"Sorry I disagree. I don't really agree with the illness model of alcoholism."
Take it up with the World Health organisation and the British Medical Association, who both define it as such.
When I say I lied about it for purely pragmatic reasons, I mean I did not, as you seem to be hinting, lie out of a sense of shame about the quantities. I did not hide my drinking in the way that many alcoholics do. Does that mean I'm not an alcoholic, do you think, or does it mean that we cannot genralise about alcoholic behaviour?
I have no desire to take the focus off the behaviour. The point i was trying to make was that it is misleading to define alcoholics by behaviour as you did, ie "this is what all alcoholics do," because it's bollocks. Lots of alcoholics i know have done things that I do not believe I have ever done (murder springs to mind) and I have done things that probably many of them have not (deliberately piss myself on a train to avoid waiting for the toilet springs to mind.) If we all defined ourselves in terms of whether we had ticked box x or y, we would all have been dead a long time ago.
I absolutely take responsibility for what I did in active alcoholism and have taken steps to rectify it or make reparation where possible (I wonder how many non-alcoholics have done that, incidentally?) At the same time, most people accept that alcoholism is an addiction. Like all addicts, my addiction led me to do out of character things, and also to act out on things that were very much in character but which the sober me kept a lid on. It was me that did them, true enough - but not any "me" I recognise now.
Similarly, I take full responsibility for drawing on my mum's walls when I was three, but would think it unfair of you if you held it against me now, especially if I had offered to repaper the room.
"With alcoholics it's the behaviour that the problem at the end of the day." You could say that about most people, really - "it's not you I dislike so much as the things you sometimes do/say/write/don't do." An alcoholic being an alcoholic, as long as he or she remains addicted, the behaviour is not going to change. So you either desert them entirely (tougher than it sounds when they are your family, as the OP is finding) or you offer them solutions to the illness (again, take it up with the BMA.)
I find it quite irratating, tbh, to be told by a non-alcoholic what it is that alcoholics "do" and "don't do" and "feel" and "don't feel" - I think, after plenty of experience drinking, and then 8 years of self-conscious recovery (the last 7 of them continuously sober, one day at a time) I have a fairly good awareness of what I do, did, feel and felt and I also know where I am typical and where I am unusual.
Incidentally, I would love to know what, exactly, I am in denial about - I think you will find that, even by the standards of an anonymous chat room, I am more frank and open than most on here about the exact nature of my drinking and what I did as a result. You are welcome to look for me on other threads on similar topics and prove this for yourself.