Day 5: What You Were Really Drinking Away
At some point, the drinking stops being about the drink.
Most people never make it to this conversation with themselves or others, because this is the one that requires you to look at something you have spent years looking away from. It’s easier to talk about the habit, the triggers, the situations, and the culture, as they are all real and do matter.
But, they aren’t as crucial to long-term sobriety as the cornerstone of your addiction; underneath everything else we can discuss on the subject, there is something that was there before the first bottle was ever opened.
Something happened to you.
Maybe it was one thing (neglect for example), maybe it was a hundred small things over a long time (like frustrations of living in poverty). Maybe you have a name for it, and maybe you don’t; maybe you have talked about it in therapy, and maybe you have never said it out loud to anyone…
It is there, and alcohol did not create it; alcohol found it and offered to cover it up, at the expense of “the toll” (more alcohol) being paid.
I have a few answers to this…
I was six years old when my mother died, and then I was seven, eight, and nine without closure, understanding, or improvement in knowing who I was and where I belonged. I kept growing up, but that thing inside me did not grow with me; that trauma just got darker, that weight of a child who lost the one person who was supposed to be permanent, the one person whose job was to make the world feel safe was ripped away, literally overnight.
When the world does not feel safe at six years old, you find ways to manage that. You get angry, you act out, you cry and get emotional, you check out of school, and maybe you move through life with one hand always on the door, ready to leave before something leaves you.
NOTE: I would never take my life, as the one thing my mother’s suicide taught me more than anything else, is how fucked up it is for you to leave, and everyone is left behind to pick up the pieces. I’d never do that to my wife, kids, family, or friends…
When you are thirteen, and someone hands you something that makes all of that go quiet, even for a few hours, you do not question it, you just drink.
I was not drinking because I was having a good time, though sometimes it looked that way. I was not drinking because it tasted good; I was drinking because there was a version of myself I did not want to spend time with, and alcohol made him easier to avoid. He was the kid in the hallway, the one asking if his mother was going to be okay, the one who never got a real answer.
I drank him away for twenty years.
And here is the thing about that; it worked. That is the honest truth that nobody in recovery wants to say out loud, alcohol works. Not forever, and not without a cost, but in the short term, in the moment, when the noise was loud, and the weight was heavy, and I needed to get through the night, it worked great.
If it did not work, nobody would ever drink more than once.
The problem is that it only ever worked on the surface. Like pulling the batteries out of a fire alarm, the screeching went quiet, but that fire burned on. When the booze wore off, the damage would still be there, the fire would still be burning, and the thing underneath never went away; it remained unresolved, ready to set off the alarms again, and again, and again…
The trauma just sat there, patient, waiting for the alcohol to wear off, and every morning it was right where I left it, and every morning, I looked forward to a little more of that sweet liquid silence-maker to cover it back up. Except in my story, and that of millions of others, more traumas were piled on top, and so more poison was needed to mask the alarms.
In a way, calling alcohol poison makes the most sense, because you really are trying to kill that part of yourself. You may not be completely suicidal, but there is a part of you that you want to die, and alcohol is a way to temporarily murder that part, while letting the rest of you “live”.
That is how the cycle runs.
You don’t break the cycle by gritting your teeth and white-knuckling through the cravings; you break it by going down into the thing you were drinking away and dealing with it directly. That is the work.
Not the 31 days.
Not the 10 steps.
Not the challenges
Not the chapter a day…
Those are the structures, but the work is what you do when you sit down with the thing you have been running from and decide to stop running.
I am not asking you to do all of that today, but I am asking you to start getting honest about what it is.
Your Day 5 Sober-Challenge
Every time you feel a craving today, do not fight it. Instead, stop and ask yourself one question:
What am I feeling right now that I do not want to feel?
Write down what comes up; not the craving, I want you to focus on the feeling underneath the craving.
Do this every single time today, and by the end of the day, you will have a list, and that list is the beginning of the real work.
- Zac
PS: If you’re a man looking for a complete transformation, focused on all areas on top of addiction, check out my republished 31 day program, ‘31 Days to Masculinity’: GRAB YOUR COPY HERE