The Alcoholic Mind

At some point in the career of every alcoholic – and trust me, alcoholism is a career – there is a tipping point. It is the point at which a heavy drinker crosses the line and enters the territory of alcoholism. It is at this point the the choice of whether to drink or not to drink is no longer an option. At the point that the drinker becomes an alcoholic drinking becomes a necessity not a decision.

For the non-alcoholic or occasional drinker this concept of drink being a need is so completely foreign that it sounds ludicrous. “Why does he have to become such a mess every time he drinks?” “What’s wrong with her. She ought to just stop drinking. She seems to have a problem with it, and doesn’t realize she just has to stop.” “He’s got everything going for him. The job, the family, everything. He just needs to stop drinking or pretty soon he will lose it all.”

These are all the types of things people say as they watch an alcoholic spiral more and more deeply into the morass of his disease. It is a sad, tragic thing to watch, but it is even more deeply and strangely troubling to the alcoholic. At the point that the alcoholic becomes an alcoholic the process of denial/extraction is an almost daily part of their life. During the denial/extraction process the alcoholic knows somewhere deeply in a part of their soul that there is a problem, but they don’t want to, or rather can’t or simply refuse to believe that they are an alcoholic. Yet they know they need to stop.

It is during this phase of their disease that the alcoholic tries almost daily to extract themselves from the depths of their disease. This will generally be a series of daily promises to cut back or stop altogether. For me I was wallowing do deeply in alcoholism that I needed to start the day with a tumbler of vodka. I sipped that until I stopped throwing it up and then would proceed to drain the glass. This daily ritual was followed by a solemn oath, a promise to myself that glass would be the only drink I would have that day until after work. That commitment was always broken two hours later as the cloying need, the absolute physical necessity for alcohol took over, and I was sneaking a drink behind the locked door of my office.

The common thread that runs through the entire alcoholic populace is that the denial that they have a disease and that they can somehow manage to stop on their own. This is perhaps the most devastating part of the disease. It is partly shame based, in the fact that if you admit that you are alcoholic it would mark you as weak, or less-than, or different. No person like to be considered any of those.

The thinking of an alcoholic is so convoluted and jumbled that even after studies and research conducted over hundreds of years by some of the greatest minds to ever study human psychology, no one has been able to figure it out. Yet one think is certain and that is the only defense against the alcoholic taking the inevitable second drink is staying away from the first one.

The one successful solution that has saved millions – hundreds of millions by now – from themselves is the program of Alcoholics Annoymous.