First of all, determine the extent of your problem. This can be done with some creative experimenting on your part. Understand that you have to take this exercise seriously or it will not reveal anything meaningful to you.

What you should do is to go for the next 30 days and limit yourself to one drink maximum per day. Take this very seriously so that you can prove to yourself exactly how bad your drinking problem is. After this experiment is over with, you should do another one in which you go for another 30 days without taking any alcohol at all. Period.

Now if you do these two 30 day trials and take them seriously then you should learn quite a bit about the true nature of your drinking problem. If you do not struggle with either experiment, then chances are pretty good that you either do not have a drinking problem, or that you are so early in the stages of your problem that it is very easy for you to control it. This is the best case scenario.

On the other hand, say that you struggle with the first experiment but not the second one. This would indicate that you have an alcohol abuse problem. When you start drinking, you have a lot of difficulty controlling it. But due to the fact that you did not have any trouble with the total abstinence experiment, then chances are that you are not an alcoholic.

Now say that the effect is reversed, and you struggle with the second experiment but not with the first one. So you did not struggle when taking a single drink per day, and you could actually control your intake, but when trying to go without any alcohol your life became unmanageable and your probably ended up abandoning the trial altogether. If this is true, then the outlook for you and your future drinking is a lot worse in this case. I believe that this proves you are truly addicted to alcohol, and are suffering from alcoholism.

The biggest problem would be indicated if you were to screw up at both of the 30 day experiments or completely give up on both of them. This would point to a strong indication that you might be an alcoholic.

Now what should you do with the results of these experiments? Well, if you deem yourself to have a problem with alcohol abuse, then you might seek out counseling or therapy. This can help you to learn how to better control your drinking, or learn some new tools to help you to manage your drinking in the future.

If, on the other hand, you decide that you are an alcoholic, then there is no hope for learning to control or manage your drinking. You have to become completely abstinent from alcohol if you want your life to change and this will mean that you need serious help of some kind. In fact, many people in this situation will need to seek out inpatient treatment in order to get off of the alcohol in a safe manner. After that, the task at hand is to change everything about your life and learn how to live again, without alcohol. Not an easy thing to do by any means, but the reward is tremendous if you can pull it off. A life lived sober is well worth living.