I was convinced via Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) that I would die if I drank again (1) , and was sober for almost nine years. After having become sober early on (17 years old) and after only having used alcohol and drugs in a rather heavy manner for a little over a year, I often wondered whether I was really an alcoholic like is discussed in the Big Book (AA text), I finally decided to experiment.
I had one beer at a comedy club in a circumstance where I knew I'd just have one and self-observe. I noticed the feeling, but did not have compulsions to drink anymore either that night or in the future. I enjoyed the experience by very much believed that if I had good reason, I could still live without alcohol for the rest of my life. It's been about 6 months, now, and I drink on occasion, mostly socially or after a hard day or celebratory occurrence, and it's been going great.
AA actually does say "... and for us, to drink is to die" in several various ways ((Big Book, 4th ed., p. 66 is one example).
I'll simply add that AA-ers would probably respond that I, apparently, was not/am not a true alcoholic and that a real one would have gone crazy into alcohol after an experiment like mine. In any case, they accepted me like a true one and my AA-based boarding school thought I was one.
[1] At least in some form. AA teaches that drinking only has three ends for the Alcholic: jails, institutions, and death. Perhaps I wouldn't have literally died in an institution, but I might have felt like dying.
It would be interesting to have some real data on consequences of AA style therapy vs. any other methods. I thought I have read something about that, but without remembering any source, well ...
Have you had a look into such things once?
Today I received some shoes in the post, which included a couple of packets of silica gel. I don't think I have ever seen a packet of silica gel that didn't have "DO NOT EAT" printed on it, and it's always bemused me. It doesn't look edible, or smell appetising, and isn't even especially harmful to ingest in most circumstances. Chances are that if I ever did want to eat silica gel, I'd probably have a damn good reason, and a lifetime of being told to not eat it is an obstacle to that.
This has started me thinking about all the other things we internalise as serious hazards contrary to reality. As a child, I was told that picking my nose and eating it would have some sort of cumulative toxic effect. This was obviously a lie manufactured by my parents (or maybe their parents) to get me to stop doing it, but a couple of decades later I felt positively scandalised when I read about an Austrian pathologist who claimed the practise was beneficial to the immune system. (Although this is mentioned in the delightful Wikipedia page on nose-picking, the reference links are dead, so I'd actually treat this assertion with caution, but feel free to munch away on your own dried nasal mucus anyway).
Although nose-picking and eating the packaging that shoes come in are pretty trivial examples, I do wonder how many of these prohibitive false dire consequences I'm still labouring under, invisibly making my life more difficult. I also wonder how many full-grown adults still don't accept sweets from strangers.
Do you have any examples of an authority figure, or a prevailing piece of cultural conditioning, giving warnings of dire outcomes you later discovered to be false, misleading or based on an agenda you were naive to at the time?