Avoiding Alcohol When Life Gets Tough
Dec 22, 2022
Staying Away From Alcohol
Alcohol is treated as the go-to panacea for all of life’s major curveballs. Lose your job, get dumped by a partner or even suffer the agony of bereavement.
You can be assured that a well-meaning friend or relative will reach straight for a stiff drink.
When people consider giving up booze for good there are many social aspects of the drug that they worry they will miss out on.
But also it is common to be concerned that a coping mechanism will also be lost out on.
On the 4th July 2017, we suffered a death in the family.
Our world crashed down around us and for me personally the most difficult part of the whole horrible ordeal was watching my children suffer and not be able to do anything to pull them out of their torture.
You may wonder if at any point in this painful experience if I was tempted to drink.
The honest answer is yes.
The days between the death and the funeral felt intolerably long.
Every minute felt like a week.
As we waited for family and friends to fly in from around the world I woke every morning and tried desperately to fill the days with distractions for my children.
On the third day they were both visiting friends and I was left on my own in a hotel room for a good eight hours.
I didn’t want to be on my own and I didn’t want my stupid brain to keep replaying events over and over again.
I briefly considered walking to a liquor store and buying a bottle of whiskey.
The thought lasted no more than a few seconds before I quickly recognized that life was already hard enough without adding another problem.
Alcohol would have just made a bad situation worse. Plus, what I have learnt well in the past is; once you invite the monkey onto your back, he won’t let go for a very long time.
You will have to wrestle with him and prize his gnarled, devilishly strong fingers from your flesh one by one.
I believe that the vast majority of the drinkers I meet are intelligent individuals who are simply using alcohol to escape the harsh edges of life.
- Get an unexpected bill – drink it away.
- Mess things up at work – drink it away.
- Miss out on the promotion – drink it away.
- Argue with your partner – drink it away.
Staying Away From Alcohol When Life Throws A Curve Ball
However, as I explain in Alcohol Lied to Me; booze doesn’t fast forward you through stressful or painful events. It may appear that is what it is doing but in reality it just hits the pause button on life.
When the drug wears off you are presented with the original problem but now you have an additional issue to deal with. That being, the withdrawal from a highly addictive drug.
In the case of my own personal experience recently. Grief has a natural process and as painful as it is you can’t choose to skip any part of it.
My son is nineteen now but still very much a baby at heart. He took the death very hard indeed.
I had with me some prescription sedatives, but no matter how much he struggled with what was happening I resisted the urge to give him a tablet.
Experiencing the agony of the first four stages of grief are the only true route to the fifth and final phase, which is that of acceptance.
Sedation would only delay that journey further.
The same is true of alcohol. You can drink and zombify yourself for a while but you can’t cheat the system.
The piper will have to be paid sooner or later. Nobody in their right mind would choose to pay later and extend the misery a second longer than is needed.
Once you get to the point where you accept that sobriety is a part of whom you are.
Then you will start to feel immensely grateful in the dark times that you don’t also have alcohol addiction to deal with.
You don’t get a choice on this. Life is going to knock you down repeatedly; it is the nature of existence.
Getting back up again is the only true choice.
Getting back up sober is so much quicker and easier than trying to do so with a booze monkey clinging around your neck.
If you are ready to get this attractively packaged poison out of your life for good.
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