The infallible pill of recovery: Grace

Last time in this series we talked about grace as 'the free and unmerited favour of God.'

This is a surprising idea - not, perhaps what we thought it was. Somehow we all grow up with rather baffling ideas about the uses of religion. The most dominant idea is that religion is 'being good - that religious people are 'good.' This means superior to others, of course. Then, when we discover how inferior most religious people can be, this ruins any hope we might have entertained of developing a spiritual life.

The spiritual life has little in common with such thinking. Spirituality is on the inside - it has little to do with rituals and observations and behaviours on the outside. Our spiritual and emotional lives are the same, for this reason. They both arise from the same core of being:  the emotional foundations of our human life. Spirituality - you may not wish to know this! - is bedded on the rock of emotional suffering. Of our hurts, disappointments, losses, of our mistakes and failures, our inabilities to live the life we always wanted to. There is nothing like facing complete chaos to discover the value of the spiritual in life! We saw this in an earlier blog. We usually find a Spiritual Power of our understanding - which I will call the Source - only through intense pain. Why is this?

A crisis isn't just a crisis, it is also a crossroads. It faces us with major dilemmas - with a variety of paths we might take, but we no longer know which one. Or with the sense of hopelessness that comes with feeling there is no path we can take. So long as we feel 'in charge' of our life direction, we can maintain composure, some sense of being an ok person - one who knows who he or she is. At the crossroads of a crisis, we realise that we are not 'in charge' any more. Anything could happen at any moment, and there's nothing we can do about it! This is a terrifying place to be. Howling winds of anxiety confront us, producing weird physical symptoms we might never have associated with anxiety before. Have you ever experienced 'jelly legs'? Sober, I mean? It is the sudden feeling that there is no strength left in your legs - you cannot stand upright and feel stable and based on the ground. Or you may have suffered hyperventilation - the feeling you are choking, though you are breathing, you are straining every ounce of energy and yet cannot get the oxygen you need into your lungs.

Common symptoms of anxiety are:

- muscle tension

- jaw clenching

- knee or foot jerking

- sighing

- tension headaches

- dry eyes, mouth and throat

- copious sweating

- feeling inexplicably cold

- constipation

- bladder urgency

- sudden increase (or decrease) in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration

- mouth watering (salivation)

- feeling inexplicably warm in a normal temperature

- migraines

- nausea

- vomiting

- diarrhoea

- dizziness

- difficulty concentrating

- mental blanking

- brain fog (can't think)

- jelly legs

Notice that these are all physical - the mind is physical, don't forget, and includes your whole nervous system, which spreads out from the brain down your back and across your body. The reason extremes in either direction occur in this list is that they come from different parts of the nervous system with different functions - some of our systems energise us when we need it, some calm us down. But they all suggest the same source which is anxiety. We now know from detailed neurobiological studies that the human system is founded on balance - what is called 'regulation' in scientific studies. In early infancy, if all goes well, a soothing parent or caregiver helps regulate and understand our emotions at a level we can cope with. If we become too frightened, too angry, too sad - in any way 'over the top' - our caregiver helps us to calm down, with cradling or holding, with soothing words, with touch, with warmth, with her or his calming presence. At the beginning of life, we are not born with this ability to regulate our own emotions. We develop the ability, gradually, with good luck and skilful parenting. Parents with emotional damage themselves or addictions of their own will find this skill much harder to pass on.

Why is balance important to us humans? Why can't we go over the top? Have a good old panic or hysterical attack and run around screaming? Or their opposite, sit in a heap and refuse to move or think at all? The answer is simple - nature has provided us with a system that works for us, in terms of survival. Being unable to regulate our feelings is dangerous - it leads us to all kinds of disastrous behaviour and dangerous situations, which the world outside us can then take advantage of, and does. Children can get away with a fit of unregulated behaviour for a while, but parents know instinctively it is not good for them to become this way regularly, and work out strategies for calming the level of excitement, fear and despair they sense as 'over the top.'

Anxiety is a symptom - Freud called it a signal from the unconscious - that our internal feeling level is approaching the unmanageable, the result of the inability to regulate our emotions beyond a certain point. And we have already made the important point that emotion is at the foundation of the human psyche. Everything we do or fail to do or resist doing or overdo is motivated by feeling, never by thought alone. Our feelings are being stimulated all the time by people, places and things around us. And we can do little about it, short of becoming a hermit! Other motorists annoy us, and we feel anger. Our partner disagrees and we feel 'put down.' Our children misbehave and we feel afraid of what our neighbours or friends will think of us as parents. Our employer makes unreasonable demands and we feel resentful. Life is one long round of having our emotions stimulated by the world outside ourselves.

Here's the rub: events are on the outside, but our feelings are on the inside! We cannot prevent the world outside us from impacting on our feelings. Stuff will happen! People do what they do, and we register it as a feeling. We are not depressed because of a visitation from outer space. Something has happened, or someone has said something or behaved some way that has upset our inner emotional balance. Our beautiful, complex and well-ordered systems will be regularly impacted in this way, and that is not in our control. The capacity to maintain emotional balance - to self-regulate - is therefore critical to a contented life. How do we gain it if we don't have it already?

If you are an alcoholic or any kind of addict, the chances are high you have no or little ability to regulate your emotional life. I know this because researchers have discovered that addiction is a lack of a capacity to regulate. Alcohol is self-medicated regulation. 'I can't do it but what is in the glass will' - thinks the addict. I drink because of depression, I drink because of a disappointment, because of a telling-off from my boss, from my son's uncontrollable behaviour which makes me feel incompetent, I drink to feel happy, to celebrate, to get in the mood for sex, or whatever. These are all 'drinks to feel something.'

In our current culture, we have decided there is 'natural' stuff good for us, and 'chemical' stuff which is unnatural and not good for us. The fact is, human physiology is chemical at the core. When something impacts on us from a source outside us, this produces an emotional response, but the production process of feelings is driven by chemicals manufactured inside us and delivered by our various carrying systems to the place we need them at that moment. All current mood-altering medications replicate this idea, that if we can help to regulate certain feelings by providing the right chemicals in the right amounts at the right place in the brain, we can regulate our feelings with their help.

This may or may not be true of any sufferer from depression or anxiety - I am not qualified to say. I take an objective view of taking medication to aid recovery from anxiety or depression - it can help in the short run as a crisis helper, though should not be used over a prolonged period, and I think most doctors would agree The problem is that after a while the sufferer becomes dependent on the chemical for normal human habits like staying calm when faced with a problem and sleeping well from natural tiredness caused by daily activities. I also know however that alcoholics are in a dangerous position since they are personalities who have had considerable trouble in self-regulation - they have habitually used alcohol for this purpose of coping with painful or difficult feelings. Thus recovery is easier for them if they can improve their handling of emotions without an external regulator such as a pill which may help in the short run, but also bring its own problems with it.

Here is where grace comes in. Grace is better than a pill when emotions are troublesome or over-the-top or too deep in the bottom. So human cultures all over the world have resorted to prayer in crisis or difficulty. It's as natural as breathing to say to yourself, 'God help me,' in a crisis. In recovery, we need to understand that it is not the bad things that happen to us that are our real problems. Our real problems are how we react: our feelings, and the degree to which they make us feel turbulent, in pain, out of control, unhappy, enraged, bitter, resentful, insecure, anxious - and not knowing what to do with them. When difficult feelings overwhelm us, we need a place to go for help which is not a pill or a behaviour that is a direct substitute for alcohol, and therefore likely to make our problems worse in the long run. We need the calming influence of a stable mind which says to us, "Simmer down! It feels awful now but it will get better!" One of the best-known verses of the Bible is Psalm 46 v 10:

Be still and know that I am God

It means: shut up for a minute and listen! When the panic or despair is upon us, we are all inclined to yack without ceasing. Yes, that is another symptom of anxiety - over-talking. Prayer is nothing more complicated than going to the power we have identified as our Source of help with the feelings we have. And allowing them to be displayed! To do this is to be open to the gift of grace: the free and unmerited favour of God.

We need to permit our feelings to exist, otherwise, they cannot be calmed down. You wouldn't go to the doctor with a pain in your leg, and say, 'it's this but you can't look at it! I may tell you what's wrong with it!' (Well, on second thoughts, some people do that! It isn't a wise way to use the doctor.) In counselling, practitioners will sometimes say, 'stay with the feelings.' This is good advice. They mean: 'Don't look for ways to get rid of your feelings. Permit them to happen.'
Here's a useful hint for future emotional situations. You don't have to do anything with your feelings except feel them.  But be careful here that you know what I'm saying. I'm not saying, feeling your rage and hit somebody. I'm saying that hitting somebody is actually an alternative to feeling your rage. We use action to prevent us from feelings we cannot regulate. All you have to do is feel angry and do nothing about it except feel it. 

The real beauty of relying on feeling our feelings is that, unlike any other solution, they pass! Nobody remains furious forever - seldom even for an hour. Nobody remains depressed - outside of a bout of major clinical depression - for a lifetime. Low and high moods are normal and happen to all of us! The intense feeling moderates, sometimes in a few days, hours or even less - it's like the draining away of water from the sink. Water doesn't sit there forever in your sink. It flows down the sink and is gone. If you put a tight plug in, it dries out into the air.  One way or another, the water will go. Likewise, we lose our preoccupation with the painful feeling, whatever it is, and turn to other matters. They build us that way. Nature, the environment, or God (if you will), realised we could not survive otherwise. 

The grace 'pill' is far less damaging than any other way, and also, it works, and quicker than you would find elsewhere. You sit with your turbulent feelings in the presence of the Source - whatever Source you believe in. And allow these feelings to exist until they exist no more. It is interesting that the injunction to 'Be Still" is at once the most difficult and the most useful in the wide world of wisdom! We are so drenched with the idea we must do something, and if not do, then talk, talk, talk! The grace of God does not require much talking. It already knows. You may find the lines below helpful if you still suffer from anxiety. It is an energy psychology exercise created by the extraordinary Sandi Radomski and her colleagues.

There is a part of my being that already knows how to..... (state the problem as a positive, not a negative, i.e. how to be still, how to feel serene and content, how to face this tragedy etc.)

It is willing to inform the rest of me now. 

It is doing so now with grace and ease.

My mind, body and spirit are receiving this.

Information transfer is now complete.

(Acknowledgements and gratitude to AllergyAntidotes.com)

Beginning recovery from a drinking problem

Had a few busy days updating the heating system in my house. Today I had a space where I could take up the question of where you go from simply not drinking. So far, we have considered questions like:

1. How do I stop? We suggested that you have the question the wrong way round. The real question is:  why do you start? Don't start, and you will not have to stop. The problem does not occur after the third or fourth drink. It happens with the first drink. In fact, just before the first drink, to be absolutely accurate. That fatal moment when your mind goes to the idea of a drink - as opposed to all the or things your mind might have gone to . . . . And then, supposing you act on the idea, the alcohol is in your system, and your chances of stopping will instantly become poor to non-existent. If you don't start, you won't have this problem. And the only day you can do this is today. 
2. Problem drinking has two sides to it - the physical and the psychological.  You need to recover at both if you are to have a life of permanent, contented sobriety. Unhappy sober people soon decided that it's not worth it . . . . . And the whole rigmarole of drinking and trying to control it starts all over again. 
3. The psychological aspect of addiction to alcohol is basically a spiritual imbalance - it involves a search for spiritual experience of some kind, for an experience of something exotic, exhilarating  'special' and powerful beyond the ordinary - in a word, something god-like. And if we cannot find this experience we are likely to return to that well-known god-substitute - alcohol - that we were so attached to before. 

But isn't that type of experience what religion is supposed to give us? And if so, why doesn't it work for me? 

'What is the difference between belief and experience?' is, therefore, today's topic. This may be a bit hard going for some, so bear with me.

Here is a breakdown of religious affiliation in the United Kingdom.

Religion in the United Kingdom (2011 census)^[1]

  Christianity (59.5%)

  No religion (25.7%)

  Islam (4.4%)

  Hinduism (1.3%)

  Judaism (0.4%)

  Other religions (1.5%)

  Not stated (7.2%)

However, many people claim an affiliation with a particular church which is no more than nominal - it's what's on my birth certificate. It doesn't tell you what they actually believe.

When the question is put differently in social attitude surveys, such as "Do you believe in . . . . (God, angels, heaven, the resurrection of Jesus)" the responses are surprisingly more positive. There is a widening gap between what we actually believe and what religious affiliation we claim.

Our actual beliefs are usually based on life experience, rather than church doctrine. 'I believe in God because . . . ." and what follows is less likely to be 'because the church says so', and more likely to be a story about something that has happened that has made us think or touched us emotionally. "Something helped me through that bad time,' or "I had a miraculous escape," or "I was at my lowest and something came through to me and I felt at peace.'

These are different kinds of experiences from the kind which occurs in the church. Going to church is an affirmation, most likely, of what you already believe. And nothing wrong with that. But it may be less useful in helping to decide what you do believe. You go to church because you believe. You look to your own personal experience to help you decide what that is.

I'm aware that enthusiastic churches of all kinds attempt to replicate that exceptional, spiritual experience in their practice of worship. There's nothing wrong with that, if you enjoy it and find it helpful. I'd suggest it suffers from the same basic problem as quieter churches. It is very difficult to actually replicate an authentic spiritual experience!  Once it becomes an every day or every week kind of thing, it just doesn't happen any more. We can go through the motions, but that's all. Spiritual experiences are intangible, they are elusive. You can't control them or make them happen to order. Why not? Because they are two-way experiences - between us and 'the other.' You can't make a compulsory appointment with God or 'the other'. At least, that has been my personal experience, for what it's worth. I can show up, but it is up to God whether s/he does too! Jung knew this very well, which is why he suggested that we place ourselves in a spiritual environment, and hope for the best! This was not a philosophy of despair, rather of humility. It is about recognising our human limitations - something that many addicts have great difficulty with.

Hence, going to church, or participation in religious rites, is not by any means a waste of time, but it does have limitations, and it is probably helpful to be aware of these, so we do not go on demanding the impossible of the church.  Rituals of all kinds simply perform the function of 'placing ourselves in a spiritual  environment." They guarantee nothing, but they do offer us a place and a time where we, at least, can open ourselves, as far as we can, to the deeper experience we are looking for. Be aware that many of the great descriptions of spiritual experience have not taken place in church at all.  

Faced with a very moving spiritual experience, the natural tendency is to describe this experience in the language of the dominant religion in your culture. "I felt at peace" means exactly that - what the words say. However, in a Hindu culture, you are likely to ascribe this 'peace' to the action of a known god: say Krishna, Hindu supreme god of compassion and love (see above left). It makes sense to you to think of it in this way. While in a Christian culture, you are more likely to ascribe the same experience to the action of Jesus Christ or God the Father - nobody around you in a Christian community is likely to suggest that it could have been a visitation from Krishna! Thus, religion gets transmitted through a culture, while spiritual experience is universal. 

From his world wide researches, Jung came to understand that the religious names may change, but the spiritual feelings underlying them are what we all have in common. The human psyche is in essence spiritual - and spiritual means emotional, for reasons we will go into. Many of us have striking, perhaps moving spiritual experiences, once in a rare while, and what we do with them - how we interpret them - is up to us. Each culture develops its own way of thinking about the spiritual. Over time, it seems that the actual experiences people had which inspired them to form religious groupings gave way to belief systems sanctioned by one community or another. For example, my experience of being helped through a crisis becomes defined by my particular community as 'the love of God.'  And then at some point, the community, feeling the need for more certainty, creates a creed out of this idea. Such creeds then start to be used every week in religious services - a regular affirmation of what we believe. It's a bit of a 'so there!" to the rest of the world. Creeds and other statements of doctrine had many advantages, because at one time education was thin on the ground, and ordinary people needed help to know what was a tried and tested belief system, to protect them from charlatans who would use them for their own ends. Actually, come to think of it, the world is not that different today! Desperate people are easy prey for those who would use them for their own ends.

Of course, creeds and doctrinal positions have their limitations also. They can easily become sources of disputes, mutual hate, or even war. 'My belief is the true one, no, mine is true and yours is all lies!' This can be quite a turn off for those desperately seeking help through spiritual experience. They simply don't want to get involved, understandably. They see nothing good in the business of religion.

Equally, someone without any kind of religion may well ignore such experiences, or, when they come, fail to notice them at all, or let them pass without much thought. 'It was the weird atmosphere in that place that did it.' 'I had eaten something that disagreed with me!' Charles Dickens gives us a funny and brilliant account of such a response in Ebenezer Scrooge. He is a man who, when visited by angels, decides that it is all indigestion!  If you are an atheist, you are unlikely to take such spiritual experiences all that seriously. And yet, some people have been converted lifelong by such experiences, in which they personally did not believe at all! We are back to St Paul again and the road to Damascus.

What is truly going on here? I'd suggest that we may not all think we have spiritual experiences, but we all have rather well-entrenched belief systems! One of which might be that there is no such thing as a spiritual experience! If Scrooge was determined to see the Ghost of Christmas Past as an attack of indigestion, no one could stop him, ultimately.

My point is just this: experience creates belief, whereas belief does not always create experience. I very much doubt whether belief is created by the church, the creed, the Bible, the Pentateuch, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the pilgrimage to Mecca or Lourdes, or any other ritual of your tradition. You might, however, be lucky, and have a powerful spiritual experience on the way, or in the process of digesting these rituals, which may even have led to your present state of belief.

If so, for those struggling with recovery from addiction, it is helpful to think about what experiences you have actually had which have conditioned what you now believe or don't. Here, you are not being asked to believe this, that or the other . . . . That is no help in your situation. You are simply asked to reflect on your past experience, and find out what you do believe or think you can believe. If you cannot believe in your parents' religion, you don't have to. If you rejected your own community years ago, fine. Nobody is asking you to take it back. Rather, you are being asked: "What is left of my previous experience that I can still believe in? When I have removed all the objectionable stuff? What is new and different in my experience that speaks to me right now?" It's like moving the furniture of the mind. Moving from covert to overt spiritual thinking, if you like. Moving your current belief system from the back to the front of your mind, where you can put it out there and see it and assess it afresh. As a help, try answering a few useful questions, like:

a) what unusual or inexplicable experiences can I recall, whether I understood or trusted them or not? (We are looking for experiences of the heart,  not of the mind.)
b) what was I brought up to believe? 
c) what did my parents believe, and did they expect me to believe the same as them?
d) what were my earliest experiences of religion? Did I like it, or not?
e) have I changed my belief system since childhood, and in what way? What experiences have influenced me in this?
f) have I drifted mentally, rather than spelled out for myself what I believe?
g) what have been my negative experiences of religion? How do I feel about those now?


And perhaps best of all:

g) Today, in the light of all my past experiences, what is my considered opinion about experience of the spiritual sort? If I were told I would die tomorrow, what would be the state of my belief today?

Faced with this type of question, surprisingly, many people find more to believe in than they expected. Some will find a lurking belief in one thing, some another. What matters is that, to recover, you need to stop worshipping alcohol! And this cannot be performed as a mental act with no alternative available! You need a god-substitute of some sort if you are to get free of the slavery of drinking. Self-denial - much vaunted in our world today - is dreary and does not work anyway. If you feel deprived enough, you will lose your rag one day and be in danger of returning to the old habits. Willpower is equally a dubious concept - something we all seem to have no trouble in believing in, though actually, it does not exist. No one has yet managed to point out where this 'willpower' is located in our brains or neurological systems. The human mind runs on emotions. It's that simple. Emotions then produce chemicals, electrical impulses, and these in turn produce thoughts, (communications) and behaviours. Do not allow anyone to mislead you into thinking that emotions are optional, and should not influence our thinking. We cannot avoid emotions - they are the foundation of the human psyche. Without them we are only half alive. We don't do things because we 'have willpower', or because we 'control ourselves', but rather out of a positive emotional motivation - a yes! feeling - towards getting or doing something that we want, or believe strongly in the value of. We reject things because of a 'no' feeling that this is something we don't want or value. Indeed any (emotional) impulse which is greater in strength than the opposite will produce a different response. If you were taking your daughter to school, and she was hurt by a fall, what urge would predominate in your mind? Getting her to school on time, or the emotional need to get help for her injuries? Our actions follow our feelings every time. The truth is we cannot fight psychological addiction by will power or self-control or self-denial, or any other great idea whatever which reaches only the surface of our minds. The 'I don't want that' is generated at the emotional level, beyond planning and self-coaching and figuring things out. The 'yes' impulse in addiction is always stronger - unless we can balance this impulse to start drinking again with something even more positive and more powerful that says strongly no.The no impulse is partly generated deeper even than the emotional level - it is in the spiritual depths of the psyche - not 'my idea' but the combined idea of me and my spiritual power. 

Spiritual beliefs, however limited or eccentric, are proven to be stronger and more powerful when tested - that is, if you have thought them through carefully enough, and know where you stand in relation to your chosen god-substitute. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you have chosen to believe in some sort of greater power than you - this means a spiritual power that can do what you cannot do alone. I've heard people suggest, jokingly, that their higher power is a table leg. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of power in a table leg! Relying on it could be a mistake. Perhaps, however, you have a concept of nature as a great power, and it certainly is. Or the universe itself. Human decency and goodness. Or guardian angels. Or the survival of the fittest. Or perhaps you have a feeling of a spiritual presence in your life of some sort, even though you cannot precisely name it. Just call it HP for now! This will do fine.

This belief needs to be as real as you can make it. Don't kid yourself, because your life is going to be in its hands! Look in a mirror, when nobody is around, and say aloud what you believe. Don't say what you don't believe! You've had enough of that. Don't give the negative too much house room in your head. Say, for example, "I believe there are good and bad forces in this world, and I believe the good is more powerful. The good is my higher power just now. I trust it!"

Here's an idea from the church that you may also find helpful - I do. You will have heard of the concept of grace. It is grace that you are going to be seeking over the next few months if you are to set your feet firmly on the road to recovery. Did you know, I wonder, what grace actually is? It is:

 the free and unmerited favour of God

It will be worth pondering this remarkable idea in time for the next post, where I will suggest ways in which this free and unmerited favour can be tapped. 

'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!