Recovery from alcoholism can in some ways be as difficult to understand at the nature of alcoholism itself when someone is drinking as a full-blown alcoholic.
This in part is because recovery from alcoholism for most people is not simply about stopping drinking.
Stopping drinking is an essential and crucial part of the process, but for many people who intend to stay sober long-term, there is a real need to address and deal with a variety of underlying emotional and mental drives that have fuelled by drinking in the first place.
Many people will often talk about the issue of willpower in connection to either their drinking, that ability to stop drinking, and their ability to get sober or stay sober, or as a reference to an individual’s self will and the ability to seemingly force their life to happen.
Much of this can really refer to a distorted understanding of willpower, self well and alcoholism itself.
RECOVERY ALCOHOLISM
For anyone who is an active alcoholic, the issue of willpower often does not simply arise.
The reason for this, is that there are many alcoholics who simply do not wish to stop drinking, and never do or never try to.
This is not because they are oblivious to the reality of what their drinking is doing to them, but because the nature of that alcoholism in someway turns them in would, and makes them believe that however bad the lifers either internally or externally, alcohol becomes the only thing that matters, and the only thing that is actually holding them together.
In those cases, will power does not refer to an individual’s desire to stop drinking.Willpower is more likely to be seen in how an alcoholic will try their life board in order to allow them to keep drinking, and somehow seemingly hold themselves or their lives together, however precariously.
This sense of trying to force life to happen, regardless of the reality of how that life presents itself, is often a key characteristic of alcoholism. It is often referred to as self will, which is one expression of this type of enormous energy that somehow can manifest itself in a drive to create and living what in today’s jargon is referred to as a virtual reality.