I'm not sure if I was the one who seeded the 'are you ready yet' into the conversation. I don't think I did and I certainly didn't meant to so let me clarify. I think being ready is your own personal experience and no one can tell you whether you are or are not. I certainly won't. I don't have a lot of experience with AA. I was forced to attend 15 meetings once by a judge since I was arrested for being drunk in public and my brother has been sober ten years because of his commitment to AA but I never delved into it, never had a sponsor or even know what the 12 steps are. I do remember at one meeting this older guy asking me how I ended up at AA and I told him I had to be here for my arrest and he just smiled and said, 'We all eventually end up here one way or another.' That struck me as absolutely horrible and it had the concept of 'ready' all over it.

Minnimom did some nice work there. I remember those quotes in the book. The one that hit me most and in remembering the old guy at AA was when Dr. Eskapa said that you would never let some one with heart disease wait till they get a heart attack before admitting them to treatment like the AA philosophy is of living a torturous life of alcoholism till you loose everything and hit rock bottom then you are... Ready.

The fact of the matter is that TSM works. It is a well known and well understood concept in psychology, this process of extinction, and TSM has been clinically proven to work. But as we keep saying you have to always follow the golden rule. Being ready is a personal state of mind. One of the other quotes I remember from Dr. Eskapa, and I don't remember if it was in the book or even here on this forum, was when a question arise about who will TSM work for and his reply was something like, if you have a drink and feel a high and then a desire to chase that then it will definitely work for you. That explains me to a tee.

It will work for anyone who follows it too but the question is on what time scale? If you are 17 years old and come from a family with alcoholic history and take Naltrexone before you first start drinking ever in your life then you simply will never build the neural pathways that hard wire alcoholism into your brain. If you are 70 years old with a good 50 years experience being an alcoholic then you start TSM then you will reverse that process back to your 17 year old brain. That's the theory but of course there are many other factors involved. One of which is that we are not rats in a cage and as such are complex psychological creatures surrounded by others who make up social arrangements and so on where alcohol is constantly at our door step.

I don't meant to suggest that TSM works well only for people like myself. That you have to drink yourself to rock bottom to the point where you are so sick of drinking and want it to stop only you cannot and then TSM will finally work. That's the AA heart disease model. TSM will work on anyone who follows the golden rule.

But some wonder why TSM is not working well for them when before they started they were up to 3 drinks a night with the occasional binge and they are still at 3 drinks after TSM. Well... People like me were up to 16 to 20 drinks a night so the affects of TSM are going to be much more dramatic however it is still working in both examples.

Well I for one am a relatively light drinker, AND I really enjoy drinking AND I do not want to give it up completely, I just did not like the trend I saw in my drinking. AND I have been 100% compliant, I have no problem whatsoever taking the pill every time and waiting an hour. For 8 1/2 months.

The bottom line is that we are all different, and while it is good to share how we are viewing things and how it is working for us, I don't really think that preaching to others is all that helpful. Supporting them to make the best decision for them while being honest about one's own experience is more what I hope this forum is all about.

Nal on!! Newlife

Interesting.

My experience with AA/12 step is limited to getting a colleague through Lambert Airport dead drunk and accompanying him to Florida to drop him off at a rehab facility. I thought I was doing a good deed at the time, and he bought into the program and did the AA thing for a while, but he was dead in less than two years. In part I think it was because he found himself in a such a hopeless state when he resumed drinking.......it left him feeling like a failure, when in fact the guy was a brilliant college professor who should have been at the top of his game, and who had a lot to live for. The experience left me completely soured to that kind of program, and that experience is what eventually what led me to the Sinclair Method. AA/12 step might work for a small few out there, but I've learned enough about it to know that it sure as hell isn't for me.

Clarion, the one thing about TSM that I find absurdly EASY is following the golden rule. Not sure why, but I suspect age, experience, personality, and outlook all play a role. The notion of NOT following the rule fills me with terror. I keep a stash on my key chain, a stash in my office, a stash in my pickup truck, and a minimum 6 month supply at my house. That said, I do recall reading from one of the studies that a large percentage of the roughly 1 in 5 that TSM doesn't work for is due to non-compliance. As programs go though, 4 in 5 compliance is pretty good comparatively speaking.

As for who it works for and who it doesn't? I think (hope) it's safe to point out that TSM appeals to, and appears to work for, people who are educated, intelligent, scientifically minded, and often non-religious, regardless of their various degrees of alcohol use disorder. I suspect that if you did a survey of the people who have participated in this forum over the years you wouldn't come up with anything like to a "typical" cross section of society.

My personal experience in support of the argument that we are all different and you don't have to be emotionally "ready". I drank beloved brews in the evening. Excessively. 1 led to 8. Something of a rush junky but not really ruining my life. My prime motive was diabetes. My numbers were off the chart. Practically speaking, I knew the alcohol had to go. TSM worked brilliantly and immediately in that it gave me the power to control. I can enjoy 2 brews immensely and stop. I could NOT stop before. I don't miss the heavy drinking and have not changed a lot about my life. I now enjoy beer for the taste and warm relaxant effect but don't endlessly chase the buzz. And my numbers all good. Just sayin.
Steve.

With no treat of diabetes, would your story have a different ending?

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

are you certain that quote is helpful in any way?

Probably.
My point was that I was NOT emotionally or socially bottomed out. I was NOT desperate. I needed to quit for practical health reasons. TSM made it possible...even easy. If you will recall, I pissed everybody off some time ago by saying it might work better on the LESS addicted. You, as I recall, were first to brand me a heretic. Regardless, in the following months, I realized there is NO easy prediction as to how TSM will work for an individual. No matter how "certain" YOU are that you know how it works, you really only know how it works for YOU.
Steve.

Quite: We must always remain vigilant.

Congrats! I love to hear that. That is exactly the way it works for me too though I was a lot worse a drinker. I took a quarter tab of Naltrexone and had two beers after my evening bike race last night with my friends on the team like we do every Wednesday. Before TSM I'd have 4 beers before showing up at the bar, then probably 4-6 while there and then one or two when I got home. In between all that it would not be uncommon for me to bump it up with a shot or two of vodka just to be on the safe side.

It's simply amazing and I have no words to describe it.