I was reading some of the posts from Sober Recovery and came across this from tw33k: "I know the reasons why I drink. I’ve been transient for so long, without stable accomodation and am panicking. I’m trying to organise things so I can fly inter state and move in with my girlfriend. Once I’m up there and settled, I can’t see myself drinking any where near as much as I am now."
Wishful thinking, delusional thinking, tricking your mind into believing anything you want to believe. It’s amazing what we can convince ourselves of just to avoid facing the harsh truth. It’s not something that just alcoholics do. We all do it. We can convince ourselves that a divorce is totally the exes fault. He was the heartbreaker. We won’t admit that we might have contributed to the breakup by selfish acts of our own. We convince ourselves that it is okay to drive by a homeless guy on the side of the road with a sign asking for help. We are too busy and someone else will stop. An hour later and we’ve totally forgotten about it. We buy something we want on our credit card and convince ourselves that we will figure out a way to pay the debt tomorrow. The only difference is that most of the lies we tell ourselves will not hurt us in the long run. For an alcoholic, those lies will eventually kill them. And that is why whenever I meet an alcoholic, I feel sad. But there is hope. Alcoholics can learn to stop telling themselves those lies. On the same post, nandm replied "I only was able to stop when I realized that I could no longer go on living in the insanity of alcoholism. I was at the place where I could not live drinking but did not know how to live without drinking. I am alive today because I threw myself wholeheartedly into a program of recovery. I was willing to go to any lengths to find sobriety; job or no job, relationship or no relationship, friends or no friends, money or no money, I had finally realized that the outside stuff was not going to get me sober any more than it had the power to make me drunk. It was just life ****. What was going to make a difference was the inside of me and that was what had to change."
