AA supporters are so unwilling to accept this. Why would you admit to having no control over your drinking when the whole point is to regain control so you can stop?

Dee74

Let all remember that we're on the same side here guys.
A little mutual respect goes a long way.

any more jabs or insults and I will shut this down.

D

freshstart57

Can we imagine a situation, purely hypothetical, where you are sitting in front of a bottle of your poison? You reach for it and take a pull, and a gun which is pointed at your head and rigged to fire when you touch the bottle, goes off. You aren't hurt because it was loaded with blanks. Next, you watch the chamber and magazine being emptied and the gun being loaded with live rounds. It will go off the instant you touch that bottle again and when it does, you will instantly have your brains splattered over the wall. Was there a time in your addiction when you would have taken that next pull? Would you have been able to say, 'I don't know how it happened, I just started drinking again'? You would have been wholly present in that situation and entirely aware of the impact of taking one more drink. You would have chosen not to drink, even while going into withdrawal and having that bottle just within your reach.

So, this is a crazy imagined situation that isn't real and obviously could never happen. However, it does show that we would exercise the choice to live for another moment. The power to choose not to drink cannot be completely lost.

The real life situation that we have experienced ourselves is different of course, but only to a matter of degree of immediacy. The experience of Alcohol-ISM, whatever that means, doesn't change any material aspect of what I described. We wouldn't die immediately of course on taking that next drink, but any number of very bad things were happening as a direct result of taking that next drink. The progression of these consequences to unacceptable outcomes is inevitable.

If we can see our drinking as that situation I imagined, we can assert that power of choice, and quit. A failure to quit drinking, for us with alcohol addiction, is a failure to accept our present reality, not an inability to choose.

Boleo

If you fly a plane to a point where you still have 50% of your fuel left you can return. If you fly any further than that, you have passed the "point of no-return". If an alcoholic travels 50% of the way, they can still return to choosing Not-drinking. One iota further than that and you have a completely different ball-game. Where that 50% line is crossed is still a mystery to modern science.

I have studied many difficult subjects in my lifetime, but none more esoteric than alcohol-ISM. Even Zen-Buddhism and existentialism are easier for the mind to grasp than the ISM part of alcohol-ISM. It brinks on the outside envelope of Epistolmolog itself. Anybody who thinks alcoho-issues are in the same league as alcohol-ISM, is speaking of what Plato called "Shadows on the wall".

jdooner

For some you are correct. But again generalizing for everyone is dangerous. Addiction, which I include alcoholism as a subset has many variable - genetic, environmental then there is progression of the illness/disease. So there are some that have yet to cross certain thresholds. To them removing alcohol is as simple as not drinking. To some they are physically dependent and must have it to survive daily.

So I humbly disagree that it is simple - it is actually quite complicated. If it were not success rates would be much higher and rehabs would not be able to change $50 or 100K a month.

It might be helpful to have some tolerance to what works for some. You might not be abel to understand what people in AA accept or don't but how much time and effort have you invested? If I am a Buddhist I might disagree someone who is Catholic but I refrain from disparaging Jesus.

jdooner

Yes there was a time and yes I was very willing to have my brains splattered. I was fortunate enough to have a moment of clarity so I could regain choice. I am not sure how or why I was able to gain this clarity when I did though.

freshstart57

Willing to have your brains splattered? For what? In my scenario, you still don't get a drink out of the deal and this is part of your understanding as you sit there contemplating that bottle. The act of deciding to drink, not even consuming, will result in your immediate death. And you would have decided to make that choice? Can you help me understand this?

jdooner

In my example FS it was not over a drink actually but cocaine. I was unable to stop, completely. I was so utterly powerless over the drug. I tried hiring someone I paid $80K a year as a personal assistant whose job was to keep me away form the drug. It did not work. I was fine until I would have a few martinis and I would be spending money I did not have to achieve I high I could never replicate. I wanted to die but was unwilling to pull the trigger myself. In that time I did not care if I was killed and in fact put myself in situations knowingly to try and die.

If in your example, I was drunk and had some lines of coke and the gun pointed at me there was a time I would have chose the coke knowing the outcome. I am far from that time and that mindset but I can honesty say that it is not so hypothetical to me at least.

I get what you are saying regarding choice though FS and I don't disagree. There was something, I believe my son's spirit that provided me a moment of clarity to make the choice to of a different path. How and why this happened when it did, I have no idea.

jsprplc2006

If AA has worked (past tense) for someone, I can respect that. However, I've spent little time trying up understand its philosophy because you don't have to read many scholarly journal articles to discover that AA's effectiveness at the one-year mark is roughly equal to that of no treatment at all. Because of that, recommending it as a first-line treatment can be dangerous.

It's not my intent to flame anyone, you just can't really disagree with data, although many have tried.

Boleo

I was at a place where thoughts of drinking haunted me 24x7. Even after 5 months of not-drinking, I had an obsession to drink that was greater than what I experienced at 5 days. Living with that level of cognitive dissonance was starting to seem worse than death. I would have chosen a bullet to the brain because it was my brain that was making my life miserable.

That's the bad news. The good news is, I found a spiritual solution so incredably powerful, that it removed my obsession root and branch. Having lived through that experience I can now say that I would not settle for anything less.

However, it is an EXPERIENCE. I can't adequately express it with words. That's where Epistemology comes into play. Logic and reason are simply the wrong tools for comprehending the ISM part of alcohol-ISM. EXPERIENCE must be lived rather than talked about.

Aellyce

The analogy of the gun pointing to the addict is pretty much how Antabuse is supposed to work. Seeing these responses even, it's not surprising it does not work for many people.

I SO relate to this. The dissonance was the worst for me also. Why I was suicidal all the time. The memory of this is actually what makes me so terrified of relapse (helps keep from it). I have the feeling that if I relapsed and got deep into the whole experience again even after this short 4 month sobriety, it would progress to a worse state and I'm not sure I would want to have a choice to survive that. Not even just surviving for a while to drink myself to death slowly. Well, who knows, but the thought by itself is aversive enough for me these days, especially combined with reading others' stories on the boards. This is why I really feel for the people who relapsed after a long period of being sober/clean.

It's very interesting that many people, who were really badly advanced in their addiction, finally turned it around after having these "mystical" moments before they quit. And after that, they can make a free choice, but not before for a long time.

Aellyce

Sorry I messed up the quote editing Of course I quoted Boleo not myself.

BackToSquareOne

You can't really argue that some people have deep insights, spiritual experiences or whatever happens that may cause deep changes in their psyche. The question of just how easy it is to reproduce or induce the same experience in others is where it gets sketchy. What if the person never has that type of experience or it takes 20 years to get there, is that acceptable?

Aellyce

Yes, and this reminds me of an interesting approach some people use or recommend in addiction treatment / therapy. The controlled, occasional use of psychedelic drugs. I know a few psychiatrists that have a license to use such drugs (eg. psylocibin) in a strategical way for certain patients and they do research on their efficacy. The results are far from conclusive or straightforward as far as I am aware, but they do help some people. These drugs can induce what are commonly describe as "spiritual" or "mystical" experiences and deep insights if applied in the right environment. Now how effective they are to help probably depends on many individual factors, including the already existing spiritual maturity of the person.

People induce/approach somewhat similar experiences using more natural methods such as meditation, but that's not easy and takes a lot of practice. How spiritual experiences occur spontaneously for some people is a very interesting question, there are researchers trying to understand this, lots of theories, but they know very little. Related work is also trying to understand the nature of consciousness and how that relates to decision making.

So the AA program is focused on generating spiritual awakening, but only after starting it and people first need to get there. It's also interesting to learn that many people get to AA or other 12-step programs highly skeptical and not believing in it, and then things happen and it starts working for them.

Aellyce

My view is that all these things, drinking and sobriety, are choices we make. Decisions. It's not that the bottle comes to fill up our mouth with alcohol on its own volition - we buy it, open it, and drink it. These are many different momentary decisions we make on the way to getting drunk.

Quitting is also what we decide, and then all the recovery work as well. Millions of decisions. To me, the difference is mainly how these different choices are made, what are the underlying motivations, and how our brain processes things from desire towards action, to lead to a specific outcome (behavior). Eg. when we choose to drink, the motivation is primarily pleasure seeking with impaired inhibitory control. When we choose to get sober and use a recovery program, the motivation is to get healthy and live a better life, and this requires a lot of inhibitory control processed by other brain areas and pathways.

I think that we (our brains) decide all these things driven by different desires in the first place, and then we execute them. Those that believe in the spiritual aspects of recovery may acquire a more mysterious kind of motivation, but it's ultimately the choice of the individual to apply the insights.

So in this context, sobriety is a specific kind of choice and recovery is action and execution.

gardendiva

I made those same choices and never had a spiritual awakening. So I started making different choices.

biminiblue

To follow haennie,

There are many roads to sobriety. Each alcoholic finds his or her own road, and there are many miles along that road that are time for reflection.

Why I drank is a little different from why you drank. There are similar physiological forces at work in alcoholics, but the driving force that starts the drinking is different for each of us. It's mainly poor coping strategies, but coping with life is different for each of us. Some have family, some don't. Some have alcoholic family, some don't. Some have good jobs, some poor jobs. Some have good friends and some have crazy friends. Some have too much money, some not enough. Some have lots of loss and don't know how to deal with that. Some have abusive pasts. Some are the abuser.

The choice has to be made to cope in healthy ways with whatever life gives me.

gardendiva

My body doesn't process alcohol the way the body of a normal drinkers does. Like many alcoholics I have a liver enzyme abnormality and my body eliminates acetaldehyde at a much slower rate than non-alcoholis. I am an alcoholic at the cellular level. Once alcohol is in my system my ability to stop drinking is diminished and some of this is due to biology. Recognizing this diminished ability ("having no control over drinking") empowers me to not take the first drink ("regain control so I can stop.")