'The Post' - not the Royal Mail!

I went to see the above film (it is not about the Royal Mail) yesterday, needing a change of mental air. It is excellent and entertaining. Also includes one of my great modern heroes, Ben Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks this time. I’ve been a fan of Bradlee ever since the days of the Watergate scandal - he died two years ago at a great age, having carried the flag for freedom of the press in an exceptional way.

It’s a Spielberg film in the tradition of ‘All the President’s Men' (one of my favourite films of all time, which told the story of Watergate and the bringing down of President Nixon) and ’Spotlight’ (how the Boston Globe broke of the scandal of child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church). I love these types of film because they are so heartening in terms of the possibility of ’speaking truth to power’ - a phrase we hear a lot these days - but do little of.

'The Post’ is the Washington Post in case you hadn’t cottoned on - I hadn’t. Its scandal is the Pentagon Papers. Way back in the ‘70s there was a leak of thousands of documents telling the real truth about Vietnam, that the establishment had long known they could not win that war, but continued it because they couldn’t face the shame of a significant military defeat. The New York Times got the papers first, but the White House produced a legal injunction preventing them from publishing them. A Post employee then gained the documents and the proprietor and editor had to face a hard choice about whether to go ahead with the publication, knowing it might not just destroy the paper but also the Graham family who owned it, and that the proprietor, Mrs Graham, and Bradlee might go to jail. Meanwhile, the US was still fightingt in Vietnam! And thousands of American soldiers had died and were continuing to die, in the belief they were dying for some worthwhile reason.

I was thinking, coming out, that Spielberg made the film now for a reason. It’s a message to Donald Trump. Don’t think Presidents can’t be brought down - they can. It isn’t accidental that the same two newspapers are in a battle with the White House today - among many other media. Trump’s method of self-defence differs from Nixon’s, who used unashamed bullying, lies and control of the media by threats of their destruction. Today we live in a different world but the same issues play out. Trump uses tactics of public pillorying, rubbishing, rhetorical attempts to turn the villains into the heroes, and vice versa. Fake truth! He has almost succeeded. You need all your lamps at home to tell the difference! The question has even been asked whether there is a difference! Perhaps we have been mistaken in all these years, imaging that some things can be true while others are not?

Let's be clear - we are not dealing in truth as an absolute moral principle here. This has always been open to debate. For example, whether lying is always wrong is open to debate, because no one can pronounce on that unassailably. What would count as evidence of the truth of such a statement? It's impossible to say. On the other hand, whether Jesus Christ was raised from the dead is a matter of historical evidence. If there is insufficient evidence, then, sorry,  it's not a truth. Recognising this, you are not prevented from believing it, nor would you be right in saying that it is therefore not true. Matters about which there is little evidence now have subsequently proved to be true. The jury is simply out, for now. But until then, what you believe remains what you believe, not the same as truth. Nor are we dealing with perception: it is true that everyone perceives their experience according to their own particular 'filters.' We tend to register evidence which accords with our beliefs, while ignoring stuff that seems to disprove them. You might say this is human nature. Nevertheless, this does not establish that all is perception and nothing is truth! The evidence still counts. Some things are still 'out there' while others are 'in here'. And in discussing 'fake' news we are in the realm of evidence. One and nine still add up to ten. It is not a matter of opinion or perception! This is where news media come in, it seems to me. They cannot rely solely on opinion biased by personal perception, or governed by vague statements of dubious principle, like 'you can't trust the newspapers.' Because how would you go about getting convincing proof of that? Trump's position is worse than this, since he wants to say 'you can trust this source but you can't trust that source.' Which amounts to 'my personal perception is always right' - and anyone who has never challenged their own personal perceptions should start to worry about it. But he also wants to be the one with 'correct' perception of truth, and to require his followers to think the same. This is dangerous practice of the type often exhibited by demagogues.

I was thinking, as I came out of the film, that it was a pity our own media had been so cowardly over the Rupert Murdoch affair. You may recall (and it will be a struggle because it has already sunk without trace!) it emerged in court that Murdoch had influential information held over the heads of members of the British Establishment to make sure they didn’t reveal the anti-social tactics involved in the way his newspapers got their information. True, one editor got the push on enquiry, but got the push for colluding with these tactics, not taking a stand against them! It’s strange that our media has such a reputation abroad as hell hounds braying for stories, and this may be true sometimes, but I wonder whether it’s their fixation on celebrity lifestyles and gossip they are talking about? I see little sign of any thirst for speaking truth to power. Yes, some, but they are struggling voices finding it harder and harder to be heard. Over here, the press, we are often told, are the enemy, not the friend of truth. I have noticed that the BBC has lately been attempting to be more critical of government. I always thought it ironic that the view of the political right was that the BBC was liberal left and in the pockets of the anti-establishment, while the view of the left was that the BBC was the voice of the establishment in the UK! Hard to be both at the same time - but the problem has been a perpetual conflict between what the journalists and broadcasters would like to say and what the BBC governors will allow them to say. Hence ‘the news’ was rather a tame account of events as they saw them, hedged with caveats about what might and might not be the case, and plenty of avoidance of challenging powerful reputations. Meanwhile they continued to produce actual quality programmes about, for example, evil doings in the military and in the NHS which were true enough (had enough solid evidence) to get the nod from the bosses. Perhaps the current Director has changed that, and brought together the two halves of the corporation. I can but hope!

The film exposes the degree to which all media are subject to the willingness of their employers to speak truth to power. Meryl Streep does a good job of playing Mrs Katherine Graham who owned the Post and inherited the paper from her dead husband, so had no previous experience of the newspaper business, and had to face some hard decisions. Some nice shots of her surrounded by men in dark suits and ties trying to tell her what to think! How courageous she turned out to be.

There are also some lovely shots of the Linotype machines rolling away like thunder with their little blocks of type which are so small and yet so powerful. And scenes of the days when the delivery vans rumbled out of the gates of the offices in the middle of the night, in their droves, and spread their bundles of solid newsprint all over their territory. What a lot we are missing today! There is a vast difference between the poodle yapping of the social media with its obsession with opinion for opinion’s sake, ungrounded by anything approaching solid evidence, which nobody has had to sacrifice anything or even do any hard work to get hold of, and which those who most need to hear it may or may not do so: and the clarion call of the great newspaper headline that is heard by everyone.  

The day after the day you stopped

So far we have established two or three important matters that anyone wanting to recover from a drinking problem needs to know. In summary they are:

1. Stopping drinking is not that hard. You just need to not start again. And the only day you can do this is today. 
2. Problem drinking has two sides to it - the physical and the psychological.  
3. The psychological aspect of addiction to alcohol is basically a spiritual imbalance - it involves a search for spiritual experience, for something 'special' beyond the ordinary, and if we cannot find this experience we are likely to return to the god-substitute - alcohol - that we were so attached to before. 

But there are a few practical matters to deal with before we go further into the psychological.  

Health 

Don't worry about cravings, they are temporary. Alcohol will take about three days to clear your system, and after that you will not experience unbearable physical craving. If you have been a heavy drinker you may experience withdrawal symptoms, which can make you feel pretty awful. Strictly speaking you drank in order to get rid of these withdrawal symptoms! A hair of the dog . . . . Now that option is not available to you, and you need to be patient until these symptoms pass, which they will. Don't hesitate to go and see your doctor if necessary, but the best cure is to adopt a healthier lifestyle as soon as possible, with good food, fresh air and plenty of sleep. Take a multi-vitamin each day - this will ensure that your system has the necessary building blocks to begin to repair the damage done by alcohol. And drink plenty of non-alcoholic drinks. Alcohol (which you claimed to drink from thirst, if you recall!) is actually very dehydrating, and often it is the dehydration that makes you feel really awful. And wait for better days, which will come soon.  

Friends and family

What will I tell people? What about the places I usually drink, and the works outing and the bottles in the fridge at home?  

You won't have to tell people you are sober, first of all! They will notice. You don't have to tell anybody anything, but you do have to respond to offers of drinks, because that is unavoidable in some situations. Actually all you need do is say, "No, thanks, but I'll have a coke."  Ignore all comments. It's none of their business! Resist the urge to describe in detail your conversion to sanity! There is something about getting drawn into drinking conversations which is bad for you - it gives the other fellow a foot in the door of the attempt to convince you otherwise, and you don't want that. People who have never denied themselves anything in their lives suddenly become experts when faced with someone trying to help themselves. They are also experts on which alcohol is good for you and which isn't. Steer clear - they don't know! It's all C2H6O, however fancilly bottled and labelled. State what you want and what you don't want, and say nothing more for now. 

It's a good idea to avoid promises of change, especially with your closest family and friends. They have heard it all before, and they are not going to believe you anyway. They will need to see it with their own eyes, and that may take time. Just get on with your life, and say as little as possible until sufficient time has passed for you to have thought through what you do want to say about your past. 

It is wise to avoid drinking places and situations for the time being. Some outings are about seeing people or things, and some are about drinking. You know by now which is which. Steer clear of the drinking places and situations. 

Support

You may want to think about joining a support or self-help group - it is far easier than doing it on your own. AA is the best of the bunch but there are other alternatives. You may feel that AA is intended for people somewhat beneath your social or intellectual standing, or for people with far more serious problems than you. In some groups this may be true, but there are many groups, so shop around, and find one which suits you, has an ethos you like. Later you will learn that the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker all have a lot to teach your highness on the subject of staying sober! And that they all have the same problem, including you. For now, find a congenial group. 

An interesting thing about AA is that if it catches on with you it will become numinous - but in the positive manner of the numinous, and not the negative. In other words, it will become a good god-substitute, one which readily replaces alcohol and the drinking culture with a staying sober culture. Very neat! You will find friends and all kinds of help with life problems. Even if you don't like it much, it can do all that is necessary to give you a helping hand over the first few months of sobriety.  

Be wary of groups that claim to teach you how to control your drinking. People who have to control their drinking are already in a shaky position, are they not? If someone told you how to control your intake of rice pudding, would you not wonder why you would want to do that, when it would be relatively simple to stop eating rice pudding? Being a controlled anything is a fairly desperate plight, to be avoided. (Compulsive eaters be patient, your turn will come in this series of posts!)

You might think about counselling or psychotherapy later on in recovery. It will help with the psychological side of recovery. But again, be wary of well-intentioned practitioners who know nothing about it, and try to encourage you to drink in moderation. The fact all these approaches have to confront is that ethyl alcohol is addictive, and this is true for all drinkers, regardless of how 'normal' their drinking is. Which means it is easily overdone, and this is a fact of life. Why would you, a self-acknowledged problem drinker, choose to go on taking in a substance which is known to be addictive and reacts badly with your system, when you could live far more happily and well without it? What are we trying to achieve here?

Problems other than alcohol    

You may already have realised that you have other addictions than alcohol. The addiction is in the person, as I have tried to show, as well as the substance. (It may indeed be rice pudding.) The best advice for now is to concentrate on dealing with the drinking problem. Do not try to solve all your life problems at once. This is equally true of your psychological problems. They will take time and patience, but just for today it will pay to concentrate on not starting drinking again. You will almost certainly have relationship problems, and these will need attention over time. But you are going to be amazed at how much your relationships improve just by being sober in them! 

The picture above is of what is called the Maharic Seal, used by some spiritually-minded energy groups to help encourage a sense of self-protection - that, with its aid, you may go into the world and not be afraid. You can find ideas about how to use it on YouTube.

Now that you've stopped drinking, what next?

Yesterday I made the point that if you don't pick up another drink you won't have any problem stopping drinking. The reason is you won't have started. So you won't have to stop. It's when you start that the problems begin. It's only when you start that you get into that curious mixture of tension, pleasure, caution, light-heartedness, confidence, elation, fear, uncertainty, bravado, doubt, what ifs, who cares etc etc.

Not every drinker's response is the same. Some respond to drinking with grandiosity. They believe themselves to be either god or pretty near to him or her. Others fall into depression and acute self-doubt - they become god-awful if you like. Some become deeply angry and aggressive and look for a fight to pick. And there is every possible variety of response in between.

None of these reactions proves you are or are not a problem drinker. How you handle your booze has nothing to do with it. It is true that some problem drinkers manage to stay on their feet, apparently sober, in the sense that they seem to be functioning - somehow. Just because you don't appear drunk doesn't mean you are sober. If you had to take an alcohol test that moment, you would show up as drunk as someone who was staggering on their feet. These different responses are very much culturally constructed. Americans get drunk differently from French people. Working class men get drunk differently from female socialites. It doesn't matter. They are all drunks. What makes a problem drinker is the common factor that they cannot stop once they start.

By the way, there is no appreciable difference between an alcoholic and a problem drinker. I notice that some of the medical specialists have started making this point, and I am glad of it. You can spend an awful lot of time arguing over whether you are 'actually' an alcoholic or 'just' a problem drinker. A problem drinker is in every bit as much trouble as an alcoholic. The terminology is irrelevant. You are both persons who have problems when they drink, and that is the key factor.

What the drink does not do for you is what you claimed it would when you used to drink. It didn't make you self-confident, it made you irritating. It didn't make you witty, it made you a bore. It didn't make you clever, it made you argumentative. It didn't make you attractive, it made you repellant. If you don't believe me, ask your friends. Or the bartender. Or your partner. Ask them for the truth. If they are real friends they will tell you, and you will end up feeling small. Try asking a frightened child at two in the morning, whether he likes hearing his drunk father trying to get into the house. If he says, "I can't think of anything nicer," he's lying! And he will carry that dread for the rest of his life, long after you are in your grave.

But not drinking at all is pretty drastic, isn't it? Yes - that is the whole point of it. It will take the most drastic possible solution to get you out of the mess you are in. Half-hearted promises to 'drink less' will result in the same old problems recurring again and again, and getting progressively worse. If you really want to stop drinking, do not start! Now! It's that's simple.

But having stopped, is that all there is to it? Of course, there's more. As much more as you like, and can take. People do not become problem drinkers overnight, or because they have no other problems apart from being unable to control their drinking, and those problems remain long after the booze has gone from their life. Look at it this way. Most addictions have a physical and a psychological component.


The physical component is in many cases the easiest to deal with. Alcohol addiction is one of these. It means the substance itself is dangerous - toxic.  Recognise that and you are already halfway off the hook. If someone were to invent alcohol for sale today, as a form of entertainment, it would never get past the health authorities who check everything we eat and drink for safety. It would be banned. It exists only because it has always existed, and has, therefore, become a way of life for many cultures. It is poisonous, damaging to health in half a dozen ways, and at the root of most of our social problems, from domestic violence to football hooliganism. But its cultural significance is hard to challenge, and governments usually content themselves with piling on taxes and trying in every way they can think of to educate people not to use it in excess. But of course telling people not to drink to excess is a bit like telling them that going to the swimming pool is a normal, healthy pastime, but they mustn't actually swim! I won't go into the politics of alcohol - make your own mind up - but have you ever wondered why governments have not done to alcohol what they did not hesitate to do to other dangerous addictive substances, such as cigarettes? Or heroin or cocaine?

Let's pass on. My question today is, if you have decided to get off the alcohol roundabout, what now? Well, there remains the psychological component. This is a lot more tricky. You can ignore it if you wish. I'm bound to say that those who do seem more likely to return to problem drinking at some stage in their lives - not, this time, because of the addiction, because we cannot blame the substance the second time around. The call of the first drink is not any longer physical - it is psychological. It's about who you are - how you function as a person. The 'need' for a drink cannot be about the drink already in your system if there is no alcohol in your system - it has to be about the state of your mind.

The psychological component is also a form of addiction, by the way, but this form is mental. We don't only get addicted to stuff - substances - we also get addicted to behaviours, to people, to places, to processes, to ways of life, to attitudes, to values, to beliefs. In case you believe that some addictions are good for you I suggest you think again. Carl Jung the Swiss psychologist said that all forms of addiction are bad for you - including idealism!

Let's think about this idea carefully, because people have already told me, after reading yesterday's post, that the general ideas it contains can apply to many issues and not just alcohol.  Of course, that is true. But why do you think this is? I'd suggest that it seems familiar, whether you are a drinker or not because the basic concept of addiction is familiar to all of us. Many of us have our own addictions, they just don't happen to be alcohol. What is addiction exactly? Think about that quote about idealism as a possible source of addiction, for example, because it is abstract enough to help us make some useful points.

Jung didn't say 'having an inclination towards idealism' is bad for you. Nor did he say, 'people with high ideals are addicted.' He merely said that idealism as an addiction is bad for you. - no matter how worthy it may be to have high ideals, or how worthy these ideals may be. A distinction is being made here between ordinary enthusiasm, interest, enjoyment, keenness, zest, passion even, and something that goes beyond these ordinary everyday experiences. Addiction is something that involves devotion, fervour, mania, ecstasy. Something you cannot wait to get to, that fills your whole mind and heart to the exclusion of everything else. And yes I know you still go to work and put the children to bed etc., but at the back of your mind, all the same, is the dominant idea of the next drink - and the experience of that drink, which is emotional. The sheer amount of trouble problem drinkers will go to in order to get a drink is a phenomenon in itself. Do stamp collectors have at the back of their minds the whole time the idea of the next stamp? Somehow, I doubt it. They may be very keen stamp collectors, but the collection gives place to other things pretty readily, if they are at all important or part of life's normal routines. Well, put it this way, if they really think about nothing but the stamp collection then they are addicted! Because that kind of mental obsession is the hallmark of addiction: drink first and think afterwards. The drink is the priority! Or whatever 'the drink' means for you.

What is actually going on here?  When you hid a small bottle of vodka in the cistern and lied about it on the grounds that it was as essential to you as breathing, were you not treating it as something far beyond the ordinary? For you, it was something pretty special. It's the nature of that specialness that Jung is speaking about when he identifies psychological addiction as a state of mind, often rather like idealism, actually.

Mental obsession belongs to the same category of emotions as awe, wonder, exhilaration, rapture. These words are the positive sides of obsession, while we think of the more negative aspects of these states as fanaticism, frenzy, craze, zealotry. And notice that these are all the kinds of words we use to describe spiritual experiences. The iconic example is that of St Paul on the road to Damascus. In Acts 9 it is described as a light flashing around him, which his companions did not see. This is commonly true of all addiction. Only the addicted one 'sees' the majesty of the substance or thing s/he is addicted to! Think about the lovely Mr Toad of Toad Hall, and his obsessions, which are wonderful examples of the state of mental obsession framed in a children's book. His friends had to bind and gag him in order to prevent him from going off on his latest obsession, do you remember? And his obsessions changed from day to day, what was more. St Paul was a natural addict - he had just persecuted the Christians with as much zealotry as he now began to support them, after the road to Damascus. His mental state swings from the negative side of addiction to the positive side. Either way, he is still an addict - a fanatic! (I am not a theologian and I'm sure he got over the fanaticism later, as wisdom set in, but at the time, it was his dominant state of mind.)

The reason we've turned to spiritual imagery to describe this condition is that it is unavoidable. It belongs to this category of human experience, like it or not. For Jung the human psyche is essentially spiritual - it deals in precisely this kind of specialness, this intensity, this over-the-topness, if I can put it so. I do not mean religion here, still less theology. These are not bad things in themselves, but they are different from spiritual experiences. Jung meant that we humans tend to be worshippers in some form or other - we seek the special, the powerful, the out-of-the-ordinary to look up to, to venerate. We may in this search find God or a god of our understanding, but this is by no means certain. If we don't or can't believe in God we tend to find a god (good?) substitute. We are quick to identify what is special - what has power, what has an extraordinary, an exceptional ethos. We feel we can rest in the existence of the special, in its power to soothe and hold us, to keep us together. To this special kind of experience, Jung gave the name 'numinous'. This is a word derived from the Latin numen, or that which is awe-inspiring - a god or the gods, in many cases. The spiritual nature of humans is easy to prove by looking back at the whole history of the human race. All races and cultures have some form of spiritual belief or attitude. You might say that when the human race began to bury its dead with some respect and form of ritual, we had reached our potential as spiritual beings. We didn't any longer throw the body in a ditch and pass on because we understood that life was more than just a series of loosely connected concrete experiences. We accepted that our lives had meaning beyond the concrete, had meanings that were intangible, often indescribable, and yet still important to us - that the spiritual is a foundational feature of what it means to be human.

There is nothing especially worrying about people's religious convictions, from a psychological point of view, though religion does not always perform the function of providing us with the numinous experience we tend to seek. Institutionalised religion is often a matter of intellectual understanding or belief. Those religions which have carefully avoided the charge of enthusiasm, of fanatic commitment, of super conviction, have tended to last the longest. Over-enthusiastic groups, cults and extreme beliefs tend to come and go, on the other hand - they do not have psychological sustaining power, you might say. Stable traditional religions and philosophies usually require us to believe certain things which have been very carefully spelt out by significant religious figures over centuries of debate and discussion, figures who have helped us decide what is reasonable to adhere to in this way, including what is morally right and worthy of our attention and adherence. These movements are however not usually ideal - far from it! They suffer from mistakes, from personal and moral flaws, even from institutional corruption and wrong attitudes, which human beings have to acknowledge and sort out over time. They may be no worse for this. Those belief systems who claim purity and the conviction of absolute rightness are the more worrying. It gets too close to addiction for comfort.

But in an increasingly secular world, the numinous - the spiritual - can easily become another thing entirely - dark side uppermost, if you like. Something or someone that is not god gets holds of us, maybe not even worthy of being god, but nonetheless, that thing becomes engrossing to us to the point of obsession. We think of little else, feeling that nothing can compare with it. We see in it our main source of inspiration and enthusiasm in life. Many problem drinkers have seen the numinous in the bottom of a glass of alcohol! At that moment of the first drink, it can seem straight from heaven. Except that heaven in any of its forms does not do to us what alcohol does by the time we have had a few more . . . . 'By their fruits ye shall know them,' says one piece of familiar text. Wise systems of belief do not encourage people to kill, to commit suicide, to do damage to themselves or others.

What we're talking about here is finding god-substitutes - to satisfy our natural human craving for the exceptional, the awe-inspiring, the thing worthy of worship. It can be anything from a football player to a grand piano. Anything will do - if it seems to provide us with that magical quality which renders it capable of making us feel special - out of the ordinary, out of the boringly every day. It is not only problem drinkers who seek such inspiration. "That's it!" I remember thinking when I smoked my first cigarette - and my whole body seemed to relax in a second and go into some sort of delight. Somehow it seemed that everything would now be ok forever - I would be able to be sophisticated like my friends, go anywhere and not be afraid, live to the maximum of my potential. This is the experience of the numinous - but the dark numinous - and the fact that I found it in a public toilet because I was too afraid to do it in the street did not cross my mind as an unlikely place for the numinous to lurk! (I was very young at the time!) In the face of the numinous, common sense and practicality seem to go right out of the window.

In psychological language, we would describe this attachment to the god-substitute as obsessive-compulsive. People sometimes ask me whether some so-called 'normal' drinkers are simply not obsessive-compulsive, like them, which accounts for the fact they don't become addicted. First of all, psychology is different from most other spheres of knowledge because we seldom deal in absolutes, rather, in continuums (or 'continua' if you are a language fanatic!). People are more or less obsessive - closer to one end of the spectrum than another - very seldom in the somehow 'right' or 'correct' place, because who knows where it is? We psychologists are sceptical about so-called normality. Where does it lie on the spectrum of all possible human behaviours, which is vast? Who knows? A more useful question I find is "does it bother you?"

The problem with this formula - that some are obsessives and others are not - is that, even if true, it still leaves out the physical addiction, doesn't it? Even if it is possible to have a purely physical response to alcohol, and none of the psychological parts, (and I believe such experiences exist though they are not that common), we would still be in danger of overdoing it more than a bit on certain occasions because of the actual chemical composition of ethanol - C₂H₆O - the substance which is the base of all types of drinking alcohol, even cough medicines. It is the reaction of ethanol with our systems which produces the 'drunk' sensation. And this physical reaction is the case with most of the non-alcoholic community, is it not? Who has not overdone it a bit now and again? And don't people who do this wake up feeling deathly awful the following day, because of the toxic nature of the substance they ingested? Nobody gets off scot-free with dangerous substances, so perish that thought. Some have it easier than others, but nobody has it easy. People with drinking problems, however, have both the physical and the psychological issues to deal with - and this makes their road more difficult.

Get hold of this, if you can. It is impossible to deal with the psychological matters while you are still addicted to the physical. If you are seeking not just freedom from the substance, but lasting, long-term psychological change and development, you need to tackle the psychological/spiritual questions also. If this challenge interests you, I will be writing about it regularly over the next few weeks, as we try to find a pathway through the difficult business of leaving the drinking behind for good.  

How to stop drinking

I'm conscious that many people will be mulling over their holiday experience in the next week or two and wondering how it was that they managed to fail to enjoy it that much. It's no accident that at the turn of the year, we make resolutions to do things differently in future. In part, it's the nature of the season - that time when the little figure on the dates we write or type changes and another figure is added. 7 becomes 8. Subtly, insidiously, time is creeping on, and we are getting older.

A supervisee of mine suggested to a client that he might make a timeline of his life to date, marking the points at which things happened that seemed especially memorable or that were staging posts of various kinds. And she suggested he add a rough 'endpoint' when he expected his life to come to its end. Cunningly she did not mention to him until he had completed it what her real aim was - to get him to see for himself how much of his life he probably had left! The answer was less than the amount he had already had. So all those things he had been talking about endlessly to her, and promising himself, were going to have to be squeezed into fewer and fewer spaces ahead. If he didn't start soon, was he ever going to get down to it? Or was he all talk but no action?

I think trying to change damaging habits and addictions like drinking are somewhat like that. It is what we are sure we want to do, what we are determined to make a start on. It is what we feel sure we can do. But not right now . . . . . Well, ok, but after tonight, I'll begin drinking less. After this party, I will never drink as much again. After my daughter's wedding, I won't have any excuses for drinking for quite a while. After the works outing, I won't need to drink so much.

If you find yourself thinking in this way, you are not alone. I think the first day of the New Year is enticing for that very reason because it seems to provide us with the significant deadline we have been searching for, the one that will impress itself on us, will really count. This is because none of the others has actually worked well up to now. The First Of January will work, we tell ourselves. It's a big occasion, enough to impress even my idiot brain, and besides, I have informed everyone around me of my intentions to turn over a new leaf, so I can't disappoint them now. I shall make a fresh start, and everything else will follow.

Alcoholics Anonymous has spotted this tendency, which, if we fail, and we often do, tends to lead us into another lengthy bout of unwise behaviour, whatever habit or addiction we are struggling with. To counteract it, they suggest living one day at a time. It's not what you decided in January that matters, it's what you decide to do with today. Today is the only day we have, in an absolute sense, in which we can do - or not do - anything at all. Everything else is a mental mirage - it's either our memories of all our yesterdays or our aspirations for our tomorrows. The past is over and done with - we can do nothing about it. The future is not yet here. We can only imagine it. But today we have a chance. Today we can do something different. If we really want to.

This type of thinking brings us sharply up against the self-deception, the denials, the rationalisations, that make up our imperfect lives. Faced with actually doing something different right now - as my supervisee faced her client with a timeline - we get a sharp shock. What? You mean now? This minute? Really? Yes, but . . . . .

Whatever follows this 'but' is usually the sum of the real reasons why we have not changed this habit or addiction a long time ago. The real reasons are more complex, usually, than the various alibis we trot out at other times. With drinking, what it really boils down to is usually something like this: 'without a drink I won't be able to . . . .'  Fill in the blanks for yourself, right now, and make the list as long as it needs to be until you exhaust all your reasons for overdrinking. Then have a good long look at it. Think about it. And I can tell you without much fear of contradiction that none of these 'reasons' amounts to a hill of beans when compared with the devastation of getting drunk even once, let alone regularly, shaming yourself in public, feeling ghastly the following day (and the same day for that matter), wasting time and energy and all your limited resources, missing appointments and family events, lettings others down, and every other nasty consequence you can supply me with for overdrinking. (And these are just the beginning, trust me. The sequence of events in an alcoholic's timeline is as clear as the face of Big Ben, and they are all losses - first, loss of self-respect, second, loss of license to drive, third, loss of job, fourth, loss of partner and children, fifth, loss of home, sixth, loss of will to live. Ok, so you haven't go there yet. I believe you. Only because I know you will. If you keep on this well-trodden road. It's such a well-trodden road, in fact, that it is as predictable as death and taxes.)

None of your particular 'reasons' justifies the results of drinking - not by a very long chalk. So you feel unconfident in company without a drink? Just imagine . . . .! What a terrible thing to happen to somebody. So naturally, you decide to poison yourself regularly in order to deal with this problem? Pull the other one, it has bells on . . . .! So you can't go out with your mates and not drink. They might notice? Really? And as your Not Drinking cannot be noticed, as it is clearly unbearable, you grab another glass to make quite sure no one notices you are NOT DRINKING. We could go down the list in this way and would find that mostly your reasons for drinking are trivial in themselves. But underneath it all is a curious fact - that you drink because you cannot stop drinking. One drink leads to another drink, and then the second drink leads to a third, and the third leads to a fourth and so on. Ask the bartender. Bartenders are usually wise in the ways of drinking. They've seen it all. They know desperation when they see it. Problem drinkers drink out of desperate need. The stuff already in their system is begging for another - just one more, and one more, and one more.

So the way to stop is incredibly simple. Just don't take the first drink, and then all the others will not follow. The first drink requires a second drink, and a third, and a fourth. This is what we call addiction. What is already in your system is calling to its own, saying, come to me! Like the Sirens who sang and lured Ulysses on to the rocks, alcohol overrides so-called will power quite easily - pushes it aside, with some amazingly trivial idea that, "It's only nine o'clock" or "My partner is annoying me."  If on the other hand, you drink a glass of orange juice or sparkling water, you will find that it does not demand another drink at all. Funny thing that. You can make a glass of bitter lemon last a whole evening, without even trying. You are not controlling your drinking in the least. There is no careful self-restraint, no looking furtively at the clock, or counting up the number of drinks you've already had.  No need for any of that self-monitoring. You can drink as many as you want: only you don't tend to want a hundred! Or even ten. A couple is usually plenty. They are not addictive substances, and this is the point. Weird. Sample the difference, and you will soon see this for yourself. It isn't because you don't like bitter lemon that you choose gin! Don't kid yourself. It's because bitter lemon does not like itself so much it keeps having to ask for another!

Armed with this understanding, you can certainly stop drinking. You stop by not starting in the first place. It's that simple.

But don't be too cunning about it, as Ulysses was. Ulysses was a chancer by nature. Notice that he both wanted to hear the Sirens and also not give in to their seductive calls! If you really want to stop, you don't sail that way and then try to chain yourself up to avoid getting into trouble! How about going to the cinema instead, or to the gym or the bowling alley - anywhere people do not congregate specifically for the purpose of drinking? That would be a really good way to use today. Doing today, the only day you have, what you have wanted to do for so long, remember? Only, today, do it!