JUST STOP....Why alcoholics can't "just stop"

If you are reading this and you are an alcoholic, chances are you’ve heard, “just stop drinking and your problems with alcohol will go away”.  Most people who use “just stop” as a solution to our drinking problems probably do mean well.  The problem is that most people do not understand addiction and the disease that cripples 10% of our population.  Most people view the disease of addiction as a “lack of will power”  instead of the physical disease that it really is.

If you are not an alcoholic and you are reading this, be patient and I will try to explain why “just stop” does not work and will probably drive a wedge between you and the person you desperately want to help.

First, toward the end of my active addiction I heard “just stop” so many times it became a joke with me.  Whenever I heard it I would usually respond with something like, “gee, I hadn’t thought about that, thank you mister helper”, at which point I would generally turn, walk away and mumble something profane under my breath.  As well meaning as you may be, telling an alcoholic to “just stop” makes as much sense as telling a baby to “stop crying” when he gets hungry.

Second, don’t you think we want to stop?  Toward the end, my life had become so unmanageable and I wanted to quit so badly, I would have sold my soul to stop drinking.  In fact, death would have been preferable to the life I was living but I was too cowardly to take my own life.  Trust me, at our core, in the fleeting moments of clarity we do have…we want to stop.  We just don’t know how.

Third, how does one quit something that has become the most important thing in our lives?  More important than family, job, faith…alcohol has become our god.  We are terrified to quit the very thing that is killing us because we believe it gives us life.

So why is it so hard to quit something that we want desperately to quit?  The answer is simple to verbalize but complex to understand.  We don’t like who we are or what we see when we look in the mirror.  Only through the lenses of alcohol can we tolerate ourselves.  We are afraid. We are looking for acceptance, but feel unworthy of receiving acceptance.  We desperately want to fit in and the things that we fear the most are made easier by alcohol.

So, why don't we “just stop”?  We can’t.  Why do we drink?  Because it works…until it doesn’t work anymore, but that is for another day.