Having decided that we are alcoholics, it is well to consider what component doctors consider as the REASONS why an alcoholic drinks.
1. As
an escape from situations of life which he/she cannot face.
2. As evidence of a
maladjusted personality (including sexual maladjustments.)
3. As a development from
social drinking to pathological drinking.4. As a symptom of a major
abnormal mental state.5. As an
escape from incurable
physical pain.
6. As a
symptom of constitutional inferiority --a psychopathic personality. For example, an individual who drinks because he likes alcohol and knows he cannot handle it, but does not care.
7. Many times
one cannot determine any great and glaring mechanism as the basis of why the drinker drinks; but the revealing fact may be elicited that alcohol is taken to relieve a certain vague restlessness in the individual incident to friction between his biological and emotional make-up and the ordinary strains of life.
Taken from the Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet - An Interpretation of Our Twelve Steps, first printed in 1944
