Do Alcoholics Have Any Choice About Drinking?
By Mike Highstead
Jun 29, 2011
It's very simple. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your choices. When you make choices that are good for you, you feel good about yourself, do good things for yourself, and have many good experiences. When you make choices that are bad for you, you feel bad about yourself, do bad things to yourself, and have many bad experiences. One road leads to pleasure, the other, pain...
Have you ever wondered why people do things that are clearly harmful to their health? Perhaps it's because they really don't feel they have a choice.
This is why the alcoholic reaches for booze, the junkie for drugs, the sex-addict for porn. It's because deep in their hearts they have a subconscious need that must be satisfied, and the bottom line is, they haven't learned to meet that need in a way that …show more content…
Watch a movie? Answer the phone? Maybe a little of both.
The point is, all your actions, even the actions you really don't like, originate from either a positive or negative impulse. And every impulse is nothing more than a suggestion that your mind has served up for you to do with as you will. The problem is, being unaware of the essential relationship between yourself and your mind, you react to every thought as if it were a command.
Consider your thoughts for a moment. You have both negative and positive thoughts to choose from. You have negative thoughts to protect you from danger, and you have positive thoughts to bring you delight. The best way to think of this is having a negative mind that wants to avoid pain, and a positive mind that wants to experience pleasure.
But then you have a conflict. To your negative mind, all the potential pleasures in life involve some kind of risk, so it doesn't want you to go there. And to your positive way of thinking, you can't fully experience the pleasures in life while you keep holding yourself back, so you disregard the
By Mike Highstead
Jun 29, 2011
It's very simple. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your choices. When you make choices that are good for you, you feel good about yourself, do good things for yourself, and have many good experiences. When you make choices that are bad for you, you feel bad about yourself, do bad things to yourself, and have many bad experiences. One road leads to pleasure, the other, pain...
Have you ever wondered why people do things that are clearly harmful to their health? Perhaps it's because they really don't feel they have a choice.
This is why the alcoholic reaches for booze, the junkie for drugs, the sex-addict for porn. It's because deep in their hearts they have a subconscious need that must be satisfied, and the bottom line is, they haven't learned to meet that need in a way that …show more content…
Watch a movie? Answer the phone? Maybe a little of both.
The point is, all your actions, even the actions you really don't like, originate from either a positive or negative impulse. And every impulse is nothing more than a suggestion that your mind has served up for you to do with as you will. The problem is, being unaware of the essential relationship between yourself and your mind, you react to every thought as if it were a command.
Consider your thoughts for a moment. You have both negative and positive thoughts to choose from. You have negative thoughts to protect you from danger, and you have positive thoughts to bring you delight. The best way to think of this is having a negative mind that wants to avoid pain, and a positive mind that wants to experience pleasure.
But then you have a conflict. To your negative mind, all the potential pleasures in life involve some kind of risk, so it doesn't want you to go there. And to your positive way of thinking, you can't fully experience the pleasures in life while you keep holding yourself back, so you disregard the