Addiction
And the AA framework hasn't been the right fit and you've been looking for something that isn't lifelong abstinence as the only option.
You’ve named yourself as an alcoholic. You’ve been to AA. The framework helped some, didn’t help others. The lifelong-abstinence model fits some people and doesn’t fit you, or it fits you and you keep relapsing, or you’ve been holding sobriety for years and you’re white-knuckling it. The drinking is doing something specific that the program hasn’t been addressing.
You’ve been handed one framework. There are others, and at least one of them might fit the way your drinking actually behaves.
The drinking either continues, returns, or holds at the cost of what’s underneath it.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
© The Institute for Applied Strategic Therapy. All rights reserved.
AA helps many people. It also has a particular framework: the alcoholic is permanently an alcoholic, abstinence is the only option, the higher power is part of the recovery. For people whose pathway to recovery doesn’t fit that framework, the framework’s failure can feel like personal failure rather than framework mismatch.
You very likely came up with drinking that escalated to dependency for specific reasons. You may have grown up in a household where alcoholism was modeled or where strong feelings were medicated with alcohol. You may have absorbed the lesson that drinking was how you survived being you, and the drinking became necessary for the survival. You may have lived through a stretch when the alcohol was the only available coping tool, and the dependency formed before you noticed.
For the related patterns, see I drink too much or I’m in recovery and white-knuckling it . For the broader framework, see I have an addiction .
The label is information about you. It isn’t a life sentence.
We point strategic therapy at the function the drinking has been serving and the daily patterns that keep that function in place. Sponsor, meetings, medication: we work alongside whatever else has been holding sobriety together for you. You stop needing the drink once the work it has been doing for you gets done another way.
Your drinking sits inside a system you didn’t choose. That system can change.
Write to us and we'll get back to you personally. A qualified practitioner answers every inquiry, usually within two business days.
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