What's something you learned in the last 24 hours?
(if you need to narrow it down, what is the most life-relevant thing you learned or realized)
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Conversation
one of the cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, asked his family for 3 shots of whiskey on his deathbed when he was dying of emphysema, and/but they didn't give it to him. he had been 36 years sober
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that's remarkable, both that he asked, and his family didn't provide... huh. thanks for sharing
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yea if you look it up it's kind of a scissor even in the AA community. some people are like "jeez, if you're about to die, what does it matter" while others are like "no weakness!! good that they protected his legacy" etc
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what i get out of it is just “huh, AA doesn’t work that well”
with better technique imo people wouldn’t even want to on their deathbed
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the whole problem is with framing reaching for the drink as “weakness”; it’s fundamentally an exiling move, you’re othering the part of you that sees the drink as the best or only option for dealing with some shit
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exiling imposes continual costs, you continually need to edit the exile out of your awareness, meanwhile it does not and cannot die, it just skulks in the shadows growing hairy and wild until maybe one day it comes back as you lay dying
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i have no experience with alcoholism per se but i have plenty of addictive tendencies myself and what actually helps me is 1) respecting that a part of me needs the addiction to self-medicate and then 2) dealing with whatever pain i’m attempting to self-medicate
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so, with respect, i will make the case that the “weakness” frame or other frames that exile the addictive part actually contribute to this whiplash effect where “relapsing” is this big dramatic thing
when you exile the addictive part it becomes more desperate because you’re ignoring it and fighting it. the way a person would. so if it *does* find a way to regain control it will desperately attempt to maintain that control by whatever means it can get its hands on
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and with alcohol in particular what’s a great way to wrench control away from parts of you that are trying to impose “self-control”? more alcohol. especially if this is part of what was being self-medicated in the first place. please let me know if i am being unspeakably rude
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+1 this does track with my xp going from being a "FUCK i need to smoke NOW" cig smoker to a casual "would be nice but no rush" – the drive actually worsens the more you frame it as weakness/failure
open to the idea that there mayyy be some threshold past which this doesn't apply
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also parallels with what one of my childhood friends told me about her ed, very very severe case, hospitalized etc
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