What time does your daily alcohol battle start?
Is it a time on the clock, or at the end of your working day?
What signals to you that it’s time to crack open the bottle?
Most of my clients say that they don’t think about alcohol until the late afternoon, early evening, and even if alcohol does cross their minds much earlier, they have got those thoughts under control. But then, as their day creeps on, their resolve seems to slide down a slippery slope from a manageable low-level awareness to a barnstorming non-negotiable, drinking inevitability – even though they absolutely don’t want to drink that night.
Do you recognise you here?
Do you make a decision, as soon as you wake up, that tonight you won’t drink?
Regardless of the time, be it 4.30am when you first become aware of your dull headache and remember the night before, or at 7am when you get out of bed, un-refreshed and look with sadness and despair at your reflection in the mirror, is that when you make a pact with yourself that today will be different?
However early in the day your first sad alcohol thought is, that is the time your drinking begins, many hours before the physical act of putting the glass to your lips!
From the very moment you make the decision that you are not going to drink tonight, because of the way you drank last night, you step into the cycle of your nightly drinking.
Why? It is so simple. You make the decision not to drink because of the way you feel about yourself and your drinking, and then you have to drink, to comfort the way you feel about yourself and your drinking!
When your very first thoughts of the day are of embarrassment, shame, failure or even just physical unwellness due to your drinking, you start your day in desperate need of comfort. But instead of the kind, loving, compassionate words, understanding and actions you truly need, you berate yourself for your ‘weakness’, with harsh unkind thoughts, unloving actions, and so your inner day is set.
The very thing (your drinking), you don’t want to do, the very thing that robs you of your sense of peace, self-respect, self-love, in fact any sense of your true self, is the very thing (drinking) you have learnt to believe (in intention, not result), comforts the lack of all of those ‘selfs’, and so many more, your probably can’t even identify.
Do you recognise that too? It is an absolute truth.
I used to wake up every day, feeling a total failure and silently promise myself, my son, as well as pleading with a God I don’t believe in, that today I wouldn’t drink. Yet it was the feelings of being a failure of who I was, and the mother my son deserved, that set me up for the first glass that evening.
I couldn’t live without comfort, and nor can you. I had no idea that I needed to gently enquire of myself what I was thinking, feeling before I drank – not about alcohol itself, but about ME. I knew nothing of my innocent self-neglect, and put it all down to me being completely helpless around booze.
I didn’t know that I had learnt to believe that alcohol was any sort of comfort. And in all my innocent not knowing, I blamed my weakness, my addiction as part of who I was, and who I was destined to always be, and of course, accepting that desperately sad knowing, meant I craved comfort (alcohol) more, not less.
My journey to peace and freedom around alcohol, my understanding of who I am and what I need, my understanding of the necessary role I created for alcohol in the absence of knowing myself, and then delivering those simple needs, released any belief that alcohol was any sort of solution.
I no longer ‘craved’ alcohol and I understood that I never had, I had only ever ‘craved’ ME.
My clients sometimes say they are not drinking because they feel better about themselves, but the truth is the other way round, the ‘feeling better’ about themselves is the TRUE reason they are not drinking, and once they understand that truth (which they do very quickly), out of control drinking quickly becomes a thing of their past, effortlessly.
My sober journey is the joy of my life, and each week I learn something wonderful and new that I acknowledge with gratitude for the gift of it, and the gift in life it makes ME.
I can say now with acceptance, that I love who I am, the good, kind, flawed, trying all the time woman, that is exactly who you are too – we are all the same inside our skins.
You, me, all of us are made of love, compassion, joy and forgiveness, you have simply stepped out who you are in your drinking, and without knowing it, you grieve the loss of you, and continue to drink in the absence of even being aware of your loss or how to comfort you.
Drinking is your comfort that doesn’t comfort, and to change your drinking, effortlessly, all you need is a new perspective, new awareness’s and new practices that allow you to release the belief that alcohol brings you anything, and step into the empowering reality that is that you are the comfort you need.
I created the unique 6 week Rapid Alcohol Recovery Method coaching process based on the new perspective, awareness and simple practices that removed any emotional attachment to alcohol from my life, and now it does the same for my clients.
If you have had enough of your alcohol struggle, of feeling lesser than you are, of feeling out of control around alcohol and would like to be able to take or leave a glass of something chilled occasionally, contact me.
The only hard part of change through the Rapid Alcohol Recovery Method is the reaching out, from their it is an easy, loving, eyeopening journey of peace and freedom back to you.
Be kind and gentle with yourself
Sonia
Before you go, why not take a look at just some of my wonderful client’s Testimonials and ask yourself, don’t you deserve this peace and freedom too?
