Alcoholism – Relapse or Recovery?

People get sober every day in a variety of ways. People get sober when they spend some time in a jail cell for instance. People get sober in many hospitals, treatment centers and detox units across the nation every day. People get sober because a spouse may be threatening them or even an employer. Sometimes a consultation with a physician will shake a person into a bit of short term sobriety. Good reasons abound for intoxicated people to spend a few days without any chemical ingestion and consequently, “sober up”.

So what is the difference between sobriety and recovery? What’s the difference between drunkenness and intoxication? Is it “relapse” or just plain old “drunk again”? What’s the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk? Can someone be a drunk without being an alcoholic or vice-versa?

For this alcoholic, the question was never “can I get sober”? The real question was, and still is, “What does it take for me to be able to LIVE each day sober”? Once I began to see and ask the question somewhat differently, amazing miracles began to happen.

When I was trying to “get sober”, it was ME doing the “trying”. I was trying to have POWER over alcohol. As long as I continued to try and gain power over alcohol, failure was as certain as the eventual next drink… which always, sooner or later, came my way. Once I began to learn how to LIVE sober, the bondage of alcohol seemed to vanish. It was then that I realized “learning how to live sober a day at a time”, is what I had spent a life time running from. The problem was me.

Daily people shout that if only “so and so” would happen, then they would not have to drink. If only a spouse or career would behave satisfactorily, then they would not “need” a drink. It is always something else that is “causing” the problem and this being so, then only brute strength and will power could possibly overcome drinking again. The problem with this is that no human being has that kind of power each and every day, each and every hour. Somewhere lurking in the dark corners of some quite time somewhere lays yet another drink of alcohol.

Sobriety and recovery is truly a situation where by giving up, we begin to win!