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.