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Do you have your own internal mean girl?
Women especially are taught to take care of ourselves .... so that we can take care of others.
I am guilty of this.
Because now I see that, when I used it for myself, it was always coming from a place of lack.
Never being quite good enough.
I think that is how my own personal "mean girl" fueled her power. I accepted her negativity and put downs in the spirit of "I should be doing better."
Given my internal dialogue, it is no wonder I was drawn to numbing behaviors. Drinking helped temporarily escape that bitch.
How to quit quitting for the last time
If you want to quit quitting, then adopt the mindset of the potty training parent.
They will be frustrated along the way, but even if they are tempted to, they never quit trying because they know that eventually their child is going to figure it out. That child will not be in diapers forever.
How would things be different for you if you believed with 100% certainty that you will regain control over alcohol?
Odds are that you wouldn't need to quit quitting. You would get up, dust yourself off, learn what you can and keep moving forward. That is the way to do it.
This is why belief is so important, it keeps you moving forward.
The single biggest reason that your attempts to drink less have failed
If you want to plan for success in drinking less, you need to plan for failure. People want to skip this step but it is critical. You will mess up, so have a plan. Turn to this with curiosity not with self judgement. It will make you so much stronger in the end.
Are you ignoring the alarm?
"Needing" a drink at the end of the day as a reward could be a signal that you aren't processing your emotions throughout the day. They build up throughout the day like a pressure cooker which will blow up if it is not released.
Our emotions are there to tell us something and yet we don’t want to listen to them. This is like turning the smoke alarm off thinking that this will help put out the fire.
Note to self- light switches don’t work in a power outage
We had a big storm last weekend and were out of power for three days. The absence of modern conveniences in the middle of a hot July was not lost on me. I knew that we didn’t have power. And yet, every time I walked into a room, I flipped on the light switch.
Every. Single. Time. For approximately 72 hours.
And every single time, I thought to myself “I know better.”
Sure my conscious mind knew it, but turning on a light switch when I enter a dark room is a subconscious response.
When I first started on my journey to stop overdrinking, I would “find” myself reflexively pouring a drink when I got home from work, or if I had a stressful conversation with someone.
These were cues to my brain that it was time to drink. Just like walking into a dark room was a cue to turn on the light.
The story about the monster under the bed is much worse than the monster itself.
Most of us are emotionally illiterate and are afraid to feel our feelings. There really isn’t an incentive to do so because we can shop, scroll, eat or drink our way out of them. But turning into them gives you freedom. It turns out that the monster under the bed isn’t as scary as the story that you have created about him.
Night time me was an asshole
I needed that glass of wine to unwind after my hard day. The irony is that it was a tough day because of all of the wine that I had the night before. I was stuck on this hamster wheel.
I wanted a "Beam Me Up, Scotty" option. If someone had offered me a pill, or a mantra, or told me that jumping up and down on one leg would help, I would have tried it. Ok, I did try some of these things.
I just wanted to be there. To be in a place where night time me wasn't an a$$hole.
Pick your hard
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading" Lao Tzu
I hate it when people say, it is actually easier to drink/eat less. The logic is that there is less physical exertion, you don't spend as much money or time planning. Blah. Blah. Blah.
I can see the logic of it now, begrudgingly. But at the time, this felt like a platitude. Not helpful.
For me, the hardest part of drinking less was unlearning the drink = fun equation.