Pedro,
I’ll forgive you since my comments were directed at Arc, not you. I had no intention of offending you, but my comments about what AA members would say must have been offensive; they had no grounding. I don’t know you as well as I know Arc, so I don’t feel as free to dig into as I do Arc, and I feel I owe you a bit more respect. If I get to know you better, my respect for you may go up or it may go down. So far, I can still take you seriously and I’m willing to reason with you.
Now… about this:
“Also, all self admitted addicts who haven’t worked seriously on their recovery think they’re not really addicts. Nothing more common than a newcomer blaming the drugs instead of the disease.”
You have a very surreptitious way about you. You speak to no one in particular, yet it seems implied you mean me. Am I reading too much into this?
If you are, I think you’re painting a one dimensional caricature of me. I’m not sure what it means to say: a self admitted addict who think they’re not really addicts. That’s you putting words into my mouth. And: blaming the drugs instead of the disease. ← Did I ever say that? And: who haven’t worked seriously on their recovery… What right do you have to say how hard I’ve worked? You mentioned before that quitting is the easy step (contrary to what a therapist said to me: you’ve accomplished the hardest step), that the next step–self-examination and asking yourself the question: why do you chase the high?–is the hard one. The reason why it’s so easy for me at this point is because I’ve done these steps in reverse. The reason this thread is 5 years old is because I spent the last 5 years examining myself and asking myself questions like these. Read it, you’ll see. 5 years of self-reprogramming, of changing my priorities, of reassessing my values and what I wanted for my life… that’s the hard work. The reason it’s easy for me now is because I’ve prepared myself for it.
What annoys me more than anything else is the hubris of people thinking they know me better than I know myself despite knowing me only from a bit of text on an internet forum. ← That is sheer arrogance right there. And the most irritating thing about it is how right they think they are despite trying to come off appearing humble, fallible, and–as Arc is fond of saying–“I could be wrong.” ← Yeah, you could all be wrong, but you don’t really believe that.
For example, this here:
“Maybe you’re not ready yet, or ever…”
…blatantly implies that you’re ahead of me in this game, that I have much to learn from you. Have you ever thought that maybe not all alcoholics are the same? That we don’t all experience quitting and recovery the same way? That maybe my approach is superior to that of others? And that’s why I’m able to claim to be having no problem with this? Have you ever considered that maybe you could learn a lot from me? I’m not saying you do, or that my approach is superior, but that idea doesn’t even seem to register on your radar.
What really irks me is when people feel they have to tear me down in midst of my successes… just because it doesn’t fit their stereotypic expectations of how success works.