What are the Various Strategies to Stop Drinking Alcohol?

For the true alcoholic, the idea that they can just stop drinking is no light matter. Since there are several different strategies that can be used to quit drinking with, which ones give good results in most situations?

1) Willpower - This is essentially the same as not using any technique at all, but only relying on one’s own willpower to avoid picking up another drink. Of course this has been attempted by numerous drunks over the years and time and time again we prove to ourselves that we cannot quit successfully without serious help. Ever.

2) AVRT - this stands for “Addictive Voice Recognition Technique,” so this is essentially an example of a cognitive therapy for quitting drinking. The idea here is to recognize when your “addictive voice” is speaking and recognize it as being “your addiction” instead of the real you. Then you are able to tell this addictive voice that you do not want to drink when it starts to get active with you.

There are other therapies out there that are similar to this, each with the concept that we can change up our thinking in order to change our behavior. These kinds of cognitive techniques do work well for some alcoholics, but for most of us in recovery, these types of mental gymnastics are not really enough to completely solve our drinking problem.

3) AA - Twelve step programs are probably the most widespread solution for alcoholism, and because of this, they offer the most amount of hope and the most realistic solution for most people in most situations. But there are problems and limitations with AA as a solution as well. For one thing–while it is difficult to find accurate data regarding this–the success rate in AA is probably somewhere in the range of 3 to 10 percent. To be fair, though, no other treatment method seems to offer substantially better numbers than this, and AA certainly has helped a lot of those who wanted to know how to stop drinking.

The problem is not that AA doesn’t work for people, but only that it does not work for the majority and if it does then it usually requires a supplemental strategy. Perhaps the most effective recovery strategy is in a holistic method that treats the disease of alcoholism from multiple perspectives. This is known as the creative life in recovery. Finding your way to this solution requires a holistic approach if you want to stop drinking.