Topic: defense mechanisms

Beginning your statement with ‘yes, but’ means you’re already arguing. And rest assured, the alcoholic person is well prepared for argument.

Eventually, the fantasy bubble gets popped, and the addict realizes they’ve wasted a lot of time when they could have been making progress.

Eventually, things get so bad that even the minimizer gets frightened.

Eventually, through painful experience, the externalizer recognizes that the secret of recovery is focusing on changing yourself, not others.

Eventually, the rationalizer (through painful experience) realizes that instead of serving as a remedy, drugs and alcohol are actually making problems worse

Eventually, things get so bad that the details become irrelevant and the objections seem unimportant.

Suffering victim and destructive asshole, all wound up in the same person. That’s the “alcoholic/addictive” personality. But who is the “real person” underneath the disease?

We’re all familiar with the behaviors of alcoholic and addicted people, now it’s time to use our knowledge to plan a successful intervention.

We can’t expect to address alcoholism without encountering defenses, since they exist to protect alcoholic drinking. But we have an advantage.

When we think of denial, we picture someone angrily insisting he doesn’t have a problem. But denial is more subtle than that.