Who is Alcoholics Anonymous for?

AA is for people who can’t regulate their alcohol use and consumption or who, when they do stop, can’t stay stopped. We were people who had lost control over when and how much we drank. Try as we might, we couldn’t seem to drink like other people.  The power of choice had vanished.  In AA we identify ourselves as Alcoholics and understand Alcoholism is an illness.

Am I an Alcoholic?

We never tell anyone they’re an Alcoholic, or that they have the illness of Alcoholism.  Instead, we share our experiences, describing what we used to be like, what happened, and what our lives are like now. The description of the illness given below may help you draw your own conclusions.

Why can’t I regulate the amount I drink?

When we drank, we found that we had little control over the amount we took.  We started out saying ‘I’ll only have one”, though we often ended up drinking way more than we intended to.  Our physical reaction to alcohol manifested in a craving for more once we started, our bodies, never satisfied, demanded more and more.  When the alcohol finally ran out, many of us swore that this time we were finished for good – and we meant it.  Before long, the idea returned that we should now be able to control our drinking, and we begin the cycle all over again.  

When I decide to stop, why can’t I stick to my decision?

Because we can’t keep them firmly in our minds, the past consequences of our drinking weren’t able to deter us from starting again.  The idea that alcohol will give us a sense of ease and comfort is too strong to resist.  Due to this strange mental blind spot, the degradation, humiliation and misery we experienced even a day or two ago will not prevent us from picking up yet another drink.  The delusion that we can somehow “get away with it” can be really subtle, and at other times we are seized with an overwhelming urge to go drink.  Either way, the insane thought that we can drink with impunity wins out time and time again.

What happens to me when I’m sober?

Many of us have experienced a sense that we don’t belong, or that something is missing, or that there’s something somehow ‘wrong’ with us that we can’t quite put our finger on.  It seems we can’t find satisfaction in the way that other people do.  It’s as if our lives somehow lack an important ingredient; without this elusive ‘something’, we feel at odds with the world we live in, and a sense of dis-ease permeates our existence. Alcoholics Anonymous describes this spiritual condition/malady/dis-ease as being “restless, irritable and discontented”.  Although everyone, at least to some extent, feels this way some of the time, we alcoholics discovered that using alcohol was, at first, an extremely effective way to relieve this kind of discomfort.  Alcohol gave us a sense of ease and comfort and turned the noise off in our heads as nothing else did – though as time went on we obtained less and less relief from it.  Eventually, the first few drinks stopped working.  When we were at times able to stop drinking we found that life soon became impossibly hard work. It was at this point that we found that we could neither live our lives with a drink nor without. Staying sober without another solution to the constant chatter in our heads over time becomes unbearable. We become beset by feelings of self-pity, self-loathing, uselessness and despair. Our world seems grey, drained of colour and vibrancy. Life becomes at once frightening and excruciatingly tedious.  Shut off from any sense of a connection with other people, we experience fear, loneliness, anger and bewilderment as normal.  Though life with alcohol is no longer an option, we find living without it intolerable.  Many of us grow preoccupied with thoughts of suicide – it seems like the best idea we can come up with and then before we know it we have a drink in our hand.

If this all sounds familiar, perhaps you’re asking yourself, ‘what now?’ Well, Alcoholics Anonymous may be able to help.

HERE ARE SOME FURTHER QUESTIONS FROM ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS GB