That’s definitely true. It will need to go a bit deeper than just stopping though: you will have to dig into your habits and your mentality, your psychology, your escape patterns (having been addicted to anything, including alcohol, means you were escaping - and until you learn to stop escaping, you’ll keep struggling with the alcohol, or with some other addiction).
Your opening post here, on this thread, is almost identical to your very first post on Talking Sober, in July 2020:
There’s a reason why the pattern repeated. There was no fundamental change of your emotional and mental landscape.
It’s like a river flowing. The river will always flow over the easiest route, it will follow gravity through the channels it has created over its history (just like we create patterns and “channels” of behaviours over our drinking or using careers). It is possible to change the flow of the river and therefore change the negative patterns, but it takes engineering and building dams and levees and chutes and other new structures, which will redirect the river.
The new structures you build, to re-route your mental and emotional (and behavioural) river, are built (and maintained over time) by learning about your addiction and your recovery, and by continuing that learning (you don’t stop - life is a learning journey). (You are an addict. We all are. It’s not something you need to feel ashamed of. I am diabetic. I’m not ashamed of that either. It just means I need to change my relationship with food. We addicts who choose to recover, who choose to change our emotional and mental and behavioural patterns, need to learn how to change and to end our relationship with our addiction substance.)
You are building a new way of living and thinking, and to do that you will need to educate yourself. This thread has good resources to get you started, groups and books and podcasts and others:
Keep at it, keep in touch here on Talking Sober, don’t isolate and don’t stop communicating, especially when you don’t feel like it (which is usually the times you need it the most). Pay attention to HALT - are you Hungry? Angry/resentful? Lonely? Tired? - because those are warning signs, and when you feel those, you should reach out to share (here or in another recovery place).
Don’t give up. Take it one day at a time. That’s all it is, you’re making choices today. You’re not making choices for tomorrow, just today.