~ Sobriety Matters ~

BeIn2day wrote: »

Well I spoke at that zoom meeting (just a quick hello really) but I guess that was a big step for me. All I can say is that everyone I have seen on zoom and heard talk, are super nice folk. Very welcoming. Very willing and keen to help. I did feel slightly overwhelmed when I was offered to have my phone number passed onto a lady so that I could be supported to attend a face to face meeting, in my neighbourhood. But, when I said I prefer just to zoom for a while, they were absolutely fine with that. So that's great. At least when I feel like attending a face to face meeting, I know I am not alone. Makes it less scary I suppose.

I have now joined various chat groups on WhatsApp and through that, I will receive all the links for attending the zoom meetings. So far, so good.

I read the (from the Big Book on my AA app) Preface and Doctors Opinion at the request of my potential sponsor. I found it interesting to read how AA started and how it began. Then there was the doctors opinion, that alcoholism is an allergy of the body. This is the part that I question and I was 100% honest with sponsor, I told her I would prefer to research this myself. Which I will. I do think I have an intolerance to alcohol, cos my face, neck and chest turn bright red when I have wine. So I'm gona be looking into this allergy theory and draw my own conclusions.

Take or leave what I'm about to say, but the allergy theory is pure garbage nonsense.

Alcohol is unbelievably toxic, so that's why people have a bad reaction to it. Some people have more of a reaction, some people have less, but the people who react more to it are actually *less* likely to become addicted because it's so unpleasant for them. This is why many people of Asian descent don't drink much, because they flush like crazy in response to the toxin.

Also, I have such a huge problem with the AA concept of "normal" drinkers. There are no such thing as "normal drinkers" and "alcoholics."

Alcohol is HIGHLY addictive. There are only people who have had enough exposure to become addicted and people who have not had enough exposure to become addicted.

How much exposure is needed depends on the person and their environmental and genetic factors, but at the end of the day, if someone drinks enough for long enough, they will become addicted.

How addicted they become is also a function of many factors combined with level of exposure. So some of the "normal drinkers" according to AA are people who are "normal" because they can stop. When really, they might already be addicted, just not as severely addicted as others.

They might be able to stop after a few drinks, but may struggle often with not drinking on a given night even though they don't want to, but when 5pm rolls around they can't resist pouring those few glasses almost every night. They might be people who can do Dry January, but the only reason they do it is because they always feel like their drinking is getting a bit out of hand and need to take a break.

Those aren't "normal drinkers," those are addicts trying to hold back the addiction as best they can. They're addicted, they're just not drowning in it, but they are often one major life crisis away from their habit being amped WAY UP.

This is exactly what we see when people lose their jobs, go through divorce, when someone dies, or a pandemic happens. They lose the brakes.

Alcohol is toxic, so in effect everyone is "allergic" to it. Alcohol is highly addictive, so everyone can become addicted to it.

There are no special brains or bodies that aren't affected these ways by alcohol, but there are some that are less vulnerable to it than others.

Perhaps you are more vulnerable to alcohol, perhaps not. But none of those factors matter nearly as much as your *history* with alcohol.

The more you drink the more addicted you become, so that's the biggest thing to account for. How much you drink and how long you've been drinking will be the biggest predictors of how challenging you find it to quit.

Also, what life factors drive you to drink. If the same stressors that caused you to drink excessively are still in your life with no new way to manage them, then you can't just remove your main coping mechanism and expect things to end well.

That's not because of some made up allergy or some excessive vulnerability on your part. That's because the reasons you drank weren't addressed.

Think of it this way, imagine you were magically transported to a life where your spouse didn't drink, where you had more money than you could possibly need, a personal chef to cook all-organic healthy meals, no work stress to worry about, and everyone you loved was living this ideal life with you.

Don't you think it would be a lot easier to quit drinking?

For me, quitting felt impossible for years. Then I quit my ultra-stressful job that was destroying my body and suddenly it was doable. My main driver for drinking was gone, and suddenly the therapy I was doing was enough to cope with my life.

I wasn't addicted because I'm genetically defective, I was addicted because I come from a family of alcohol addicts, and I naturally gravitated towards wine as a coping mechanism for the stresses of life, the way it was modeled for me my entire life.

I drank enough for long enough to become addicted and built a career that had an unmanageable amount of stress, which made it virtually impossible to remove the self-medicating habit I had formed.

I *am* a normal drinker because it's NORMAL to become addicted to alcohol.

If there are people out there who can have regular exposure to alcohol and not become addicted, then they are the ones who aren't normal.

If I started smoking enough, I would become addicted. If I started snorting enough coke, I would become addicted. If I started taking enough oxy, I would become addicted.

This is how addictive substances work.

You have had a lot of exposure to a highly addictive substances. Your brain is now rewired to be addicted to them. This wiring may never go back to how it was pre-addiction.

So yes, AA is right in that people with alcohol addiction are fundamentally different from people who aren't addicted. Our brains are different, but not primarily because we were born this way, but because the neuroactive properties of the drug modified them over time to become this way.

I know, intuitively that I can never "safely" start drinking again. I could likely restart and moderate right now and be just fine. It would take discipline, but I could do it. But I have zero faith that that discipline would survive my mom dying, my husband leaving me, hell even my dog dying.

I don't want my health and sanity to depend on discipline, which is notoriously unreliable for long term results.

And for what? What would I gain from starting to drink again? What would alcohol add to my life???

Nothing of value. Nothing at all. The only thing I would likely gain is weight.

I have a brain that was exposed to enough alcohol to rewire itself to constantly seek it. I can't undo that wiring. That's what alcohol does.

I consider myself VERY lucky to be one of the sensitive people whose body responded very poorly to alcohol. It made me very sick at levels that most people can tolerate. This is the only reason my addiction wasn't worse than it was.

My sensitivity to the toxicity of alcohol actually saved me from developing very severe addiction because my body couldn't take the level of exposure that very severe addiction requires.

So take from AA what works for you, and if perceiving yourself as being "abnormal" and having an "allergy" to a toxin is what helps you stay sober, then just ignore what I'm saying.

But for me, the key to recovery has been to understand that alcohol isn't some great, wonderful thing that "normal" people get to enjoy.

No, it's toxic and highly addictive and it's bad for literally everyone at literally any amount. There are just some people who have managed to limit the badness so far vs people who have had enough exposure that their brains are working too actively against them to manage those limits anymore.

As someone who has studied the function of the brain for decades, the scientific consensus is pretty clear: there is no meaningful difference between alcohol and heroine. In fact, if both were legal, and you could get clean, predictable doses of heroine at grocery stores, heroine would probably cause much less damage to individuals and society.

You're not an addict because there's something wrong with you. You're an addict because you consumed A LOT of a highly addictive, toxic drug over a VERY LONG time.

Whenever I'm out now and see people drinking, I visualize them all as shooting up. That's what I see now when I look at alcohol. I don't see the fun, cool, advertising that has been shoved down our throats our entire lives. I see what it really is.

Rotten juice that poisons people's bodies and makes them sad and sloppy.