Willpower might not be necessary to shed an addiction, but it sure helps. So says longtime addict and contributor to the Quora website Winton Chavez. This individual is a library of addiction lore.

An important factor here is that if a person had willpower in the first place, they would have always reined in their substance use, and would not have graduated from occasional user to full-time addict. In fact, telling yourself “I’m not really hooked, I know when it’s time to quit, and I have the willpower to do it” is a prime example of stinking thinking. So is, “I can never even get hooked, addiction doesn’t run in my family” or similar nonsense.

Here is another one: “Well okay, I really let myself go overboard again. But now I know the signs of too much, and next time will be different.” However, as many people in a position to know have pointed out, nobody ever thinks they will become an addict.

If the total truth were known, on how many tombstones would this be engraved? “Next Time Will Be Different.” Sure it will, you stinkin’ thinker. According to this expert, for most people willpower does not occur inherently, but is a skill that has to be developed or acquired somehow — and an addict never acquired or developed it.

What is not difficult to have, however, is desire. Most of us are born with a ton of it. We are totally programmed to want a nipple that delivers warm milk, and from that starting point, desire does nothing but increase. So when you grow up and become an addict, the only thing that can save you is not willpower — the drive not to do something — but desire. The positive drive to do something, namely, get sober, is the only real cure:

You have to WANT, more than ANYTHING ELSE, to let go 100% of your addictions — ALL of them… You can’t keep any part of your addictions in your pocket, or hide them in the closet. Everything Must Go…. ANYTHING associated with the addiction needs to be uninstalled from your brain… The addiction must become NOT optional; not on special occasions, not ‘just a little bit’, and definitely never ‘just this one time’.

A disillusioned Alcoholics Anonymous veteran called “Orange” wrote quite a lot about the respected program, including the assertion that its success rate is only 5%, and not even that, because if AA never existed, there would be a 5% spontaneous remission rate anyway. Who are these rare 5-percenters?

They just get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and of watching their friends die… They often quit with little or no official treatment or help… They just quit, all on their own, or with the help of a couple of good friends who keep them locked up for a few days while they go through withdrawal.

To digress for a moment, one anonymous man used an online forum to confess that he seemed to have won some kind of genetic lottery that allowed him to escape addiction with relative ease. To be so successful in his own long-term recovery made him feel kind of bad. He had helped several friends to detox, and they all made it.

Getting back to “Orange,” he didn’t use the term “stinking thinking,” but did warn that people of every philosophy can be vulnerable to it. Extremely versatile, stinkin’ thinkin’ is available to the sober and the inebriated alike. To take the first sip or hit is easy to rationalize. “I’m powerless. I can’t help it. The Big Book says I have no defense…”

Claiming that the AA doctrine of powerlessness actually leads to binge drinking, he cited research to prove it. In addition, once you have started, you see how much sense it makes to just keep going. Especially since you have sworn this will be the last time. Might as well go out with a bang.

Written by Pat Hartman. First published March 7, 2025.

Sources:

“The Effectiveness of the Twelve-Step Treatment,” Orange Papers, September 12, 2016.

“Winton Chavez,” Quora.com, undated.

Image Copyright: affen ajlfe/Public Domain.