"I don't understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I can't. I do what I don't want to--what I hate." Romans 7:15
No one understands the meaning of that verse better than an alcoholic. We want to do what is right. Oh, how we want to be restored to our families and to become respected members of the community once more! However, our craving for beverage alcohol is so powerful we cannot overcome it. You would have to search the world to find a person who has more feelings of guilt and remorse, or feels any more sorry for himself, than alcoholics do. In the throes of our addiction we are, of all men, most miserable.
And not without reason.
We realize, with vague uneasiness, that our personalities are breaking down. We know our ability to do our work is slipping from us. Our families are drifting away or are already gone, and our friends leave us.
We're caught up in a terrifying wheel within a wheel. We are trying to make a recovery and at the same time to satisfy our craving for beverage alcohol. We experience one failure after another. Time and again we make a firm decision to leave liquor alone, followed by a terrible, losing battle and a miserable sickening drunk that triggers another, and another and another. At last, we come to the place where we feel there is no hope for us. And we give ourselves over to the misery of eking out an existence from one bottle to another.
We become strangers to our loved ones and even to ourselves. To get another bottle, we lie and cheat and steal with animal cunning in an effort to outsmart those who are trying to help us.
We will make miserable exhibitions of ourselves before anyone who happens to be around, yet we are too proud to admit that we have a problem with alcohol. We hate what we are and long for help, yet we are too self-centered to ask for it. We would give anything we own to get our family back, yet we're too proud to make any attempt to win them. Added to all these thoughts is the nagging thought that nobody loves us. In fact, we even begin to lose any love we had for ourselves.