Dr. Neill Neill
Addiction to a drug like alcohol develops gradually. Drinking alcohol may start out as social fun, or it may from the beginning be a way of escaping pain and difficulty. Sometime I think of it as one of dissociation’s helpers, because alcohol helps a person to split off from reality. But that's an idea for another post.
The point is that people cannot know whether alcohol has become an addiction until they are deprived of it, either through circumstance or through an attempt to quit drinking.
