"The futility of this situation—in which the addict’s efforts to regain control send him spiraling further out of control—is the basis of the paradoxical-sounding insight for which Alcoholics Anonymous has become famous: **that you can’t truly hope to beat alcohol until you give up all hope of beating alcohol.** This necessary shift in outlook generally happens as a result of “hitting rock bottom,” which is AA-speak for when things get so bad that you’re no longer able to fool yourself. **At that point, it becomes impossible for the alcoholic to avoid surrendering to the unpalatable truth of his limitations—to see that he simply doesn’t have the ability to use alcohol as a strategic tool to suppress his most difficult emotions**. (“We admitted,” reads the first of the Twelve Steps, that “we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”) Only then, having abandoned the destructive attempt to achieve the impossible, can he get to work on what actually is possible: facing reality—above all, the reality that, in his case, there’s no level of moderate drinking that’s compatible with living a functioning life—**then working, slowly and soberly, to fashion a more productive and fulfilling existence**." --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[acceptance]], [[alcohol]], [[character]], [[discipline]], [[personal-values]] **Source** -- [[202410130434 - B - Four Thousand Weeks]]