Alcohol abuse.

Like any other illness, an addiction to alcohol progresses unless it is somehow arrested. This can go on for years, and as you progress in your drinking, as a natural side effect to reaching the advanced stages of alcoholism, your life disintegrates. The question is - how much can you take?

This life disintegration happens after your total loss of control over alcohol is becoming old news, and your life centers around feeding your addiction. Your life will also become more microscopic as a result. You are being completely controlled by your addiction to alcohol and the addiction process itself. Obtaining alcohol, pouring the first of many drinks can have sort of a ritualistic quality, very similar to different forms of drug addiction. And as we know, alcohol is a drug.

This more advanced stage of alcoholism is accompanied by excessive anger, pain, fear, shame, and loneliness, which is more than your average person can handle, and it wears you down. You start to break down under the pressure, so you get relief through continued alcohol use, likely increasing the quantity of alcohol for relief, which in reality makes matters worse. You find yourself just surviving and nothing more.

In this advanced stage, you are no longer deriving pleasure from drinking, you are trying to escape the pain. The magic that was there when you started drinking is gone and you find your behavior has changed. You are no longer the person you were.

As your personality disintegrates as well, the few coping skills you had to begin with are all but gone and most start to isolate or (continue to) spend time with other addicts. Spending time with loved ones and friends has become a burden.

You are subject to a deeper kind of depression and anxiety and may start contemplating suicide.

Chances are you will stay in this "limbo" until a crisis appears to force you to address your illness. Unfortunately, alcoholics are resilient and it may take more than one crisis for the drinker to really seriously address the idea of putting a stop to the drinking and all of that suffering and pain that comes with it.