If you've made a Big Plan, then what's the point of the AV?
Better when never is never
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Join Date: Sep 2011
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If you've made a Big Plan, then what's the point of the AV?
This morning, I was thinking about this. If I have made a Big Plan, then drinking is forever off the table, so what is the point of the AV? The only thing I could think of is to provide some comfort by letting us know that thoughts and ideas of drinking are normal even after a Big Plan is made.
However, the AV cannot make decisions or take actions, so I don't need to worry about the thoughts and ideas as drinking is no longer an option. In fact, saying I must be able to identify my AV is in a way introducing doubt into my BP by implying that if in some case I fail to identify my AV I might drink - which would be the AV. Also, because the AV cannot take actions or make decisions, there is no "battle" to be done with it. It has already been defeated by the BP.
So basically you have: You'll still have ideas and thoughts of drinking, that's the AV, but don't worry about it because you have the BP. But the more simple "I made a Big Plan" would have the same outcome.
However, the AV cannot make decisions or take actions, so I don't need to worry about the thoughts and ideas as drinking is no longer an option. In fact, saying I must be able to identify my AV is in a way introducing doubt into my BP by implying that if in some case I fail to identify my AV I might drink - which would be the AV. Also, because the AV cannot take actions or make decisions, there is no "battle" to be done with it. It has already been defeated by the BP.
So basically you have: You'll still have ideas and thoughts of drinking, that's the AV, but don't worry about it because you have the BP. But the more simple "I made a Big Plan" would have the same outcome.
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Join Date: May 2014
Location: Washington, MO
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Jazz, I made a big plan and drank again. The obvious that my plan was not quite big enough came to me first--like a net not cast far enough to catch every contingency. I know now other changes are needed but that falls under the BP umbrella also. My Ideas of drinking come strong and seemingly out of nowhere. I'm able to ignore most-think it through and say "I don't drink". I think some insight is gleaned from a relapse if even sub-consciously but as to whether it gets used for victory or defeat is up to me. I'm still looking up at 1.5 weeks.
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Originally Posted by jazzfish 
This morning, I was thinking about this. If I have made a Big Plan, then drinking is forever off the table, so what is the point of the AV? The only thing I could think of is to provide some comfort by letting us know that thoughts and ideas of drinking are normal even after a Big Plan is made.
However, the AV cannot make decisions or take actions, so I don't need to worry about the thoughts and ideas as drinking is no longer an option. In fact, saying I must be able to identify my AV is in a way introducing doubt into my BP by implying that if in some case I fail to identify my AV I might drink - which would be the AV. Also, because the AV cannot take actions or make decisions, there is no "battle" to be done with it. It has already been defeated by the BP.
So basically you have: You'll still have ideas and thoughts of drinking, that's the AV, but don't worry about it because you have the BP. But the more simple "I made a Big Plan" would have the same outcome.
However, the AV cannot make decisions or take actions, so I don't need to worry about the thoughts and ideas as drinking is no longer an option. In fact, saying I must be able to identify my AV is in a way introducing doubt into my BP by implying that if in some case I fail to identify my AV I might drink - which would be the AV. Also, because the AV cannot take actions or make decisions, there is no "battle" to be done with it. It has already been defeated by the BP.
So basically you have: You'll still have ideas and thoughts of drinking, that's the AV, but don't worry about it because you have the BP. But the more simple "I made a Big Plan" would have the same outcome.
It don't work that way.
The AV is part of the structural model of addiction. The desire to drink - to have fun, even if destructive - is part of the midbrain. We call that the Beast. The Addictive Voice is how the Beast speaks.
Its goal is to secure as much alcohol as possible as often as possible.
It no more goes permanently away in the face of a Big Plan than hunger goes permanently away because you just had dinner.
The concept of the Addictive Voice is useless without a working knowledge of the structural model of addiction. Attempting to graft RR terms and concepts onto the disease model is sophistry of the worst sort.
Better when never is never
Thread Starter
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Wisconsin near Twin Cities
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Originally Posted by Greenwood618
When you write, "What is the point of the AV?" it sounds as if you think it was invented by product designers and is just an optional add-on that is in the way of you having an easy time in life.
Originally Posted by Greenwood618
The AV is part of the structural model of addiction. The desire to drink - to have fun, even if destructive - is part of the midbrain. We call that the Beast. The Addictive Voice is how the Beast speaks.
Its goal is to secure as much alcohol as possible as often as possible.
Its goal is to secure as much alcohol as possible as often as possible.
Originally Posted by Greenwood618
The concept of the Addictive Voice is useless without a working knowledge of the structural model of addiction.
Originally Posted by Greenwood618
Attempting to graft RR terms and concepts onto the disease model is sophistry of the worst sort.
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Join Date: Sep 2014
Location: Earth
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Originally Posted by Greenwood618
Attempting to graft RR terms and concepts onto the disease model is sophistry of the worst sort.
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Join Date: Jan 2012
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Posts: 1,413
Originally Posted by jazzfish
This morning, I was thinking about this. If I have made a Big Plan, then drinking is forever off the table, so what is the point of the AV? The only thing I could think of is to provide some comfort by letting us know that thoughts and ideas of drinking are normal even after a Big Plan is made.
However, the AV cannot make decisions or take actions, so I don't need to worry about the thoughts and ideas as drinking is no longer an option. In fact, saying I must be able to identify my AV is in a way introducing doubt into my BP by implying that if in some case I fail to identify my AV I might drink - which would be the AV. Also, because the AV cannot take actions or make decisions, there is no "battle" to be done with it. It has already been defeated by the BP.
So basically you have: You'll still have ideas and thoughts of drinking, that's the AV, but don't worry about it because you have the BP. But the more simple "I made a Big Plan" would have the same outcome.
However, the AV cannot make decisions or take actions, so I don't need to worry about the thoughts and ideas as drinking is no longer an option. In fact, saying I must be able to identify my AV is in a way introducing doubt into my BP by implying that if in some case I fail to identify my AV I might drink - which would be the AV. Also, because the AV cannot take actions or make decisions, there is no "battle" to be done with it. It has already been defeated by the BP.
So basically you have: You'll still have ideas and thoughts of drinking, that's the AV, but don't worry about it because you have the BP. But the more simple "I made a Big Plan" would have the same outcome.
I believe you are absolutely correct in suspecting that The Big Plan of RR does not really need AVRT in order to succeed. You also do a decent job at answering your own question as to "the point of the AV". I would not call it "comfort." I would call it something more like a self-talk and emotive reprogramming accelerator focused directly upon and only upon the issue of drinking some more.
The Big Plan seared into my brain the new shortcut neural path "never" drink again. No other decision-making is needed. But here's what AVRT does for me. It tags every other possible residual neural detour of that new, direct "never" pathway with a Beast marker. Aha, "There IT is. That's not ME because I know exactly what I am NOT doing ever again - swallowing alcohol. That is IT, the old and dying desire to keep up the habit by ignoring the beastly behavior and recalling the deep pleasure. For me, this dissociative pronoun switching technique is an accelerator to get that new hardwired "never" shortcut fully insulated. AVRT totally prevents any current leakage, so to speak, from that thinking shortcut. That "current leakage" is not an action, but just wasted thinking. This is how I imagine it working in my brain. Very quickly, AVRT allowed me to very comfortably let go of memories of both my beastly behavior of the past and the deep pleasure of the past. Yes, there's the "comfortable" part.
I can choose to practice "shifting" by provoking my Beast, but those rhetorical exercises simply make ME smile and quickly get on to what I was doing. Shifting does not "leak current" from The Big Plan.
I believe anyone who says they made the Big Plan, and then they had more to drink, and they still believe they had made the Big Plan is absolutely not fully disclosing what their decision making about drinking REALLY was. I believe it is impossible to reverse a Big Plan and voluntarily drink some more - absolutely impossible. What are the detailed second by second thoughts and feelings that preceded swallowing more alcohol. Zooming in on that short chronology exposes the lack of a Big Plan every single time. "Oh, I just changed my mind." Duh, Big Plan? NOT. The Big Plan is specific, everlasting, and iron-clad.
The Big Plan of Rational Recovery is the first time in over 150 years, that I know of, that the simple pledge "I will never drink again." has been offered in a publicly promoted articulated program of recovery from addiction. What I am suggesting by this is that our society has become saturated with publicly repeated mythologies about "recovery programs" that can only be maintained IF the simple pledge of permanent abstinence continues to be publicly attacked and put down.
Throughout history, the pledge has never been able to be eliminated from personal decision-making, but it CAN be dealt harshly with in the public realm as it has been up until RR and AVRT. And I commend SR for bucking this trend by hosting SC.
Zenchaser, I believe you have finally "caught" AVRT and now understand it, and, yes, your Beast is absolutely outraged at what you now know you can do to it. You can sink the Big Plan stake into the heart of your Beast in ANY five second period starting NOW. It will try to hide, and you will feel sorrow. It may get you drunk in dreams. It may get you to feel later on that you have actually gotten drunk after making your Big Plan. All that happened to me.
After quitting for good, I felt very real grief over an extended period as the memories of those "good times" and all the energy and effort I put into maintaining/hiding my drunken pleasure stopped. I'm reminded of Tom Hanks in Castaway just before he's rescued on the raft as he weeps his farewells to "Ball Wilson" as it floats away never to be seen again. I wanted to, I had to, I was in process of leaving forever my own past self-indulgent world of bingeing drunkdom to fully rejoin society; and IT HURT! But that hurt was totally harmless to me. I recognized it as a good hurt. Anything that hurts IT, is ok by me.
But why not make that hurt as short-lived as possible. I think AVRT explodes that blimp of hurt into a billion tiny pieces of meaningless drivel. "Wahhh, wahhhh, wahhhh, go ahead and drink some alcohol!" HA HA HA. I'm not sick. I'm a human being with typical human animal tendencies I can control all by myself. This should not be a Eureka moment, but in contrast to the last four score years of anti-pledge recovery programing I certainly understand how finally knowing you have every capacity to make The Big Plan can seem like a Eureka awareness.
GT
Better when never is never
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Join Date: Sep 2011
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Originally Posted by GerandTwine
For me, this dissociative pronoun switching technique is an accelerator to get that new hardwired "never" shortcut fully insulated. AVRT totally prevents any current leakage, so to speak, from that thinking shortcut.
Zenchaser, I believe you have finally "caught" AVRT and now understand it
Zenchaser, I believe you have finally "caught" AVRT and now understand it
-Jazzfish
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I'd like to second the kudos to SR for hosting this "little corner of the Internet".
I've said before that I implicitly adopted the cultural reliance on things recovery and programs espousing methods contingent on certain proscribed actions and associations coupled with the disease model without exploring other perspectives on ending addiction. I obviously can't blame society at large for failing to spoon feed me all available methodologies, but I can , and now, do place blame on myself for using , in the past, the disease modality of addiction as an excuse to not try harder to break the cycle , in a weird way it was a comfort think I was "broken, or uniquely damaged" in a fashion different from other normal humans without the "curse" of an ism.
So as an atheist but with the exact sentiment, I say will say again, thank god for SR and God bless Mr Trimpey
I've said before that I implicitly adopted the cultural reliance on things recovery and programs espousing methods contingent on certain proscribed actions and associations coupled with the disease model without exploring other perspectives on ending addiction. I obviously can't blame society at large for failing to spoon feed me all available methodologies, but I can , and now, do place blame on myself for using , in the past, the disease modality of addiction as an excuse to not try harder to break the cycle , in a weird way it was a comfort think I was "broken, or uniquely damaged" in a fashion different from other normal humans without the "curse" of an ism.
So as an atheist but with the exact sentiment, I say will say again, thank god for SR and God bless Mr Trimpey
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I think the AV doesn't really have a point in the modern age. Or rather it's a distortion of the body's drive to obtain things it needs. For example, sugar is rare in nature but super packed with calories/energy. In the days of food insecurity the body could crave sugar and reward eating with pleasure because it would have been very difficult to "overdo" it. Alcohol is probably the same way- rare in nature but useful when it could be found.
Fast forward to the modern day. Anyone but the very poorest American can sit down and eat thousands of empty calories of sugar and other carbs, and wash it down with tons of cheap alcohol. The supply of that stuff greatly exceeds the need but the human body can't adjust in to it in just a few thousand years. Bear in mind the body evolved around the available kinds of food for at least hundreds of thousands of years while cheap sugar and alcohol are only several hundred years old at best.
Fast forward to the modern day. Anyone but the very poorest American can sit down and eat thousands of empty calories of sugar and other carbs, and wash it down with tons of cheap alcohol. The supply of that stuff greatly exceeds the need but the human body can't adjust in to it in just a few thousand years. Bear in mind the body evolved around the available kinds of food for at least hundreds of thousands of years while cheap sugar and alcohol are only several hundred years old at best.
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GT what an amazing response even if there was a little mix it! You made so much sense to me. Thank you.
My beast is acting like a little brat throwing a tantrum because I'm threatening to take away it's supply. It is a time of conflict inside me. What you said right here really struck a chord in me. So thanks.
Zenchaser, I believe you have finally "caught" AVRT and now understand it, and, yes, your Beast is absolutely outraged at what you now know you can do to it. You can sink the Big Plan stake into the heart of your Beast in ANY five second period starting NOW. It will try to hide, and you will feel sorrow. It may get you drunk in dreams. It may get you to feel later on that you have actually gotten drunk after making your Big Plan. All that happened to me.
After quitting for good, I felt very real grief over an extended period as the memories of those "good times" and all the energy and effort I put into maintaining/hiding my drunken pleasure stopped. I'm reminded of Tom Hanks in Castaway just before he's rescued on the raft as he weeps his farewells to "Ball Wilson" as it floats away never to be seen again. I wanted to, I had to, I was in process of leaving forever my own past self-indulgent world of bingeing drunkdom to fully rejoin society; and IT HURT! But that hurt was totally harmless to me. I recognized it as a good hurt. Anything that hurts IT, is ok by me.
My beast is acting like a little brat throwing a tantrum because I'm threatening to take away it's supply. It is a time of conflict inside me. What you said right here really struck a chord in me. So thanks.
Zenchaser, I believe you have finally "caught" AVRT and now understand it, and, yes, your Beast is absolutely outraged at what you now know you can do to it. You can sink the Big Plan stake into the heart of your Beast in ANY five second period starting NOW. It will try to hide, and you will feel sorrow. It may get you drunk in dreams. It may get you to feel later on that you have actually gotten drunk after making your Big Plan. All that happened to me.
After quitting for good, I felt very real grief over an extended period as the memories of those "good times" and all the energy and effort I put into maintaining/hiding my drunken pleasure stopped. I'm reminded of Tom Hanks in Castaway just before he's rescued on the raft as he weeps his farewells to "Ball Wilson" as it floats away never to be seen again. I wanted to, I had to, I was in process of leaving forever my own past self-indulgent world of bingeing drunkdom to fully rejoin society; and IT HURT! But that hurt was totally harmless to me. I recognized it as a good hurt. Anything that hurts IT, is ok by me.
Better when never is never
Thread Starter
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Wisconsin near Twin Cities
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Originally Posted by GerandTwine
jazzfish, I thought your OP was from zenchaser. It sounded to me like something zenchaser would say. Sorry for the mix-up.
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