Are You Drinking Too Much Alcohol Just To Cope With Life?
Abraham Maslow is famous for conceptualizing the hierarchy of needs. Postulating that human beings are motivated by the desire to serve common inbuilt prerequisites in a specific order.
For example, you are unlikely to be concerned with the need for sex if you haven’t eaten in a week or have no roof above your head.
The needs of self-preservation logically come above the needs for pleasure and comfort
However, the addiction that resides inside you has only one need. That is for you to drink alcohol.
Alcohol lies to you
It doesn’t care how this happens, what emotions you experience as a result of drinking or even if it causes you pleasure or pain. As long as you drink the need is fulfilled.
Additionally, the Evil Clown has no memory. You can’t appease him by have a good hard drinking session and assuming he will be satisfied sufficiently to give you a break the next day.
The clown wants you to drink at every possible opportunity, even if doing so will ultimately kill you.
Because the addiction is so focused on this one activity it achieves mastery over it. It knows exactly what buttons to press and how to make the puppet dance perfectly in time with the music.
This is how we come up with our belief structures around the drug.
You will have a series of ‘go-to’ phrases to defend your addiction.
For example: ‘Alcohol helps me cope with life’, ‘Drinking helps me relax’ ‘I need a drink after a hard day at work‘ or ‘Alcohol is just one of life’s little treats’.
On the surface, all such statements sound entirely logical and you may feel the urge to challenge my assertion that they are nothing more than lies created by the Clown.
If you are wondering how I know for certain that these statements hold no water, simply replace the drug with another one.
Using alcohol when life gets tough is tempting. However, it is as logical as using gasoline to put out a fire.
We go easy on alcohol
We tend to go easy on alcohol because it is legal and sold in convenience stores and supermarkets – hey how dangerous can it be?
We assume that cigarette smoking is more addictive and more dangerous to our health and often a drinker will even pat themselves on the back with a cheery ‘hey at least I don’t smoke or do serious drugs’.
However, the reality is, alcohol is significantly more addictive than nicotine and kills someone every 90 seconds. Just because the government endorses it doesn’t mean it is safe.
This fruit-flavoured social pleasantry that we believe to be harmless actually kills millions of people every year.
Meanwhile the drugs we label as evil, such as heroin, kill a dramatically lower number.
Drinking Too Much Alcohol On A Regular Basis?
Feeling protected because you ‘only do alcohol and not the evil drugs’ is a bit like being happy you only fell off the 20th floor of the building and not the 30th.
Yesterday I met with an old friend that I hadn’t seen for over ten years. Jane is an estate agent in England.
I have a couple of properties in the UK and she helped me buy and manage them for a long time. She always does a good job for me and a special ‘mates rates’ price. I decided to sell one of the properties recently and arrange to meet with Jane on my next visit to the UK.
She was supposed to meet me at the property to value it for sale. However, she emailed to say she wasn’t well and would send one of her team.
I decided to go visit her at home to catch up and see if she was OK. The woman that answered the door shocked me to my core. A gaunt, ghostly face peered at me. An oxygen tube up her left nostril, attached to a cylinder that she carried under her arm.
It was Jane but not the woman I knew from ten years prior. I couldn’t help but take a shocked intake of breath at the sight before me. Before I could stumble around enough to construct a polite question she explained everything I needed to know with one sentence.
Terminal breast cancer!
Drinking Too Much Has Risks
I asked her how long she had and she explained that four months ago the doctors had given her three months to live. Jane was now living on borrowed time.
All her life she had been a heavy smoker and drinker. But do you honestly believe that at her funeral any of her family will take comfort from the knowledge that at least it wasn’t one of the ‘evil’ drugs that killed her?
Stop believing that alcohol can be defended.
If you take all those defence statements from above and replace the drug you will quickly and clearly see how devious and dishonest they are:
- ‘Heroin helps me cope with life’
- ‘Taking heroin helps me relax’
- ‘Heroin is just one of life’s little treats’.
I advise all my ‘Stop Drinking Expert’ members to keep a daily journal called ‘The Clown Chronicles’. I want them to examine the methods their internal addiction is using to try and get them drinking.
Why they are claiming that they are using alcohol to cope with life at all.
When you can step outside the problem and view it from a third-person point of view, the insanity becomes more apparent.
To do this, keep a notepad and pen handy. When you get the urge to drink, write down the reason why you want to drink.
There will be an explanation and after a while, you may even be aware that it appears to be being expressed about you by someone else.
For example ‘you’ve had a hard day, you deserve a drink’.
This is the voice of the clown disguised as your own internal dialogue.
Next, I ask my members to change the drug and play about with the language. Essentially to dissect the command and find the real source of its existence.
Ultimately what you should be able to do is trace every desire to drink back to the primary and solitary need of the Evil Clown… to drink alcohol right now.
For example:
Drinking too much alcohol on a regular basis to cope with life is one of the most common claims of drinkers. However, when you go through the process I just outlined above, you will see that this statement is nonsense.
If you are struggling with the hardship of life and feel sad and depressed about where you are.
Why would the logical solution be to drink a depressant?
That would be like going to a hospital with a broken leg and being told the cure is to break the other leg too.
It also seems the more depressed you get the more the Clown believes alcohol will help.
Take for instance a family bereavement. When you are at the lowest moments of your life, stricken with a heartbreaking loss. The clown pops up and suggests what you really need is something that will make you more depressed.
The insanity is, we all agree that it’s the best thing to do.
Straight after any funeral the dash to the pub begins, where the grieving insists they are just raising a glass to the dearly departed.
I will close this blog post by giving you a challenge. I know that every single defence of alcohol will ultimately lead directly and exclusively back to the need of the clown.
If you can come up with an explanation for the beneficial consumption of alcohol that I can’t unpick then I will give you a free lifetime membership to my program.
Are you ready to finally stop drinking too much alcohol and get back in control today? Why not take action today and grab your place on today’s free quit drinking coaching session?
