And the line-up to pat me on the back too starts here.
I had a really super-challenging situation yesterday and did not give in to drinking, though there was lots of wine available and I was soooooooooo tempted. SOOOOOO tempted.
WOW.
We had company for dinner Friday night. Wine was involved, but I didn’t have any (except for a single sip of ritual “wine” with the blessing we say on Friday evening for Shabbat dinner, the kind that’s so ridiculously sweet (the wine, not the blessing) I don’t even consider it wine — doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest). Other people had wine (the real thing), and I was momentarily tempted to, but I was busy serving this great meal I had created without the distraction of alcohol, and just forgot to want it anymore. (It’s amazing how much more smoothly everything seems to go when I haven’t had a glass of wine or three while I’m cooking! I’m organized, the timing of things coming out of the kitchen and onto the table is bang on, the kitchen’s clean before we sit down to eat, and everything just clicks into place. Who knew?)
Anyhoo, dinner came and went, and a good time was had by all.
The challenge started when the guests left and my husband went to bed and I stayed up for a bit, relaxing in front of the TV. Our guests had brought a huge bottle of white wine, most of which was now left over, recorked and sitting in the fridge. This is one of my most dangerous drinking cues. I’d already gotten through making dinner (another drinking trigger) and having dinner with guests (yet another trigger). I briefly toyed with the idea of having “just one glass”. Then I remembered where that kind of thinking had gotten me in the past, and that put an end to it. Back to Not An Option. Round 1 to the Bus Driver.
Round 2 was MUCH harder.
Saturday afternoon we had a big disagreement. Bitter words were spoken, rather loudly, drama occurred, and one of us left the house for a time-out. I was the one who stayed home … with the wine. Every time I opened the fridge, there it was, in the door, calling louder and louder, and getting harder and harder to resist. I was feeling sad and scared and upset, very much in need of comfort and soothing. And there was that bottle, just calling to me. So I took the bottle firmly by the neck and moved it into the storage locker. Out of sight, out of mind.
Round 2 to the Bus Driver as well.
(Why didn’t I just pour it down the drain? Hmmm, I guess there’s still part of me that can’t “waste” perfectly good wine. I have a pretty big practical streak, and I thought my husband might like some later on, which in fact he did, so I was glad I’d saved it for him. In the end, after he’d had a couple of glasses of wine, he was the one who poured the rest down the drain and got it out of harm’s way. The End.)
There’s one thing I don’t understand though. Why can I control the cravings now and not before? The wine was available, which used to trigger a huge dopamine surge, huge cravings, but it didn’t. The thoughts and the cravings are still there, but dialled way back. It seems as if even though the wine was physically available, I had decided it wasn’t available to me, so it wasn’t.
Or was it just a matter of time? Is it possible that even with the wine readily available it’s just taking longer now for the cravings to get too strong to resist? If that wine had been in my face for longer, would I have succumbed? Say, if I hadn’t moved it? I know I was more tempted than I was last week, when I knew there was a bottle of wine around here somewhere all week, but I didn’t go looking for it and didn’t really think about it much. Would I have gone for it or would I have just gone back to my new “normal” once the stress of the argument was dissipated?
For that matter, how did I get to this new “normal”? How is it that I seem to have made such a huge shift from “can’t say no” to “won’t say yes”? Not only that, but it’s beginning to feel EASY, natural, not something I’m fighting anymore. What has changed?
Nothing and everything. That may be a cliché, but it seems true for me.
Really, the only thing that has changed is my thinking. But changing your thinking really does change “everything”. The big piece that has changed is that I’ve made a choice to say “absolutely not”, to abstain altogether. It’s just a thought, and it’s just one thought, but oh what a difference it makes. Before I chose that thought, I had to make the decision about whether to have a drink and if so, how many, every single day, and in fact, many, many times in every single day. It was exhausting (Marc Lewis talks about “ego fatigue”, where you basically wear yourself down with trying to resist the temptation, till you can’t take it anymore and you cave). But now that the decision is made, I don’t have to put all that energy into trying not to drink, and then drinking, and then beating myself up over it, and starting all over again the next day. All that energy is available now for things like living with my decision. Yes, it’s hard sometimes to watch the impulses come up without doing anything about it, but nowhere near as hard as watching the impulses come up and acting on them, then feeling bad about it — and everything else — all the time. And the impulses do go away, usually within a matter of minutes, once I remind myself, oh yeah, right, I don’t do that anymore.
And I don’t. A couple of months ago I would have just automatically hit the bottle, in a heartbeat, when we had that big fight, but not now. When I was in need of soothing, what I turned to was, first, distraction — in this case, laundry! — and second, mindfulness. I took the time to really feel into my feelings, and just sit quietly and let it all sink in. And guess what? I got to figure out what the real issue was for me, we talked about it quietly when he got back, we each said what was true for us, and the whole thing was resolved. That would never have happened when I was drinking. For one thing, I wasn’t so in touch with what’s true for me. Now I can sit with myself and get in touch with my centre, and speak calmly about my truth, with compassion and love rather than fear, anxiety, and often blame.
I feel like I dodged a bullet there, but I also know it’s a bullet I will have to keep dodging every time we share a meal with someone else, probably for the rest of my days. Though there’s no social pressure to drink, there’s also no social pressure not to. So I guess I’m feeling I may as well get used to it — to having wine in the house and not drinking it, having people over and not drinking even if they are, going out to dinner and not having wine, etc.
I have lots of questions, but one thing I do know for sure: I’m never going back to that awful black hole again. I’m feeling calm and peaceful, no more anxiety, and I’m doing what it takes to keep it that way.
Driving my own bus 
Hi:
For me the first clue 😉 was where you realize you really DO function better off alcohol. For me it took a long time to fully comprehend that the “influenced” state was a real degradation in capability. People often think they are going as well or better but this is because the alcohol is acting first to suspend their judgement and objectivity. If you do not drink at all you note that drinkers seem to be getting “happy” and that seems like a good thing but they are not doing all that well though they may think so. So, for me, I could see that doing my best was associated with being both alert and sober. Eventually that did become the “new normal”.
It is interesting to not that the alcohol hits the higher centers first which are the ones trying to moderate and direct the irrational impulses from lower centers. If alcohol worked from the lower to the higher centers or in reverse order such that respiration was affected first and rationality last it would be quickly be seen to be a CNS poison which it certainly is.
People learn that some part of their brain is constraining them in social situations and they bridle at this frustration of not being able to comfortably function at a
pre-human level. By testing and peer influence the lower brain realizes it can be “free” if it can stun the cortex with alcohol. I suspect that it is this effect that the brain is actually addicted to that is to say that numbing the cortex = freedom and pleasure.
If the stunning can be kept at a certain level suppressed behavior can be liberated. This will be some sort of aggressiveness up to a criminal level, risky sexual behavior or other action constrained by the cortex in normal, sober daily life. Ultimately a person might simply want to stun the cortex from perceiving what its real living situation is.
The dopamine rush would be the craving for that state of lack of inhibition and freedom from prohibited actions and even thoughts.
At some point I became convinced that the way forward for myself and ourselves as people living socially was to enhance the capability of my cortex not stun it into acquiescence. This means increasing the amount of good knowledge I can hold in my mind and working memory and not just more self discipline and suppressed frustration.
YES! I especially like that last comment about increasing what you can hold in working memory, and about how that is not about self discipline and suppressing frustration. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s become so EASY that it doesn’t require all that much self-discipline. Yes, I was definitely stunning that cortex — partly to avoid looking at reality, and partly to give myself an excuse to shut down for the day because I found the work I was doing too hard (and I work at home, so the boundaries between office & bar are rather, um, fluid). Now the work has magically become easier (surprise, surprise) and ironically, quitting alcohol has actually been more liberating than drinking ever was! All of a sudden I’ve discovered that there are several hours between suppertime and bedtime that are now unoccupied because I’m not stunned with drink anymore. So I have more time and I can get more rest and that too is good for my brain!