And the flip side to what you are saying is that it is telling you are hopeless. Powerless is hopeless to have power, and without power you cannot make change for yourself.
Let's examine this logically.
You choose to believe that you are "powerless when it comes to alcohol". This choice is based on the experience, no doubt, of repeatedly failing to effectively control your use of the substance in the past, and to painful results.
But, you are not powerless when it comes to alcohol or you would still be not just drinking, but drunk. Therefore, you have made at least one choice concerning alcohol which led to something other than your being drunk and therefore you have the ability to make choices concerning alcohol, as, in fact, we all do.
And since you can make choices concerning alcohol, and some of your choices have been to do something other than drink it when you wanted to, you therefore have power concerning alcohol, because your choices are your ability to control things concerning yourself, and control is power.
Since you have control of yourself concerning alcohol, and you believe you do not, we must conclude that you are choosing to believe something that is not true because of a failure to think rationally and logically. We must also conclude that the source of your belief that you are "powerless when it comes to alcohol" is wrong. You do have power over your choices concerning alcohol.
Given this dichotomy, we must conclude reasonably that you have control but either do not realize it, or do not want to believe it. If you did not realize it, my work is done. Otherwise, we must now seek an explanation for why you believe you are powerless when you are not.
My experience has been that this belief that one is powerless when they are not frequently comes from the desire to escape personal responsibility for the power one possesses to make a choice and change, because that responsibility is uncomfortable. Denial of power is denial of personal ability, which is in itself denial of personal responsibility. When one is not responsible for one's beliefs, choices or actions, one can do things they know at some level are not the right thing to do and have a charade that allows them to "get away with it" and perhaps do it again.
In the case of alcoholism, there is no such disease outside the refusal to take personal responsibility for one's actions because that responsibility requires one to face the root cause of the "alcoholism" and deal with it instead of using alcohol and alcoholism as the excuse they are to hide from personal responsibility. Alcoholism is the disease of the mind that one believes they are powerless concerning alcohol. It has nothing to do with alcohol, or actually being powerless, because nobody is really powerless. If Stephen Hawking can write books on leading edge quantum physics using his eye twitches only... you're not helpless, hopeless or powerless. There is no excuse.
Half of the "disease" of alcohol comes from the need to escape from something: physical, mental, emotional pain, guilt, shame, fear, anger, self loathing, grief, hopelessness without having the maturity, understanding of how to, and desire to find alternate ways of coping. The other half comes from the institutions that teach that you are perpetually hopeless, helpless and diseased.
Alcoholism is a state of being. It is not a definition for a person, or an identity. Alcoholism is a state of being in which a person uses alcohol in excess on a regular basis specifically to self medicate away pain, guilt, shame, fear, self loathing, anger, grief or feelings of depression or hopelessness. That state of being is not perpetual, but perpetuated: at any time, the individual acting in an alcoholic manner can make the choice to do something else. They can decide not to visit that bar. Or, if they go to a bar, they can decide not to order alcohol. Or, if they order alcohol, they can choose not to drink it. And if they drink it, they can choose to exercise restraint.
Instead, a person acting in an alcoholic state chooses to do none of those things. But it is a choice. A series of choices, in fact, which makes it anything but random. As they say, actions speak louder than words; what you say will always be revealed to be true or false by your corresponding actions. By choosing to believe you are powerless, you are choosing to eschew personal power and responsibility concerning alcohol. That means you are actually using AA as an excuse to have the option to go drink and act in an alcoholic manner. And that's just fine with AA, because without relapses, who would need AA?
Drinking alcohol is a choice. You always have the choice, and therefore you always have the power to choose something else. The issue is that you don't know how else to cope with your fear/guilt/shame/self loathing/pain/etc. in a way that is as comfortable as alcohol is, and you don't wish to make the effort to find one, or execute that method. It is just easier to drink alcohol as a coping method than to, say, exercise self control. Or seek out, heal, deal with, overcome and move on from the root cause of your desire to self medicate with alcohol.
My grandfather on my mother's side drank himself to death at around the age of 46. Literally drank so hard that his liver dissolved. His reason for this was that he could not deal with the fact that, even though he had flown not the required 25 missions over Germany in a B17 bomber in WWII, but 50 (!), he could not forgive himself for his brother's death when his brother's tank was hit by a German tank shell. He blamed himself for his brother's death, and this guilt was so painful that he turned to alcohol to escape. Which promptly cost him my grandmother and his daughter and two sons, as my grandmother left him to have the ability to put food in her children's mouths, instead of alcohol in his stomach. He died homeless, penniless, and very young.
All of this was a choice. First he chose to believe that his brother's death was somehow his fault. Then he chose to seek escape instead of trying to deal with his pain and grief. Next, he chose to perpetuate his escape even at the expense of his wife and children. Finally, he chose to die rather than consider that maybe he should ask for help.
All choices he made. Stupid choices, but choices nonetheless.
Nobody is different. We all have the ability to make choices for ourselves. Every move you make, action you take, choice you make, and all the results of what you do, think, say and believe are all in themselves a choice. They all stem from what you believe to be true, and that is also a choice. If it wasn't we wouldn't have a million and one religious denominations out there, with people switching between them to validate and suit their current choice of beliefs.
You have the choice as to what you do and do not to. When you do what you do. Where you do what you do. How you do it. All this is based on your actions, and those are based on your choices, and those are based on your beliefs, which are also based on your choices, because again, we choose what we believe to be true.
An interesting fact: the subconscious mind has no concept of good or bad. It simply does what it believes to be what you want it to do. And what does it believe you want it to do? Whatever it is you have accepted as true, it understands as a set of instructions. "Make this true outwardly." And it goes about doing exactly that. You may not consciously see it, realize it, recognize it, but that is exactly what is happening. Whatever you choose to believe, your subconscious mind supports the external manifestation of by directing your actions and choices accordingly.
So if you believe you are an "alcoholic", guess what your subconscious is working to make true? You being an "alcoholic"! And what does an "alcoholic" do by definition? Drink alcohol in excess and without control, of course! And at every AA meeting, what is the first thing you hear out of everyone's mouth? "Hi, I'm ________, and I'm an alcoholic." Tada! Perfect recipe for a "relapse". In fact the 12 step programs are designed psychologically to perpetuate the problem, not fix it. The best an AA member can hope for is to be stuck being an "alcoholic" for the rest of their lives, and with luck, they find a way to define "recovering alcoholic" in a way that does not include a relapse and then identify strongly enough as a "recovering alcoholic" that they stop drinking. But as a "recovering alcoholic", they must forever go back to AA meetings and be brainwashed again and again into believing they are diseased, hopeless, helpless and powerless. That they are an alcoholic, and there will never be any other reality.
The truth is that what you believe is what you make real, and this can be seen for example in my mother. When I was 11, my mother was literally dragged to her first AA meeting, drunk off her ass. Ironically, she was dragged to this meeting my one of my uncles, who was just as bad off, but who was still fully in denial about his own drinking. From that day forward, she never drank again.
She was a member of AA for five years before she stopped going to meetings, and yet she spent the last 29 years of her life stone cold sober. Why did she stop going? Because she realized that she didn't need AA. She was tired of the politics, the squabbles, the petty manipulations, the brainwashing, the failure based thinking, and the constant reminders of hopeless-helpless-diseased-alcoholic.
One thing I have never failed to see an AA member do is identify as an alcoholic. One thing I never saw her do after she left AA was... identify as an alcoholic.
Overcoming alcoholism means understanding that your reality is the result of your choices. And your choices are the result of your actions. And your actions are the result of YOUR CHOICES... and your choices are the result of your beliefs.
If you choose to believe that it is better to be drunk than to try to find the cause of the pain and fix it, then you will be drunk until the pain magically vanishes. (Not gonna happen.) If you believe that alcoholism is a disease, then you don't have to be responsible for what you do, because you can always blame the disease. "I get a free pass to drink all the time and screw up mine and everyone else's life because I have this official disease, see?" It all boils down to maturity and taking responsibility for yourself. Those who have it, recognize that pain means they need to fix something, so they set about figuring out what to fix, how to fix it, and then fixing it. Those who don't, try to hide, escape, blame someone or something else, and generally claim to be helpless, hopeless and powerless.
AA is a cult of the voluntarily powerless, which is a choice, because they don't know how, or where to find a better solution. Those who do, leave AA. And frequently that better solution is to stop identifying as a diseased, hopeless, helpless alcoholic, suck it up and face life from a position of "I can!" instead.
You are not an "alcoholic". You are a person who finds it easier to be drunk than face the challenges life has given you to overcome, and who does not have the understanding of how to get past those challenges otherwise, or the will to do so. You do not have a disease; you have a lack of understanding of the solution, or perhaps a lack of desire to take the harder-but-better road of fixing the problem. You are not hopeless or helpless unless you choose to believe that you are, and in so doing, make yourself such - which is basically using your power to do nothing.
Not all of growing up has to do with the age of the physical body. Some of it has to do with the age of the mind and emotions. Alcoholism is a problem that affects those who start off without the maturity to do otherwise. That does not mean you do not always have the power and ability to choose another path, one of growth, accepting personal responsibility and fixing the problem instead of trying to deny and hide from it.
The same is true for drug addicts, including cigarette users, whose drug addiction has become so commonplace as to no longer be seen as a drug addiction, and "food addicts" who use food as their drug of choice.
This might interest you to read.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0807033154
You can read an excerpt from it here:
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/the_pseu...addiction/
