Cravings and triggers
There was one thing about my drinking that I simply couldn’t understand. I was perfectly capable in every other aspect of my life but for some bizarre reason I couldn’t control my drinking. I drank more than I should, I […]
Is alcoholism genetic or is it caused by our personal circumstances?
The answer to this question isn’t either one or the other; the answer is “both”. Susceptibility to addiction is genetic, and activation of that susceptibility, where it exists, is environmental. Susceptibility to addiction is quite simple and specific. The adverse […]
Do you need to stop drinking? Try these things
Stopping drinking is really hard and anyone that says otherwise is talking out of their ass. But there are things we can do to help ourselves. Here are a bunch of things we can do that will help us get […]
Sobrietry
Getting sober doesn’t just happen, we have to make it happen, and nobody can do that except ourselves. We can’t simply wish things were different, we have to act. It takes effort and persistence to stop drinking and just like […]
Why me?
People struggling with alcoholism are desperate to identify someone or something to blame for their addiction but we confuse things that cause us to drink with what causes addiction… and these are not the same thing at all. Here are […]
Alcoholism is an illness, not a weakness
My drinking was something that was beyond confusing; it was absurd. All the evidence was that my drinking was disastrous. Bad things were happening, I drank more than I intended to, I drank more often than I intended to, I […]
Drinking was fun until it wasn’t
When I first read this it hit me like a hammer-blow because I could see where I was headed, and it wasn’t pretty. While it was obvious to me that the amount I drank had slowly crept up over the […]
Lying Minds
Alcoholics are not damaged, faulty or broken, and we aren’t bad or weak people, we are deceived: deceived by our own minds. Most people that drink heavily in their youth will mature out of it and those that drink to […]
Why we can’t get sober on our own
Nothing is 100% black or white in addiction but the evidence in the research on one thing is very clear; people that maintain regular contact with a recovery group of one form or another are FAR more likely to achieve […]
Our past is not the problem
We have a desperate need to understand why we drink the way we do. This need isn’t simply an urgent quest for knowledge it is driven by something far more powerful: shame, or rather, the need to avoid it. We […]
Shame and alcoholism
Shame is a soul eating emotion. We often bundle shame and guilt together, but there’s a distinct difference between the two: shame is when we think “I am bad”, and guilt means “I did something bad.” But there’s something else […]
Alcohol is C2H6O… it isn’t magical!
Alcohol (ethanol) is a simple little chemical. It has two carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms, and an oxygen atom. It doesn’t travel at speeds exceeding the speed of light and it doesn’t have the gravitational pull of a black hole… […]
Finding hope
While I may have understood at an intellectual level why stopping drinking was essential, my heart wasn’t in it. In my mind I can evaluate all the information: drinking makes me miserable, causes all sorts of problems, and will if […]
The 100+ challenge
By far the most likely time to relapse is in the first two weeks after stopping drinking. But relapse after 100 or so days is also extremely common. I want to talk about three aspects of relapse at this time […]
The gift of desperation
I carried on drinking excessively far, far longer than is rational. Normal drinkers around me looked on in despair; they couldn’t figure me out at all… and they couldn’t be expected to; their minds work completely differently to mine with […]