The reason you can't achieve what you want is that you have not understood your disease correctly. You are an addict. Your body craves this particular substance excessively, so that you feel compelled to continue. You will not be able to have a few and stop. You need to accept that your only path to recovery is recognizing your illness for what it is, and stop fantasizing that you can still drink.
Your body is addicted; but your mind does not have to stay that way. It's up to you.
AA is a great program. Rehab only breaks the addiction temporarily. AA helps you to learn about the illness and how to start the road to recovery, one day at a time.
I agree with the solution - I just need to quit altogether instead of trying to drink moderately.
But it’s not a physical disease - it’s a bad habit just like smoking, gambling, over-eating or watching too much TV. You break habits just like you form habits - by repetition. After I repeated 20-25 days without smoking, the habit of smoking was replaced by the habit of not smoking.
I can do it with drinking too - I just need to accept and resolve that I have to quit drinking alcohol altogether in order to break the habit. Limiting myself to a few drinks is apparently not enough of a clear change in behavior to break the habit.
When you repeat a behavior often enough, your brain comes to expect that behavior and accept it as normal. When a behavior feels normal, it becomes habitual - the path of least resistance.
Breaking the habit of over-eating is one of the toughest of all, because of course you can’t quit food altogether. But people have success by making rules for themselves - never eat certain foods. Never eat after 7pm, etc..
It’s silly to call it a disease you are born with - as if you have no control over it. Of course you do. Anyone who has broken a bad habit will tell you it took discipline and hard work. Will power. You have to decide that you want it bad enough to do the hard work of resisting the compulsion. Your.brain has an autopilot and tends to automatically compel you in a given direction - even if it’s the wrong direction. The way you reset that autopilot through repetition - set a better direction. After a while it gets easier to go in the new direction because now your brain’s autopilot is working in your favor.
The other thing to remember is people are different - so different approaches work better for different people. For example, I don’t crave alcohol - if I don’t go out and there’s nothing at home, I can go without a drink for a week without even thinking about it.. I wouldn’t jump in the car and go to a bar or liquor store like some alcoholics. If my wife and I have a glass of wine I don’t need to pour myself more.
If I go to a party, I don’t tend to drink too much - I don’t want to embarrass myself.
My problem is when I go to a bar - people at bars tend have one drink after another - I just don’t have an off switch in that setting. I play league pool on Tuesdays and it’s always at a bar. I stay reasonably sober until i shoot, so that I’ll play well, but after I play a start drinking and usually drink too much.
I guess I either have to quit pool or quit drinking.