DriGuy

I know it's hard, believe me. I've been there. The opposite side of "hard" is "easy" but I'm not saying it's easy either. Simple? Yes, I can own that, but simple is not the opposite of hard. The simplicity is in not drinking, but it's up to each of us to find our way to that. In the end, that's what we need to do. Alcoholics often have the gift of making this more complicated than it needs to be. Breaking the problem down to it's simplest form is the way I did it. It may not be right for everyone.

Hodd

Bit flippant of me to say this, but any old excuse will do. Why stop drinking when you can analyse it instead?

I remember going to my one and only counselling session. It was near my house and my local supermarket. I said farewell to the counsellor and headed to the supermarket to buy you know what. I remember thinking how tragically comical it would be if the counsellor had seen me in the checkout queue. In my case, I knew quitting 100% was the only way but another several months passed before I did anything about it, i.e. quit.

A couple of years on I can probably analyse. I reckon I’m a bit compulsive. If I buy four bread rolls to eat over a couple of days, I’ll scoff the lot in one go. I drink buckets of tea and coffee and quickly too. It’s not an issue as I can switch to caffeine free and continue to guzzle. I obviously did the same with alcohol and got addicted along the way. That’s my analysis. Knowing that wouldn’t have helped me as a drinker.

I’m probably guilty of making it all sound so easy and frivolous. It was far from easy.

Dee74

Welcome back Cornishman
Staying sober is pretty simple - don’t drink - but simple is not always easy.

Everytime I went back to drinking I had lofty ideals of always drinking like a gentleman..never getting wasted…but everytime all bets were off once I had that first drink.

Once I accepted that – it’s the first drink that does the damage rather than blaming the last - it got a lot harder for me to rationalise the first drink.

Acceptance worked a lot better for me than willpower. Again, after that first drink, my willpower disappeared.

I used to follow the line of thought that I was an alcoholic, it was some kind of innate disease/condition I suffered from and that it was inevitable I’d drink again…but that’s not true.

I may be an alcoholic, but I don’t have to drink.
D

Dee74

Max hope you’re doing ok?

D

DriGuy

That is the truth, and I spent months analyzing my problem to no avail. I kept searching for the reason my drinking was out of control thinking that if I could identify some subconscious motivation, I could solve the problem. I'm pretty good at that kind of thing too, but I always came up with zilch.

What I needed to do was quit, and when I finally did that, I found the insight I was looking for. You see, it turns out I was addicted to alcohol. But here's the thing; Be it addiction, bad potty training, or betrayal of some past love, it is all irrelevant to the solution. You have to quit. It's that simple, not easy, but simple, and I wasted a lot of time wandering around in my head when I should have been changing my behavior. Realizing after the fact that all I needed was to change my behavior was still a precious insight, as big a deal as any insight I got from self inspection.

So why was it so hard? Self analysis, was the easiest path to follow, because that's the way I had been solving my problems up to that time. Easy, but the wrong path and unproductive, especially in the case of alcoholism. On the other hand, major changes in my behavior without analysis was mostly new to me, and that was a lot harder, but a much more direct path to the goal. Today, I've honed some of my behavior skills, and this has helped me find solutions to other problems as well.

I was in my 50s, when I made this discovery. The embarrassing part is that a lot of people probably have that figured out by their 20s, but at least I found it, so I'm not going to whine about finding the treasure so late in life.

I paid good money to three different counselors looking for the cause of my alcoholism, and never found it there, well, with two out of the three, anyway. I'm sure they all knew what the problem was, but only one of them actually redirected me to look in the right place. I said goodbye to that counselor too. She said she would be happy to talk to me if I actually quit drinking, and I remember thinking, "If I quit drinking what possible reason would I have for talking to you?" Kind of funny, I guess, but who knows, I may have uncovered more stuff about life had I done that. I did meet her on the street months later. I told her I had quit, and she seemed happy with that, and she didn't seem worried or slighted that I hadn't scheduled any more appointments with her.

Hodd

I’m sure there are excellent counsellors out there, so I feel guilty being so dismissive of the one I saw.

I had to see that counsellor to tick a box and be prescribed Campral. The first ten minutes of the appointment were answering boiler plate questions which could’ve been done beforehand and did nothing to put me at ease. I can’t remember much about the rest of the session although when I said I’d cut down by buying smaller bottles of wine, she said she often advised clients to do that. It’s hardly the greatest advice to give an alcoholic. Also, the fact I left the session and bought wine two minutes later says it all.

I’ve wondered if I’d make a good alcohol addiction counsellor, and I’m not sure. I’d get very frustrated with excuses or over analysing. I just don’t believe there are deeper reasons why people drink. I think drinkers like the taste of alcohol and become addicted.