It means that you do not have total recall of what happened while you were drinking. My friend Bob s wife taped his drunken ravings one night because the next morning he never remembered having said them. If you call your best friend and say I know I had a great time at your house last night. If you think alcohol is the answer but cannot remember what the question was, you definitely have a problem. If you wake up in a strange bed and have no idea where you are or how you got there, it is time to pack yourself off to a treatment center.
Alcoholics drink to numb the pain of living.
They stop drinking when they hit bottom, meaning that the pain caused by the drinking becomes even worse than the pain they drank to avoid. Some of us have high bottoms and others low ones. My friend Blackie had a low bottom. After he had been arrested a couple of times, his wife had divorced him, his boss fired him, his parents kicked him out of their house, and all his sober friends repudiated him, he woke up one morning in his automobile, surrounded by all his worldly possessions and thought to himself, Maybe I am doing something wrong . It takes whatever it takes.