b :morally excellent :righteous <a virtuous decision>
PHENOMENON OF CRAVING
How many of you believe you have a choice whether you drink or not?
Can you control it once you start? and
Can you control it once you stop? To be Alcoholic you must:
Experience the physical craving as well as have the mental obsession. Symptoms of the PHYSICAL part of the Disease:
1. The feeling of euphoria that comes after starting to drink instead of the nausea that normal people feel.
2. The inability, at times, to stop drinking, even when faced with the knowledge and evidence that you should.
With the alcoholic the craving starts after you put alcohol in the system.
The phenomenon of craving for alcohol happens on the way up, as you’re getting
higher.
Alcoholics do get the craving coming off (withdrawing from) booze- as shown by DTs.
Untreated or unaided alcoholics, when withdrawing from alcohol, often die without the help of people and/or medications to get them through the horrible physical withdrawal.
CAUTION:
You can be an alcoholic and not have gone through those terrible cycles because you are in early stages of alcoholism.
You may be an alcoholic and drug addict and come off alcohol with the use of chemicals (legal or illegal) and have experienced only mild withdrawls, so.... look carefully at your own symptoms.
You should ask yourself: What did alcohol do for me once I started drinking?
“The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink”.
Alcoholics Anonymous- pg.24.
PHENOMENON OF CRAVING (for non-alcoholics)
If you are a loved one or family member, there may be a physical manifestation experienced when the drinking alcoholic’s negative legal, financial or physical consequences are temporarily averted. The chaos of the home or workplace may stimulate extremes of emotions which can lead to dependence on unhealthy relationships. Justification, minimalization and rationalization adds to your feeling of over-importance.
You may have a physical and emotional let down when the alcoholic sobers up and starts to function, as normal people do, and that “high,” once achieved from emotional extremes, becomes less attainable.
If you are a Drug Addict, you sometimes get physically sick while getting high – throwing up, diarrhea, etc.(other symptoms of the physical allergy). As you start to come down, the physical need or demand for more increases.
Drug addicts get a craving for more on the way down from a high (withdrawal).
Drug addicts, unlike late stage alcoholics, usually have the ability to come off (withdraw from) heroin and cocaine while detained in jails or hospitals. They do get sick, but don’t die from withdrawal.
In the case of the Addict and the Al-Anon, the withdrawal symptoms disappear when the “craving” is satisfied. However, when the alcoholic drinks the craving for alcohol becomes stronger.
That’s what makes alcoholism different.
