One Year

There is no such thing as a normal person ~ ‘normal’ is a baseline we use to judge people and how far we believe them to be from our value systems. Alcohol in cooked food has evaporated, there is no alcohol left by the time you eat the meal. Non-alcoholic beer has so little alcohol in it that in some cases you would need to drink 100 bottles to equal one regular 5% bottle but because of food regulations the alcohol content must be stated though, of course, it is better to avoid anything that might cause you to make associations to a substance you wish to avoid. Do you avoid cough/cold medication? Many of these contain alcohol.

Drinking too much alcohol is not a disease, not an illness, not an addiction ~ it is a choice, a choice we made when life seemed to much to cope with that this seemed the only solution. To call it anything else is to require a scapegoat, to choose impotency…see it’s not my fault, it’s because of x/y/z….it may not be a fault but it was/is our choice and we must become accountable. We could have chosen another option but our past experiences tend to take us to one substance over another whether it be food, drink, over-thinking, heroin, OCD, even exercising too much. The best possible path is self-awareness, learning to understand what occurred, almost certainly in our childhood, that led us to form these pathways that now influence us so profoundly. From this we gain knowledge, learn, grow, become mindful (Buddhism/psychology), we recognise the triggers, we learn to form new cognitive pathways that allow us not to follow this habit (almost everything we do is habit) but to choose another healthy end option as a reward not alcohol etc as the ‘reward’. Rats, in laboratory settings, will choose to go back to a habitat that gives them an electric shock rather than chooses a new situation they are confronted with (see abusive relationships/substance dependencies). We choose what we know, we normalise what we know, we fear anything else yet what could be worse that what we are already experiencing? AA keeps all its members forever at the mercy of the substance, forever in a relationship with their dependency – who would do this so that 20/30/40 years on you are still defining yourself and life in terms of something you no longer do, do you change dependency from alcohol to dependency on the group/system that pretended to offer you a way out? No, you choose freedom, control over yourself and your emotional landscape, you research how/why you found yourself in the dark place, you talk with an expert if necessary, you learn, you change, you find your new path, free of all the nonsense in the world.
See Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit ~ right at the beginning, a woman in a complete mess turned her life around, not by changing habits but rewards. All the dependent areas still lit up in MRI scans she just chose to reward her habit cycles with healthy options – not a cigarette, a marathon.
See Dr Tom Dow – Diet Rehab ~ dopamine/serotonin levels ‘control’ our behaviour – these ‘feed’ our habits, prevent us from breaking out of our cycles and keep us stuck with our mantras ie I’m not good enough/I’ve failed etc.
All research assists moving towards a new life, a new us, but more importantly freedom.

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