Hi daredevil,
I haven’t read any of your other posts, but you landed in a forum of SR that I frequent. Welcome. And to the others following in the tailwinds.
A liter of vodka over 50 hours or so, that sounds about right to me.
You got what you wanted. If I think about it hard, a part of me is a little jealous. It also sounds to me like you’re doing pretty well; capable, sociable, willing to take chances, but understanding and wanting stability. And you’re here, you want permanent abstinence, and are asking for help.
You know it would be best for you never, ever again, at any time, for the rest of your life, to swallow alcohol. Why won’t/can’t you just do it; what’s preventing you from taking the pledge? Is it that time factor that keeps changing your conviction? You’re not alone.
Addictive Voice Recognition Technique can put you in a very advantageous position to take the once-in-a-lifetime pledge of permanent abstinence.
Here’s a couple exercises to set up a foundation for AVRT if you want to try it out.
Take your non-dominant hand and make it into a fist. Take your dominant hand and wrap it over the top of the fist like a five tentacled octopus grabbing the fist. This blob of hand flesh and bones that you are looking at represents your brain.
With this simple structural model of your brain, the fist represents the ancient, primitive part that has kept you alive; the vibrant spark of replicating life you possess that can be traced without interruption back billions of years. We’ll call it the mid-brain. Now, this is important, it’s totality is Pleasure Seeking and pain prevention. As human’s we “know” that all that pleasure seeking keeps us alive, but the human neocortex is only a several million years old. The pleasure drivers of life are billions of years old.
Your dominant hand, wrapping over and grasping control of your fist, represents your neocortex, with all your uniquely human attributes; and this is important, it posessses your ability to inhibit pleasure seeking with YOUR total control of all your voluntary muscles. Human society is completely dependent upon how, when, and why we control of our animalistic midbrain pleasure seeking appetites; breathing, sleeping, eating/drinking, passing waste, and procreating.
Everyone here has been quite intimate with our own appetites for booze. Well, AVRT calls this central nervous duality “the structural model of addiction” and uses it to clearly identify the strength and weaknesses of the unwanted appetite for booze.
IT, your midbrain, wants to drink some more, but YOU, your neo-cortex knows you’d better abstain permanently because you’ve done enough moderation experiments and they don’t work.
Now, lets call the five fingers of the fist hand your basic survival appetites, breathing being the thumb, and the other four food, sleep, waste, sex. Now, stick your fist thumb representing breathing out from the fist and pointing towards you. That represents you consciously recognizing that appetite and deciding to hold your breath. You’ve temporarily evicted that appetite from its midbrain functioning and you have started the process of voluntarily trying to suffocate yourself. (It won’t work, because you’d pass out first and start breathing involuntarily again). Holding your breath for a long time can cause a lot of unpleasant thoughts and feelings along with the huge demand for more oxygen. It’s like a phormer drunk’s first several weeks, or even months.
So, this is what we want to do with the appetite for booze. Start over with the hand representation but also take a pencil or pen and hold it in the fist hand with the extra length sticking out away from you so you can’t see it. This represents the state of addiction. You’ve got the invasive deep pleasure based appetite for booze, and you haven’t recognized it as such, YET. All this time, make sure your dominant hand is clawlike grasping your fist.
Now, push the pen/pencil through your fist so the extra length sticks out towards you. This represents that you are learning Addictive Voice Recognition Technique. YOU SEE IT. There it is. It’s obvious in its difference from your fingers, but it’s still there in your fist. A survival based appetite for booze with all the ancient demanding forces of the other appetites.
Now, take the pen/pencil out of your fist and put it in your shirt pocket or somewhere where you can still see it. This represents taking the once in a lifetime pledge of permanent abstinence. The appetite to drink some more does still exist, but you have removed it forever, from any possible connection to your voluntary muscles.
Drinking alcohol is such an obvious and deliberate event, that it is patently obvious that permanent abstinence can be acheived perfectly. Your midbrain, or in AVRT, the BEAST, cannot get you to drink any more than that pencil in your pocket can get you to drink. If you want to get dramatic, you can stuff and cut off the finger of a glove, or you can go to the Costume/Halloween/Party store and buy a plastic finger and put that in your pocket as a representation of your AV’s inability to get you to drink.
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Here’s another exercise.
In this exercise the fist represents only the unwanted appetite for booze.
Put your hands back in the BEAST fist and NeoCortex wrap over it again.
Look at it and imagine the motives of each regarding drinking some more.
IT wants more of that deep pleasure sooner or later, it doesn’t really matter, when the desire gets strong enough YOU will feel the demand to mobilize and repeat the habit.
YOU are toying with what NEVER having that deep pleasure any more, ever again means. You see your life spread out behind you, and what may come ahead of you if you drink, or if you quit forever.
While you look at your hands in front of you some more, be aware, the human YOU, your dominant hand wrapping around, have absolute and complete control over whether it will be able to get to swallow that next first drink.
Now, experiment with the sentence “I will never drink again” and at the same time separate your hands a little bit while keeping them in the same shape. Next, open up your claw shaped neocortex hand all the way and face the palm towards you. At the same time move the Beast fist gradually away and move it around, but never let it get completely out of you perriferal line of vision. Then, directly in front of you, wiggle some or all the fingers of your neocortex hand all around in various deliberate motions.
The Beast is detached and hovering, but still there. You are going ahead and living your life while recognizing the Beast and it’s AV barking. If that fist starts moving closer to your open hand with wiggling fingers, it’s easy to just bat it away to the very edge of your view. There’s no need to imagine that it must disappear, because having that Beast is not a sign of disease or weakness, it is a sign that you have a healthy midbrain with appetite drives that keep you alive. That one, though, is one you can decidedly never again act upon.
If you have an interest in AVRT, and are willing to use it to take personal responsibility for both your addiction and your recovery, then you have completed over 90% of all the work and struggles related to your addiction and your recovery.
AVRT is a dissociative technique that isolates the appetite for alcoholic pleasure and renders it powerless - all the time, every time. I hope you choose to learn it and get on with the rest of your life.
GT