Causes of Alcohol Addiction

What are the causes of alcohol addiction?

Well the first thing you should realize is that the cause does not really matter. Later on in the course of treatment, there might be some small benefit to examining the root causes of what caused us to drink to excess, but in the beginning of our recovery the exact cause does not really matter.

What matters is action. What matters is a solution. That we are moved to do something about our drinking problem. This is what is important when it comes to our disease.

People always point to the stereotypical causes of alcohol addiction, such as being abused as a child, or being abandoned at a young age, and so on. But many people go through these situations without becoming addicted to alcohol. Likewise, many other people who become alcoholics later in life have not had any traumatic experiences in childhood whatsoever. So there really is no rhyme or reason to the disease, no firm causes that can be identified.

Furthermore, they have done studies and determined that the idea of an "addictive personality" cannot really be seen as being conclusive. This label has become meaningless and has no predictive power to it whatsoever. This can be misleading of course, because in retrospect it is quite easy to look at a person and see how they had an "addictive personality," but we have found in our research that it is impossible to predict alcohol addiction based on a person's personality.

In light of the typical causes to alcoholism, it really does not matter what the apparent cause was that created an addiction in someone. Those causes might be issues to be dealt with later as someone reviews their resentments in either stepwork or therapy, but it does nothing to change early recovery. We still have to sober up and take meaningful action in order to change our lives, regardless of what caused our alcoholism.