Okay, I'm going to be really brave here.....
I have now waded through another bunch of posts in this thread--and intend to get them all, because it's important stuff--and although I see a few preachy ones, and a few people getting their buttons pushed, I hope that stays at a minimum, because what I mostly see is some really honest and painful processing, including my own, and I think that's great, because that's what this foum is for. Now: I have something to share, and I want to tell you that I seldom share this information about myself, because it can really backfire, but here it is: I am a mental health clinician and chemical dependency therapist. Now, before you run screaming or tell me I have major problems both ethically and professionally, let me remind you that I am "off duty" here, and that I am very much a human being, as can obviously be seen if you read my first post in this thread. The reason I am sharing this information (and I do so with trepidation, given past experience) is because it is a topic I have looked at very deeply, and continue to look at. I work with people who have pretty much destroyed their lives with substance abuse: they have done jail time, had their kids taken away, destroyed their marriages, gone backrupt and/or destroyed themselves physically. After years of research and listening, I honestly do believe that whether or not alcohol is a problem is a very, very subjective thing, and I'm not seeing a lot of that really end-of-the-road stuff here. But someone once said to me that "you're an alcoholic if alcohol is causing problems in your life." This is an extreme statement, but what it leads me to conclude is that it's up to me whether alcohol is a problem for me. Not for everyone, because if a person gets drunk and kills a child, then alcohol is very much a problem. But there is a continuum, and for those of us who have a sort of "social habit," possibly complicated by a carb addiction, the question is one of priorities, i.e., which is worth more to me, to lose weight faster, or to have that hour or so in the evening when I chill out with my glass of wine? In my opinion, that's the difference. For eons, human beings have used alcoholic substances of one kind or another for celebration and comfort. Perhaps the attitude is what matters: one Japanese philosopher suggested that we should only drink to celebrate; that is we drink to comfort ourselves, we are poisoning ourselves. I can resonate to this, and choose to continue in my ongoing self-examination, coupled with self-respect and, hopefully, honesty.
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