Anyone who has a drinking problem needs to get honest with themselves and really assess where they are at with it. There are essentially two ways you can do this: one is that you can do a thirty day trial where you do a series of controlled drinking experiments. The basis of these experiments is that you are to only have one drink and then cut yourself off for the day, and do this every day for 30 days. If you are a true alcoholic then this will be a very, very difficult experiment to complete.
The other experiment you can do to test your drinking problem is to totally stop drinking for 30 days. This means that you will abstain from alcohol completely, no exceptions. If you find this very hard to do then you might be an alcoholic. On the other hand, there are binge drinkers who are definitely alcoholics that can easily go 30 days or even longer without taking a drink. That is why you need to do both experiments separately. A true binge drinker who is also an alcoholic could never complete the first experiment successfully, even though they can probably go for 30 days without any alcohol at all.
So let’s say that you do both 30 day trials and you decide that you might have a drinking problem, but you are not alcoholic. If this is the case then you should probably just stop drinking altogether. This should be no problem because you are not alcoholic. At most, a problem drinker might need some light counseling or therapy to help them to curb their excessive drinking.
On the other hand, if you decide that you really are a true alcoholic, and that you cannot drink successfully and your life falls apart when you try to abstain from booze, then you really need to seek professional help to stop drinking. Remember, the problem drinker has a problem when they drink, but the alcoholic has a problem when you take the booze away. They need a program and an outline for living in absence of the alcohol.
Stopping drinking alcohol is never a piece of cake, even if you aren’t an alcoholic. Like going on a diet, there will always be times that you want to cheat, and social situations where the drinks come out, and you find it hard to keep to your resolve. But in order to take control of your life, you need to stop drinking now. If you only have a minor problem with alcohol, that will be a relief, and something that you can likely handle on your own. But if you realize that your alcohol problem is bigger that you thought and that you can’t stop drinking alone, you will be armed with the information necessary to seek the help you need.
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