Is ~15 beers every night for 13 years alcoholic enough for you? It was for me. I haven’t touched the stuff in almost six years, and yes, I’m quite happy. Are you saying a “true” alcoholic wouldn’t be happy?
Don’t get me wrong, AA is a great organization that has helped many people. It just wasn’t for me.
One of the problems I have with many hardcore AA people, however, is the “my way or the highway” mentality. Y’all think that because AA worked for you, it is the only thing that could possibly work for any alcoholic. Not so.
I mentioned this in the other thread, and you posted in here again. How is this different from the No True Scotsman fallacy? Every time someone says that they were able to quit drinking by NOT going to AA, you and other AA members come back with the assertion that they were not really alcoholics.
I guess you could say I’m not convinced with the central holding of AA: That all alcoholics are that way because they are basically selfish people who care so little about others that they simply would rather wallow in their own brain introspective and absent from the world around them.
While that may be true for some, others are simply addicted to the euphoric feeling that they get after a few drinks that they want to replicate that over and over again; much like gambling or other addictions.
I think I may be able to clarify a bit. I am a recovering alkie, it’ll be 7 years in March.
Back when I was ~19 through about 22 or so I went out almost every night and drank. I did this with a bunch of friends and band mates. We all drank a lot.
I mean a lot. Every night we were at the bar. (Side note, I was playing in bands back then and we played a lot of the bars we where we hung out). If we didn’t go to the bar we were at somebodies house and there was booze.
A long the way, starting around the time I was 22, my friends starting getting real lives. They stopped drinking every night. They got responsible. I did, to a point, but I couldn’t stop drinking. No, let me rephrase that, I still *had *to drink. It wasn’t too bad at first. I had to have at least 6-pack or so every night. Usually more but if there was an event I had to go to the next day I could moderate a bit and keep it to 6 or 8. However, I *had *to have those drinks. The feeling I would get if I tried to skip drinking is hard to explain. The best I can come up with is drowning. Imagine the feeling you get when you are underwater too long and really, really need a breath. It was like that with me and drinking. It wasn’t ‘Oh, a beer would be nice’, it was ‘I MUST have a drink. Now’.
My friends, who drank as much if not more than I did, did not seem to have a problem cutting down. We all drank about the same amount over the years, and it was a lot. But for some reason they did not have the obsession that I did. Why? I don’t really know though there is a lot of research pointing to genetics as well as environment being the root causes of alcoholism.
So, out of the 5 or 6 guys I hung out with, I was the only one who was an alkie. They all married, got real jobs and went on with their lives. I got a real job but continued my nasty little descent into alcoholism. So while my friends certainly abused the hell out of alcohol, they weren’t alcoholics in that they could and did moderate or quit. I couldn’t moderate. I couldn’t quit for a long, long time. I have talked to a couple of them since I quit drinking about it and they said that they just kind of lost interest in drinking every night as their lives changed. When it was time for them to cut down or quit, they did not have that underlying need that I did. They just stopped. One guy did have problems from drinking too much, but much like GESancMan they realized that they were drinking too much and quit. (Note, I don’t know if GESancMan considers himself and alkie, or if he drinks in moderation. I don’t know if he had that undeniable urge to drink which, as far as I can tell, is what really separates a heavy drinker from an alkie). My friends abused alcohol and walked out the other side. I became an alkie.
Addtionally, jtgain, I believe that your characterization of A.A. is wrong. A.A. is much more complex than you make it out to be. Additionally, the best alcoholism/addiction researchers in the field suggest A.A. as a part of recovery. I believe we’ve been over the effectiveness of A.A. in other threads…
I do consider myself an alcoholic; my urge to drink was much the same as yours. I only drank at night, I’d put away 15 or so beers over 5 or 6 hours. On the rare occasions I was unable to drink, due to having to get up too early the next day or whatever, for that entire day I’d dread getting through that night; it was like a feeling of impending doom. The whole night my gut would be twisted in a knot, as though I’d been kicked; I’d sleep very little, if at all, due to tossing and turning and sweating, sometimes I’d even have an anxiety attack. And when I finally got to drink the following night, I’d never felt to thankful for anything.
Also, I didn’t exactly quit by choice. I mean, I did, but… what happened was, an indirectly related incident landed me in the hospital, and the secret of my drinking problem came out in the open. I was detoxed and put in a therapy program; at the time, I felt like I had to quit, but before long I knew I was doing the right thing, that I was doing it because I wanted to.
I don’t dispute that A.A. works well for SOME people. The problem that I have seen is that the A.A. mantra teaches that the people who failed were “most unfortunate” and “could not follow our simple steps.”
And the flip side is that, like the previous poster, ANYONE who was able to stop drinking outside the program was not a “true” alcoholic. Or better yet, even if someone had quit for 10 or so years, the old timers would give a knowing wink and say that they “would pick up again someday.”
The thing that any alcoholic or problem drinker wants to do is to stop drinking. Period. He can remain the biggest dickhead in the world, but he wants to stop drinking so that his job doesn’t suffer, his family life can heal, or for his personal health. A.A. tells that person that he has just completed only 1 of 12 steps.
For example, you must then “make a list of persons you have harmed and be ready to make amends to them”. WAIT..I just want to stop drinking. I’m not running for Jesus here. EVERYONE has done terrible things. I have hurt people when I was as sober as a judge.
“Make a searching and fearless moral inventory.” No. As I said in a prior post, these steps are predicated on the belief that an alcoholic drinks for the SOLE reason that he is an inner asshole and must drink to cover up all of these things.
I take issue with that. Some people DO drink for that reason. Others drink because of immaturity, laziness, a lack of self-confidence, or simply because they are addicted to the dopamine high that comes from alcohol.
One size does not fit all. A.A. says that it does.
My view on AA has been moderated somewhat over the past few months. It does work for the subset of people who want it to work, and who are willing to do what it takes for it to work. If not, a million meetings won’t make any difference.
That being said, however, I believe that it is possible to “outgrow” it, and for AA to stop meeting your needs. When I made the conscious decision to stop attending meetings, it was because I wasn’t really benefiting from them; that the program wasn’t doing for me anything that I wasn’t capable of doing on my own, and that in some cases, was actively impeding my ability to function as a competent, capable adult. If that makes me not a “real alcoholic” (whatever that is), I’m OK with that.