When you’re thinking about your drug and alcohol use, your mind plays all kinds of tricks on you. Even the healthiest among us falls into maladaptive patterns of thinking sometimes. Throw chemical dependency in there to mess with your motivations and rationales, and the addicted mind is a powerful and single-minded captain of the ship. As Gabor Mate says, to break free from addiction, the brain that got you into this mess has to be the instrument of its own healing. If you’re in the “pre-contemplation” stage – worried about your use, wondering if you should quit, wondering what life will be like if you do – maybe you’ve experienced some of the following thought patterns.
“I need drugs/alcohol/cigarettes/etc.” This is a tough one. What I can say is there was a time before you were addicted that you didn’t need your substance of choice. There are billions of people out there who don’t need that substance, and they are doing fine. There are even several million people out there who used to be trapped into “needing” those substances, and broke their addiction. You can be one of those people.
“I just need one/I’ll just drink this one time.” I’ve been here. One is too many, and one is never enough. If you’re an addict like me, have you ever been truly satisfied with “just one”? And if you’re an addict like me, making an exception is a slippery slope. It starts with just one today…and since you’ve already broken the rules, might as well just have one tomorrow…or maybe two….or ten…and the next day…and the next day.
“I’ll quit tomorrow.” We’ve all postponed tomorrow a million times. What will be special about tomorrow that will make it different from today?
“I’m only hurting myself, not anyone else.” Unless you live in total isolation, this is probably not true. And what if the world needs what Sober You has to offer? What if you standing in your own way is keeping you from sharing your gifts with people around you? From former addicts who become addiction counselors to Brene Brown transforming our relationship to shame and courage, you may not know what you have to give until you quit.
“My whole social world is full of drinking/smoking/using.” That’s a fair concern. There are people in business whose livelihood revolves around wining and dining clients. As an addict, a lot of my social circle shared the common interest of drinking and smoking. Before I quit, I would scoff and say, “What, so I’m supposed to give up all my friends??” Yeah, maybe. What I also found was that keeping my friendships and just drinking something other than alcohol with them was not as hard as I thought it would be. There have been times I’ve had to politely but firmly turn down a repeated offer of a drink – but rarely. 95% of the time, people do not give a sh!t what I do, they just want to hang out.
“I’m more fun/interesting/creative as a drinker.” Giving up the image of yourself as the tortured creative or bon vivant is pretty tough. There are a lot of people whose identity is pretty tied up in their being Ernest Hemingway or Jackson Pollack. For myself, I had a long history of being a party girl. This was one of the hardest things about quitting for me. But one by one, the people I partied with stopped partying. Soon it was just me, by myself, drinking alone. And I didn’t write. Not anything. Once I quit, I had all this free time. And I filled it up with writing. You don’t know what your creative mind wants to say without being drowned by alcohol. What if it’s better than your whiskey-soaked output? What if you can bring discipline to your craft that you’ve never had before?
“My problem isn’t that bad – I haven’t lost my job/family/home/health.” Do you want to wait for this to happen before tackling your problem? It is infinitely harder to deal with simultaneous problems. Today you have an addiction problem. If tomorrow you have an addiction problem, an unemployment problem, a “my family has left me” problem, a homelessness problem, health problems, poverty problems – you will want to run from those problems, because that’s what you know to do, and alcohol will be waiting with open arms. It’s better to address this one problem than have it be part of a mountain of resulting problems.
“Nobody knows/I’m getting away with it.” Drinkers are sadly delusional; I certainly was. How many parties have you been at with people who were clearly very drunk, trying to convince people they weren’t drunk at all? Or you have probably been that person yourself. You are probably not hiding your problem as convincingly as you think you are.
“I’m a ‘functioning alcoholic,’ and I compensate in other ways.” Maybe you haven’t totally wrecked your life. Maybe you’re making it into work most days and working hard while you’re there. I’ve lived the “I work hard, I play hard” life, and I’ve worked sober, and working sober is 100% better. What kind of dynamo could you be if you weren’t hung over, if you weren’t exhausted, if you weren’t dopamine-depleted? How would your work be different if you were your best self nearly every day?
“I can’t quit.” Millions of people more effed up than you have quit – support groups are great to demonstrate this. I tried and failed to control my drinking for a long time. I made all kinds of rules that I immediately broke. Then I tried and failed to quit drinking a bunch of times – and tried and failed to quit smoking a bunch of bunches of times. I got more and more practice at being sober every time I tried to quit. I caught glimpses of what life could offer without alcohol and smoking. I couldn’t quit – until the day when I did. As Henry Ford says, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”
If you see yourself in these justifications for keeping drinking, you’re in good company. I have been there too. Sober life isn’t always a picnic, but it’s always better than the joyless, compulsive drinking I did as an alcoholic. People say alcohol is a crutch, but I picture it more as a blanket you hide under. It’s not protecting you from the monster, just keeping you from seeing the monster coming straight at you. Quitting gets you out of the monster house entirely. Step out of the monster house, and you are safe.
Thanks so much for this post. I love this stuff because it’s exactly what I was thinking when I was in early recovery.
It’s so correct to start with the Gabor Mate reference. In his book, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,” he describes an interview with an addict in pre-contemplation. She expresses some doubt that she has enough willpower and interest to quit, basically echoing your topic that the thinking that got you into trouble won’t get you back out of that trouble. But Mate turns the addicts question around and asks her “How much of you wants to stop using drugs?” The addict acknowledges that part of her does, but it’s very very small, and Mate tells her that even the smallest drive toward recovery can be enough. He goes on to describe how this can be, and his approach is like this post: gently and repeatedly using the (modest) desire for recovery to dispel the illusions and drives that keep people in addiction.
I agree with all of the questions you raise and with the responses you give, but I think that everything anyone could possibly write about this hits a limit– these are just words and not complete experiences. For me, the biggest thing that persuaded me was experiencing people (especially myself) again and again live out these broken thought patterns and see how the ended up in failure. The best place to see those people was face-to-face in support group meetings; in fact, that aspect of support groups changed me more than any of the main curriculum of the 12 Steps or SMART or anything else.
As you said in the section on the illusion of “I can’t quit,” at support groups, you’ll see people much like you in support groups who really have quit, and once I’d seen that, it was something that I could never unsee.
Thanks again for this great bunch of ideas.
I wholeheartedly agree that support groups offer access to lived experiences that show another, sober way is possible. I found people who’d exhibited the exact same thought patterns and overcame them. Some of these folks were deeper in their addiction than I had ever been, and come even farther in their recovery. They are proof that even the addict brain that caused the problem can be molded into something different, one day at a time.
This is another GREAT post. Dan B’s response isn’t bad either.