I've never met a happy alcoholic. Since the beginning of my work as a therapist, I have helped many alcoholics to be honest about their addiction, its effect on their families, and to make realistic choices. Sobriety requires enormous work and change, but recovery is possible.

1. Alcoholics drink to self-medicate, using alcohol to cover-up and avoid underlying, unresolved issues that cause depression and anger toward themselves and the people they love. Issues: Can be trauma-based (rape, abandonment) or caused by unresolved childhood issues (rejection, betrayal, abandonment).
2. Alcohol is physically and emotionally addictive, and the amount and frequency of drinking increases over time.
3. Drinking becomes the center of an alcoholic's life: Alcohol is their 'best friend.'
4. Every alcoholic has good reasons to drink, but they are still drunks making bad decisions.
5. Alcoholics disrupt the lives of those around them, particularly those closest to them. They are dishonest and manipulate others to get what they want, including their sympathy and understanding to justify and support their alcoholism.
6. Alcohol often enflames a person's depression, hopelessness, anger, or lack of self-esteem, the very things they are trying to avoid.
7. When drinking, alcoholics are unreasonable, unpredictable, hostile, sad, self-serving, aggressive, socially inappropriate, embarrassing, and manipulative. They often resort to anger and aggression when they don't get their emotional and physical needs met. Then they are remorseful and ask for forgiveness. Then they are sober (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week), and then they find an excuse to start drinking again.
8. The only solution to alcoholism - the ONLY SOLUTION - is to stop drinking completely and forever. To maintain sobriety, an alcoholic must own and understand the underlying issues in their life that have led to using alcohol as self-medication.
9. Sobriety is only part of the solution to living a reasonable, if sometimes painful, life. Honesty about one's flaws, failures, and strengths is the other part to living a reasonable life.
10. It is hard work getting sober. With time and practice, it gets easier, but the struggle is never over. Self-awareness is the reward.