Walk in Dry Places #essentialsofrecovery

What causes a binge?
Understanding honesty.

In the foggy world of drinking, we were sometimes confused about cause and effect. A person might think of a binge as having been caused by a fight with his or her spouse. The real truth, however, is that he or she provoked the fight in order to get out of the house to launch a drinking spree. It was really the need to drink that caused the fight, and not the reverse, as the alcoholic believes.

We must always understand that the compulsion to drink is the root cause of every binge. We may blame certain things that seemed to trigger a drunk, but it is always our own compulsion that gives force to such an action. Nonalcoholics have the same human experiences we do, but such things do not cause them to have binges.

Seasoned AA members are trained by their experience to detect and defuse these false causes. “There are excuses but never good reasons for drinking,” they say. We always drink because we want to drink, not because another’s actions forced us into it.

Once we’ve established real sobriety, we also learn to identify the excuses and devices that helped us blame our binges on other people and conditions. We learn that we are always responsible for maintaining our own sobriety.

I intend to get along with everybody today and to meet all conditions and circumstances in a mature manner. Nothing can trigger a binge but my own desire to take a drink.

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