You Can Stop Drinking Now

When you suffer from alcoholism, chances are there are going to be some painful “bottoms”.  The more resilient you are (or the stronger you are), the lower the bottom.

Hitting bottom is where an alcoholic finds him or herself in a bad situation as a result of drinking. The bad situation is usually beyond anything the drinker ever expected they could possibly be involved in, and will sometimes cause the drinker to get some kind of help.  A “bottom” situation could be a drunk driving ticket, getting fired from a job or losing a love interest or a spouse among others, because alcohol pervades every area of the alcoholic’s life.  Even sober, the effects of alcohol will cause the drinker to make bad decisions when they think they are functioning normally. With heavy use, alcohol has a crippling affect on the drinker mentally and physically. It will affect your social life, work life, and family life, and leaves no area untouched.

Since alcoholism is a progressive disease with predictable stages (which is what qualifies it as a disease) it stands to reason that the more progressed an alcoholic becomes with drinking, the lower the bottom will be.

It usually takes a long time to become an alcoholic. It was not intentional and it wasn’t planned.  The drinker starts out with normal drinking, just like any other person, but because of some trigger in the brain or a predisposition to alcohol, the drinker then progresses to heavy drinking, and later becomes an alcoholic. Because most of the time it takes a significant period of time to reach this phase, it is almost impossible for the drinker to recognize when the actual transition into alcoholism took place.  It takes only one drink to cross that line, that one forever unidentifiable step that takes this unsuspecting drinker into a new league - into alcoholism.