Alcohol abuse is about pain as much as anything else. That’s how it was for me, anyway: My alcohol addiction was about pain, or more precisely the escape from it. I hurt. I could give you the long-winded sob story, but it wouldn’t change the fact of the thing itself: I hurt. That’s why I drank, why I became a victim of alcohol abuse in the first place. I hurt. Alcohol made me feel better. Everything else more or less took care of itself.
Every alcoholic has demons, when you really get down to it. There’s always a Source of alcohol abuse, a kernel of intractable pain that makes alcoholics turn to the bottle. It doesn’t matter what it is; it’s simply enough that it exists. So long as it does…so long as it’s There…an alcoholic will continue to be an alcoholic. If alcohol treatment is going to work, on the other hand, it’s got to help you get over it: help you dig down into the guts of whatever it is that’s eating at you, and teach you to cope with it in a way that doesn’t involve booze. It’s not easy. But it’s worth it. Alcohol treatment saved my life. It made me stop hurting. And no price could be too high to pay for that.