The best way for you to get that new experience is to change your response to what happens.

When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy.

If you are surrounded by people who not only don't believe in your goals and your positive outlook on life, but who also continually try to tear you down, it will be extremely challenging for you to hold firmly in mind that you will succeed and that you can be happy.

How do you change what you believe when your experience has convinced you otherwise? By creating a new experience. The best way for you to get that new experience is to change your response to what happens. By the natural law of cause and effect, that new response will create new results, which you will then experience as a new reality. To reach the goal of happiness, act as though the following statement is already true: Everything that happens to me is the best thing that can happen to me.

I wrote this book to show you that a cure is entirely possible because I've seen it happen over and over again.

Embrace simplicity…be content with what you have and are, and not one can despoil you.

Think about the stigma that is attached to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, an incurable illness, and you have it. That's a terrible thing to inflict on someone. Labeling alcoholism as a disease, a cause unto itself, simply no longer fits with what we know today about its causes.