jdooner

I would ask myself why? Could I do this for a period of time, maybe a year, maybe two? Yeah probably. But why am I doing this? If I am honest, I never liked the taste of alcohol. I will admit that I fit in when partying and feel left out by being sober in a room full of drunks. Its why I have changed my life. So if I want to fit in I would drink and spend copious amounts of energy trying to moderate. But then at some point the booze would affect my psyche again and I would delude myself into rationalizing a drink in the morning. Or a few lines of cocaine after a couple martinis and then I am back at my first post here. Its sort of like playing Russian Roulette - odds are that you have a one in five chance you can pull that trigger and here the click. But what if that bullet is in the first chamber?

I am an alcoholic and an addcit and can never drink or use normally. The why does not really matter its that I have accepted this that allows me to enjoy life and the peace that comes with acceptance. That limbo of trying to rationalize "am I am alcoholic" or "could I moderate" is an awful place to be - I have been there.

Mek2

Jaynie04, I am unclear of the difference? Drinking is a choice. We chose to sit and put more than most people into our body. Alcoholism is the result of that. Any person can become an alcoholic if they drink too much. I am not arguing, I am trying to understand the point of view.

jdooner

Alcoholism has nothign to do with quanitity. It has everythign to do with mindset - in my opinion. Someone who drinks a gallon of vodka daily might not be an alcoholic. But someoen else who drinks a fifth might be - its how it affects them.

You don't become an alcoholic because you drink more. I was an alcoholic before I drank and my alcoholism was activated sometime during my drinking career. Once activated my belief is I can never go back.

tomsteve

"I've known him for a couple of years and what he says seems to be true, I've only ever seen him drinking on saturdays and he never drinks much. "

how often have you really been around this man other than Saturdays over the years?

desypete

you lose any sort of argument trying to compare alcoholism to cancer. i lost my 16 year old son to stomach cancer and he suffered in a horrible way, right up to the end
can you imagine he knew he was gong to die and there was nothing anyone could do nor a god could do to save him

so please think again when trying to comparing drinking and alcholism to cancer

there is no comparison as death will come with cancer unless your lucky of course or have a different type of cancer that is much easyer to cure

these people have done nothing wrong in life to deserve death
yet with alcoholics like me who did plenty wrong in my life i should be the one who had cancer not my son
to know what a true disease really is, you have to have inoperable cancer knowing your going to die next week and your in so much dam pain, you can not even drink a cold drink to quench a thirst let alone eat anymore

meanwhile all the loved ones can do is sit back and watch and wait for the end there is no dam hope and everyone is powerless

not so for the alcoholic as there is a way out of it there is no way out for cancer unless of course you end up with a lucky break as happens from time to time and of those who end up getting that lucky break they will swear down a god saved them, only thinking of themselves and the outcome for themselves and not a thought in the world for the many who dont live or get cured
would a 12 step program work to cure cancer ??
no it wouldn't

veryready

Sorry, but nobody ever 'used to be' an alcoholic. Dangerous to suggest we could ever out grow it. I did not drink for 7 years, and then I thought I wasn't an alcoholic anymore, then it took me 7 more years to stop again and it of course was much worse the second time.

Once we have lost control of our drinking, the ship called moderate drinking has sailed, for good, for life. Once we have hid a drink or hid a bottle or rotated stores, there ain't no lookin' back.

FT

I think under the "right" circumstances, I could become a "responsible" drinker.

However, that would mean a total guarantee that there would be NO surprises -- no debt, no illness, no marital arguments, no physical ailments, no injuries, and MOST certainly, NO BAD DAYS! (and don't forget, NO taxes and NO death!)

Hey, wait a minute. When I was in my 20's, SOME of those things were a rarity in my life. I'm 63 now.... need I say more?

I used to have a neighbor who was a mechanic, and he used to use GASOLINE to clean his engine. WTF? He also used to use a trickle of gasoline to track a few hundred feet to a big beachball filled with acetylene gas set upon an empty paper bag. He'd light a match to that (or use a lit sparkler, if he had one in his hand), and BOOM! Yes, the 4th of July in our neighborhood was FUN!

What's the analogy? Well, most years the gasoline did not run the wrong direction and set of an explosion that burned his eyebrows off.

Most years....

wantmylifeback2

I think if you are a "responsible drinker" you are not an alcoholic. I used to be able to go out and have one or two and it was not a problem to stop. However, as the years went on, I started drinking more and more and found I COULDN'T stop. Every time before I would go out I would have a conversation with myself and decide that I was only going to allow myself x amount of drinks. In theory, it sounded like a great idea. But, reality was I could never stop myself. That is when I realized that I truly have a problem. That is what made me realize that I am an alcoholic. Those who can only have one or two never had a severe problem to start with. I might be wrong but that's my opinion. If you can stop, you don't have a problem....

choublak

That's what I'm wondering, especially since the OP referred to him as a "friend of a friend"...

Mek2

Ok, but this is taking responsibility away from yourself and contradicting yourself. If you were an alcoholic before you drank and sometime in your career became an alcoholic then you made the choice to drink to that point. The theory would hold water if the behaviour started on day 1 of drinking, but not hundreds of days down the road. Just my opinion but somewhere down the road everyone needs to take responsibility instead of saying it is not my fault I was born this way. This is why I do not like these threads in the newcomers area. They are dangerous because they spread confusion instead of helping the person realize there issue is their responsibility and only they can make the ultimate difficult choice to stop.

jdooner

Actually you know nothing of my life and make judgments that you really have no basis making.

To answer your question though, I believe that I had an addictive mindset based on being born into family with genetic predisposition and given certain environmental exposure. If I go back before I took my first drink I had these same tendencies. While a teenager my first drink felt like a warm blanket - it accepted me wholly. I drank, but not alcoholically for the next fifteen years. In my late 30s my alcoholism and drug addcition kciked in, so there was a point or line that I crossed and I became powerless over my substance abuse.

When I got sober and began recovery I traded addictions. So my addcit mindset was stil lactive even without the booze. In fact, without my coping mechanism my life was even more unmangabile. However, I did not sit around and complain about this, I stayed sober and began a program of recovery RR, AA, Therapy and dealing with my own issue, many of which still exist.

I fail to see how I am not taking responsibility or accountability. What I have done is accepted who I am and taken steps to build a program through mindfulness and awareness to live a osber life that I want more than an active life.

I would love ot hear how this is dangerous to a newcomer? Please enlighten me.

Mek2

I am not judging you in anyway. I was judging the statement "I was an alcoholic before I drank" which is a scientific impossibility. While your drinking was a learned behaviour (as was mine) and you chose to embrace it, by your own words it took you 15 years to get to the point you considered an alcoholic. It is dangerous to tell a foggy headed newcomer that they were always an alcoholic and their behaviour was secondary. To fix a problem you often need to know how you got there in the first place.

I never said anything about accountability.

I truly praise you for quitting though. No judgement on you intended whatsoever.

FT

Not true, actually.

That is akin to someone not being allergic to penicillin until they got an anaphylactic reaction to the drug.

There are definite genetic predispositions to alcoholism, although many alcoholics do not have it.

It is called "acetaldehydism." Google it. If you like to read actual medical journal articles, use Google Scholar.

Mek2

Yes but a predisposition does not mean you are an alcoholic. It means it may be easier for you to become one. You still need to put it in the effort. A baby is not born an alcoholic.

You would be allergic to penicillin on your first dose. Not after 15 years of putting doses of penicillin into your body.

pupkin

Hey jdooner. I agree with you in many ways and mindset/addictive personality is obviously a crucial component. I also think there is a progression involved, as you say when you talk about crossing the line at some point. For me there is a difference between being an alcohol abuser and being an alcoholic, and the difference was physical dependency. For me that was the line. When I finally realized I'd crossed it I realized the game had changed.

Of course it was my addictive personality that lead me to the line and over it rather than pulling back like others might have done.

I'm of two minds about this thread. It's dangerous for me to read at the moment. Reading it I feel MYSELF trying to re-rationalize this same argument, find permission to try moderating again, believing that even though I know the game has changed, I can change it back.

On the other hand, this whole topic is so important. It's such a crucial, shared question to so many of us struggling to find our footing in long-term sobriety.

I hope newcomers like myself can find the value in this discussion, and the cautionary tale in it, rather than finding excuses in it...

jdooner

Perhaps what I should have said was I was an addcit before I ever drank and my alcoholism was activate during my drinking career. I sometimes use the term addcit and alcoholic intechangably as the mindset is the common thread (I view alcoholism as a subset of addiction).

I do not believe the substance makes the addcit, including alcohol. It is my view that the combination of genetics and environmental factors creates the addict mindset and we activate the disease/disorder later. So I compeltely disagree that alcoholism is a learned behavior.

I appreciate your concern for the foggy headed newcomer. You may want to look into your own true motives though. Is is really for the newcomer or is it to puff your own ego up?

Pupkin - if it helps there is not a single thread of the hundreds of thousands that moderation has ever worked. Moderation is an illusion for the addict/alcoholic. Babies are born with physical dependency every day.

EndGameNYC

I've learned in both my personal life and in my professional experience that there is an extremely weak correlation between knowing the cause of my alcoholism and the ability to get and remain sober.

We can and must put down the drink in order to get sober. We may never know why we drink the way we do, and having this knowledge has no bearing on our ability to stay sober. Many people report that they drank because they have low self-esteem, suffer from social anxiety, or were abused as children. Knowing this did nothing to help them achieve sobriety.

. . .

Parable of the arrow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"If we are concerned about 'what created the world?' and 'why are we here?' then consider the parable of the poison arrow.

A man went to the Buddha insisting on answers to these questions, but the Buddha instead put a question to him: "If you were shot by a poison arrow, and a doctor was summoned to extract it, what would you do? Would you ask such questions as who shot the arrow, from which tribe did he come, who made the arrow, who made the poison, etc., or would you have the doctor immediately pull out the arrow?"

"Of course," replied the man, "I would have the arrow pulled out as quickly as possible." The Buddha concluded, "That is wise, for the task before us is the solving of life's problems; until the problems are solved, these questions are of secondary importance."

Life does not depend on the knowing how we got here or what will happen after we are gone. Whether we hold these views about these things or not, there is still suffering, sorrow, old age, sickness, and death."

jdooner

Not true again Mek2. Immune systems change all the time. A baby could be fine to penicillin for years and years and then develop an allegic reaction. Bee stings too, poinson ivy again. Chicken pox and shingles.

And yet none of this helps us get or stay sober.

Stoogy

Well I have never tried this and I'm wise enough to realise it can only end one way for me, I can never drink in moderation as my brain cannot change frequency that easily, it's been to used to alcohol in large doses for too many years to even attempt this.
I wish Mike good luck and hope this works for him.

Mek2

Ego? I am an anonymous poster on a forum? I have been through and am maintaining the process and would love to see newcomers make it.

You need to remember I didn't originally take issue with anything YOU said. I took issue with the cancer comment by another user.

You can believe anything you want but I am sure there will be a large number of people who will disagree with you about alcohol having nothing to do with being an addict.

Btw environmental factors and learned behaviours are the same thing.