Moderation’s hard work for an alcoholic!

~ Jason Schwartz

44685143AfterPartyChat has a really interesting first person piece from an alcoholic who tried Moderation Management.

Every now and then my addiction tries to convince me that I never truly hit bottom with alcohol and could probably drink moderately again one day. When that happens, I remind my disease that I’ve tried that, thanks. Before surrendering to 12-step recovery, I tried Moderation Management, a secular support group for “non-dependent problem drinkers.”

. . .

. . . would choose a certain number of drinks as their daily maximum. Ideally, we’d scale back our max each month until it stayed firmly in the green zone: four drinks for men, three for women. I could never manage a limit below five. The most annoying part of this wasn’t counting the physical drinks, it was figuring out how many drinks my drinks counted as. Some cocktails, and even some beers, contained enough alcohol for two or even three standard drinks. All in all, it was a lot more math than I’d bargained for.

. . . you couldn’t drink more than two days in a row. So if you wanted to party (moderately) on Friday and Saturday, both Thursday and Sunday were off limits. I struggled with the two-day rule even more than with the daily max. It completely changed my conception of what a weekend was.

Very interesting, and not written with an axe to grind. Read the whole thing here.

Published by Jason Schwartz

I have been an addiction professional and social worker since 1994. I started blogging in 2005 as the Clinical Director at Dawn Farm. I no longer work at Dawn Farm and am now the Director of Behavioral Medicine at a community hospital, and a lecturer at Eastern Michigan University’s School of Social Work. Views expressed here are my own. Keep in mind that the field, the contexts in which the field operates, and my views have changed over time.