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What is your view on this: Addiction vs. will power?
1 posted on 10/29/2023 11:10:36 AM PDT by RandFan
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To: RandFan
I recently left the mental health care field after three and a half years. In that time I saw a lot of people addicted to drugs, to alcohol, to sex, to a lot of things. I think there is truth in what Perry and Hitchens both are saying. It is difficult for a person to break away from addictions. It also does require making a conscious and driven choice to abandon those addictions. The thing that I learned more than anything else is that if a person wants to be healed, he or she must WANT that healing. We can talk to them and encourage them until we're blue in the face but ultimately this is a choice that THEY must make. I worked with some people who were addicted to alcohol and smoking. By the time I left, some of these people had been able to break free of those controlling behaviors. They each saw the kind of person it was making them and they decided they didn't want to be that person anymore. But that requires enormous self discipline. The slightest return back to abusing a substance and it undoes all of that hard work. You don't get cured of alcoholism or drug addiction. Once you're there, you're there for life. You are "recovering" and that demands effort on your part to remain that way. People are hoping that this kind of thing is easy. But it's not and I doubt it ever will be. So, I can see where both of these men are right.
2 posted on 10/29/2023 11:26:22 AM PDT by Ciaphas Cain (America will need de-liberalization just as Germany had de-nazification.)
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To: RandFan

Having seen addiction run its course it’s pretty clear that it’s a neurological issue.

Hitchens is an ignorant snob in this video.

Does Hitchens think that a lack of willpower is what has people drink until they lose their job, their home, their family and frequently their life? Does he think they willingly put drinking above their children and spouse?


3 posted on 10/29/2023 11:28:40 AM PDT by Principled (Biden is illegitimate and whatever he says can be ignored. )
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To: RandFan

I don’t claim to know the answer, but Hitchens won that debate hands down.

Perry used appeal to authority, then sarcasm, then condescension and personal attacks, then - when asked what the objective physical evidence of addiction was - Perry closed with “you don’t know what you’re talking about”.

Then, whoever posted the video cut it right there to give Perry the last word.

My guess is Hitchens had a pretty good response - why else cut it there?


4 posted on 10/29/2023 11:29:04 AM PDT by enumerated (81 million votes my ass)
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To: RandFan

I can only speak for me. 34 years off the bottle this past Wednesday. There are people who believe it is moral weakness. I just know I had the old time Bill Wilson fellowship and loving and wonderful strangers who I could call in the middle of the night. In return I got sent into noxious hotel rooms where similar hopeless people smoked and vomited and begged to stop. There were no treatment centers full of licensed fools back then.

Hardest thing I ever did, but also the most wonderful.


5 posted on 10/29/2023 11:31:10 AM PDT by Luke21
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To: RandFan

It’s a choice. Any addiction can be overcome. It’s mostly habit. Perry said it himself...if he didnt’ have that first drink he would be fine. So he loses his willpower to NOT have that first drink.


8 posted on 10/29/2023 11:39:23 AM PDT by DouglasKC
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To: RandFan

While I have some bad habits, insobriety is not one of them. It was revealing to learn from watching a friend, however, how some seem to process intoxicants differently. The euphoria wears off and it’s like being cold for them. The urge to reconnect is primal, like seeking warmth.

For me, it’s not willpower that keeps me sober. I just can’t imagine getting anything done while wasted.


9 posted on 10/29/2023 11:45:40 AM PDT by Gilderite
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To: RandFan

Alcoholism and drug addiction are two “diseases” that are 100% self inflicted.

Such diseases are a function of a weakness of character rather than a physical weakness. For me, I didn’t have the strength of character to be the man God created me to be. So, I wallowed in self-righteous and self-indulgent self-medicating. I wasted a solid chunk of the best years of my life being stoned and stupid. By returning to the Way of My Lord, Jesus, I’ve found peace and strength; the peace and strength I was looking for in booze and dope.

I’ve been straight and sober for nearly 40 years following a 15-year reign of terror as a bat-sh!t, crazy drunk and recreational drug user. All glory to God.


10 posted on 10/29/2023 11:56:13 AM PDT by Montana_Sam (Truth lives.)
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To: RandFan
I had friends from high school (a married couple) one an alcoholic and gambler and the other addicted to alcohol and pills. I also was in a 2-year relationship with an alcoholic in the 1980s.

They are the most narcissistic, spoiled, entitled, and selfish people I've ever come across in life. Everything bad that happens to them is someone else's fault, and even their addiction is not their fault.

11 posted on 10/29/2023 12:17:30 PM PDT by HandBasketHell
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To: RandFan

I worked as a clinical consultant in a triservice alcohol and substance abuse program - ASAP - for 3 years after spending over a decade myself in ACOA and AA. I came to the conclusion there are no addictions, only choices. What I found working for people who remained sober (not using) was a clearly defined reason that meant everything to them.

Users are liars- to themselves, family, friends, God, and choosing not to use wholeheartedly seemed to be what made the difference I saw and experienced myself in deciding to quit smoking after 20 years.

There are no addictions, no addictive personalities, addiction genes, people quit using all the time and stay quit by choice.

JMHMO


12 posted on 10/29/2023 12:21:12 PM PDT by normbal (normbal. somewhere in socialist occupied America ‘tween MD and TN)
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To: RandFan

If I don’t drink the first drink I can’t get drunk


15 posted on 10/29/2023 12:58:40 PM PDT by Nifster ( I see puppy dogs in the clouds )
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To: RandFan
Peter Hicthen’s is a smug, self-righteous arrogant Brit atheist who love to bash religion, espesically Christains and to be fair Muslims. Worse yet he has recently become a US citizen. If ever some poncey Brit git need his jaw broken it's this prick.
16 posted on 10/29/2023 1:02:06 PM PDT by jmacusa (Liberals. Too stupid to be idiots.)
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To: RandFan

Addiction is chemical. Propensity for addiction is genetic/ biological. Willpower has very little to do with it. And keep in mind, on some level we’re all addicts. Endorphins trigger your opiate receptors. Anything you do for fun, anything that triggers that endorphins release, especially if you KNOW it’s going to, is, in the strictest sense, an addiction. And being a jerk seems to trigger Hitchens’ endorphins. So maybe he should use his willpower.


19 posted on 10/29/2023 1:13:33 PM PDT by discostu (like a dog being shown a card trick)
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BTW, as a schoolboy, Matt beat the piss out of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, so you all lamely waving your arms over your head and somehow pretending you are beating down on Perry, LOFL f--- --f as usual you Freeptards.
28 posted on 10/29/2023 2:03:28 PM PDT by StAnDeliver (TrumpII)
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To: RandFan
I'm a recovering alcoholic with (God willing) 20 years if sobriety this coming January.

It's easy to understand why many people think an alcoholic has no willpower; that's a logical conclusion, but an incorrect one. To the contrary, alcoholics have intensely powerful wills. The problem is the will of an alcoholic is inclined to (i.e. hell bent on) getting drunk. This is why prisoners will smuggle fruit cocktail out of the dining hall to ferment in their cell commode. This is why alcoholics will risk careers, lives, marriages for the opportunity to get loaded.

My experience, and my observation has been that once one finds one's self in that maelstrom, the only chance one has is to learn to subordinate one's personal will to God's will.

33 posted on 10/29/2023 2:24:44 PM PDT by Joe 6-pack
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To: RandFan

People who believe there’s no such thing as addiction to alcohol must ignore all the work done with mice and other animals.

If mice can get addicted to alcohol there’s no reason humans cannot.

(Unless you don’t believe we’re related.)


40 posted on 10/29/2023 3:32:51 PM PDT by aculeus (Just Call Him "No Border" Biden)
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To: RandFan
What is your view on this: Addiction vs. will power?

common sense, moderation in everything.

42 posted on 10/30/2023 7:41:26 AM PDT by 1Old Pro
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To: RandFan

Matthew Perry was extremely fearful of being alone - by way of abandonment, because of a long period of fear that developed as a result of the separation of his parents from each other.

That period began when Matthew Perry was a mere baby.

He ended up filling the empty space with drugs, booze, and the response he received by his being a comedian - from a very early age. Fame eventually arrived.

At first, he relished that fame; but the responsibility for not letting down, his friends at the production of *Friends,* weighed more and more . . . and thus more cycles of drugs and booze, and “rehab.”

No matter how long he might have a girl in his life, he feared that girl would just walk away - especially at the moment the girl would tell him, that she loved him.

Instead of then, waiting in anxious depression, for the girl to leave . . . Matthew would [somehow] leave.

Overall, he was in a downward spiral that he constantly had to fight in order to control the varying rates of his descent - the net of the downers, instead of the uppers.

He wrote, “There are two kinds of drugs for addicts. Downers and uppers.” And, his choice was downers.


46 posted on 10/30/2023 8:13:03 AM PDT by linMcHlp
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To: RandFan
Maybe Pete who is supposedly a devout Christian should look into the Oxford Circle, a precursor to AA that had very Christian roots. Bill and Doctor Bob took much of it and kept it a spiritually centered program, albeit much more Unitarian in tone. Remember that one cannot gain sobriety without surrendering to a higher power greater than them and the addiction.

“Just stop it” only works in the imaginations of people who aren’t addicts. But sobriety takes WORK on the part do the addict.

52 posted on 10/30/2023 8:48:32 AM PDT by Clemenza
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