Originally Posted by Jel

brushing it aside so carte blanche as just being a choice is what keeps many addicts from seeking help waaaaaaaaay earlier - this mass-thinking that it's purely a matter of choice/willpower.

Once you have someone IN recovery, then yeah, like you did with your sponsees, you can lay out the choice thing, because without the substance being in their system 24/7, the head clears, and that ability of choice returns over a period of time (however long that might be for each individual).

I can only speak about alcohol, but who the fuck thinks, at age 15 "I better not touch this stuff, there's a 10% chance I'll become an alcoholic in later life, even though my perception of an alcoholic is a homeless bum" - well, pretty much no-one, and why the fuck would they lol. By the time the addiction is full blown, any 'choice' in it has long gone, and your mind is detached from reality anyway (as I think you've said before, you create your own reality anyway, according to your own perceptions).

So a blase 'it's purely choice' and 'he had 150m in the bank' is a cop-out to save the hard work of understanding/discussing/fill-in-the-blank the extremely complex workings of the mind. When let's face it, no-one is even close to understanding a fraction of how their own mind operates, let alone claim that some shitty soundbite can explain the way someone else's mind works.