Addiction & Recovery

It took me ten years of self destruction,loss and suffering to finally get my first year. What was different from all the other attempts in AA? Finally I did the first step honestly and completely. Wrote it out, read it to a sponsor, forced my overdeveloped denial machine(brain) to CONNECT THE DOTS. Until I faced the exact damage that my drinking( and hangovers) had done to myself and others,I was not able to build a foundation for sustainable sobriety.

There is a reason that they say in AA "the only step that needs to be done perfectly is the first step." Until I enumerated every time alcohol (and hangovers) had hurt me and others,faced the fact that alcohol was not the solution to my problems but the cause of my problems, I was never going to stay clean and sober.

And the larger picture: Alcoholism (addiction to any central nervous system drug) has only one goal: to survive. Either I kill it or it kills me. That's what I respond every time its little insane voice pops into my head. It's the enemy, it wants me dead.
Period.