Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Airline Must Pay $305K to Pilot Who Objected to AA on Religious Grounds" video.

I hate to break it to you, but no matter what program you go through, or if you just do it yourself, once somebody is an alcoholic, they are an alcoholic for life. Yes, some people, myself included, do get to a point where most days we don't need or want a drink, but you're going to have bad days that spring up out of nowhere, sometimes years after the last meaningful urge to use and if you make it through that, it goes back into remission. I gave up on any notion of being "cured" years ago when after the better part of a decade without any urges to drink I started having days where it was all I could do to keep from crawling into a bottle and taking up residence. That hasn't happened to me in several years, fingers crossed. Part of the problem is that you can't really say somebody is no longer an alcoholic other than in retrospect on their death bed having hit a point where there were no more urges and that's rarely the case.
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@ToiOraLAT I do think that focusing on just getting through the day is the only thing that really works in the short term, but yeah, the number of days needing to be continuous isn't that big of a deal. If somebody has only had a drink on a couple days out of a year, that's still quite impressive and worth celebrating. Yes, it is possible to get so drunk on those days that it screws up the rest of the year, or leads to death, but barring that, a couple days out of a year is quite good for somebody that is a problem drinker. In fact, if you can stick to only getting drunk a couple days a year, that's probably an OK outcome for a treatment program as it's less than many non-alcoholics get drunk in a year.
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