“You cant hypnotize an alcoholic. They don’t give up control.”
I think it was a Coffee News joke. At any rate, its true. Alcoholics do not give up control and they have a tendency not to learn well, either.
I am the primary example. Still, even in sobriety.
I didn’t give up control when been taught or advised on many things when I was a kid or a teen. To think of it now, I don’t know what I was fighting against. I didn’t know what guns I was sticking to, at least most of the time I didn’t know. Sure, kids do that, but some of them learn after. As for me, though, I was not of sharp mind, making few mistakes. Quite the opposite, actually. So, rejecting help was not exactly smart of me.
Several years back I saw a book in public library that collected graduate students letters to their younger selves: what would they have advised themselves of or against of?
I know from my work experience with drugs and alcohol recovery program that it is encouraged and a part of curriculum in some places to write a letter to yourselves in the future, for encouragement, to remember where you came from and how hard, but important was the change.
Now here was a different idea – it was acknowledgement of what you now know and, perhaps, how you learned it, with an opportunistic twist of going back in time and teaching your younger self of what to do and what not.
I thought of that. What would I write in a letter to my younger self if he/I had a a chance to hear it? What would I advise myself of (without worrying much about Back to the Future principle “change the past – change/endanger the future”? To take some particular opportunity? Talk to that girl in high school? To not talk to that kid? How about not taking any of those drinks?
And then another memory came – of talking to a teen about his issues. I wrote about it years back. In a nutshell – would I in age 14 listen to older me looking like a hippie with a job in a homeless shelter talking to me of how messed up he has got before he got better?
Again, I still I wasn’t listening to anyone about life, with about the same dedication that i gave into running with ADHD wolf in regards to my academic studies. Nobody tried to hypnotize me though. Who knows, I might have had agreed to that, for the morbid fun of it. But would I listen to me? Would I care to read that letter? Somehow, I think not.
I now have got two decades of sobriety under my belt, but I am certainly not a wise person. I maybe a better student, though. I started learning of many things when I joined AA. That is one school I had to put a lot of my attention and work into, in order to quit drinking and stay sober, and positive at that. I really wanted that. And it worked, in some ways better than I ever expected.
the image was copied from https://www.google.com/imgres?q=hypnotize%20funny&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthumbs.dreamstime.com%2Fb%2Fhypnotist-39836.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dreamstime.com%2Fillustration%2Fman-hypnotize.html&docid=MOlalCKiRZEMTM&tbnid=P7CI7r1F_NX3zM&vet=12ahUKEwixvsK07_SNAxVrFTQIHYG3H6AQM3oECFoQAA..i&w=800&h=564&hcb=2&ved=2ahUKEwixvsK07_SNAxVrFTQIHYG3H6AQM3oECFoQAA. thankyou.
Trezvennost II 
