IN THIS CHAPTER
•SOCIAL OCCASIONS •IMPAIRED JUDGEMENT •IT RELAXES ME •IT’S JUST A HABIT •IT’S THE WAY I’M MADE •CONTRADICTIONS
One of the most powerful illusions among drinkers is that they cannot enjoy or cope with life without alcohol.
At the end of the last chapter I gave three examples of occasions when a soft drink is often considered unsatisfactory: in a bar, out to dinner, at a party. This leads us to the most common excuse for drinking: that it helps to make social occasions more enjoyable.
We often go into social occasions with a lack of confidence. Will I know anyone there? Will they find me interesting? Will I meet anyone I like? One of the key aspects that makes social occasions fun is surely that we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. Who wants a party to be predictable?
Nevertheless, these questions raise fears within us and so we reach for our little crutch to quell those fears. We have been brainwashed into believing that alcohol gives us courage.
The term “Dutch courage” originates from the days when English troops were given Dutch gin to calm their nerves before going into battle. There’s an important distinction here: it may well have calmed their nerves by knocking out those particular emotions, but it didn’t give them anything, least of all courage.
Courage is acting in spite of fear. A fireman who runs into a burning building to rescue a baby is not fearless – he knows only too well the danger he’s in and any fully conscious human who is in danger will feel fear. Yet he sets the fear for his own life aside to save the life of the baby. That is true courage.
Just as taste buds have a very valuable purpose, so does fear. It’s the emotion that alerts us to danger, by triggering the “fight or flight” response. If we block out that response with alcohol, we’re leaving ourselves vulnerable.
CHECK YOUR INSTRUMENTS
Imagine a pilot flying over a mountain range in cloud. He knows he needs to fly at a certain altitude to avoid the peaks, and he gauges his altitude by looking at his altimeter. If he looks at the altimeter and sees he’s flying too low, he may feel a momentary surge of panic but he will respond quickly and pull the plane up to a safe height. The altimeter is his constant gauge of danger from the mountains and as long as it keeps working and he keeps responding to it, he will remain safe.
But suppose the altimeter malfunctions. Its little warning light that flashes when the plane drops too low stops working. The pilot thinks everything’s fine, but really he’s hurtling towards the mountains. Suddenly a peak looms out of the cloud and he realizes the danger he’s in.
It’s a mistake to regard fear as debilitating. As this example shows, it’s the absence of fear that is debilitating. There is nothing genuinely frightening about a social occasion, but there are dangers associated with them, such as getting home in one piece and, for women in particular, making sure you don’t leave yourself vulnerable to ill-intentioned men.
When we’re in real danger, we need all our faculties to be fully functional: the ability to run, to shout, to fight, to think. Fear triggers all these responses. Block out fear with alcohol and you’re effectively burying your head in the sand. The effect is twofold: you not only fail to identify danger when it arises, you also lack the ability to respond effectively.
Here’s a reminder of a few expressions we use for being drunk:
Blind drunk
Legless
Paralytic
Wasted
Is it really necessary to debilitate all your bodily functions in order to enjoy social occasions?
In the longer term, drinking to give yourself courage has a further ill effect. If you have fears, drinking may dull them but it won’t make them go away. On the contrary, as you become less capable of tackling whatever it is that is frightening you, the fear increases. Imagine a girl who finds herself in the home of a strange man she’s met in a bar. She’s drunk, he seemed attractive, she trusted him. Now she’s getting cold feet. He seems a bit odd and she realizes she’s alone in his apartment, completely at his mercy. She’s struggling to stand up, let alone fight or run. How frightened do you think she feels?
I’m not trying to scare you with horror stories. I’m just trying to show how fear gives us the ability to protect ourselves and the ability to protect ourselves alleviates fear. Interfere with this and both your vulnerability and your fear will increase. You create a vicious circle: the more you turn to alcohol to quell your fear, the more your fear increases, so the more you turn to alcohol. This is how the alcohol trap works. It’s like a pitcher plant, dragging you further and further down, while you think that it’s giving you support.
Shyness is not an unattractive trait. Who would you rather spend time in conversation with, someone who doesn’t talk much but listens, or someone who talks too much and shows no interest in what you have to say?
Social occasions may make shy people feel vulnerable, but any sense of inadequacy is only in their own mind. Brash, talkative and drunk people may hog the limelight and thus create the superficial impression that they’re more entertaining than everyone else. In fact, most people are secretly wishing they would shut up and give someone else a chance.
But because these motor-mouths seem so self-assured, we want a bit of what they’ve got and so we turn to alcohol. But alcohol doesn’t make us more interesting, it just removes our ability to tell when we’re being dull.
What is shyness? Is it not a form of fear: the fear of making a fool of oneself? Just as fear protects us from danger, so shyness protects us from humiliation. Of course, shy people tend to have a heightened sense of fear before social occasions, but that’s no different to an actor getting nervous before taking the stage. Once you’re in the situation, you deal with it and your confidence grows. Try to drown your shyness with booze and you increase the likelihood of making a fool of yourself.
Disabling your inhibitions with alcohol is tantamount to removing the bulb from your oil warning light. The threat doesn’t go away, only your awareness of it disappears.
Making a fool of yourself is one thing – and with drunks it’s a very common thing – but there are other inhibitions that, when knocked out, can lead to far more serious consequences. I refer back to the vulnerable girl who goes home with a strange man at the end of the evening. Sober, she would be acutely aware of the risks involved in such an action. Drunk, her reading of the situation is impaired and she puts herself in danger.
You could say that good manners are a form of inhibition, whereby we control our thoughts about someone so as not to hurt their feelings or cause antagonism. Drunks often become rude and abusive.
Why? Because the sense that inhibits rudeness is blocked out. They also become aggressive and accuse people of being rude to them.
We have many social skills designed to help maintain a civilised society: politeness, tolerance, tact, diplomacy, the ability to listen, the ability to show an interest in others, the ability to pacify. Alcohol impairs all these skills and the results are what we regard as stereotypical drunken behaviour:
Insensitivity
Long-windedness
Rudeness
Impatience
Abusiveness
Boorishness
Aggression
Violence
In the case of the latter, the inability to know when to stop can have frightening, even deadly consequences. It’s very rare for two sober people to come to blows. In most cases, there’s a lot of talk and posturing as both parties go through the primitive ritual of trying to face their opponent down. Neither one wants to hit or be hit and in most cases they will back down before it comes to that.
Add alcohol to the mix, however, and the sense that inhibits violence is blocked out. The primitive instincts that enable us to assess the situation and weigh up our chances of emerging unscathed – or, indeed, inflicting grievous harm – stop working. A small man will take on a big man, believing he can win. And despite being soundly beaten, he will not concede. On the flip side, the fighter who has his opponent beaten does not know when to stop and keeps pummelling until someone drags him off. What if there is no one to drag him off?
Perhaps you think I’m painting an unbalanced picture. Sure, most social occasions pass off without anyone getting hospitalized or killed in a drunken fight, but I’m citing these extreme examples – and they’re by no means uncommon – to illustrate the point that applies when going into any social occasion:
No doubt you will have experienced numerous happy social occasions where a lot of drink has been consumed, and you will assume that it was the drink that oiled the wheels. But think about it: who were you with and what were you doing? Isn’t it the case that those occasions were really enjoyable because of the company and the occasion? A wedding, a birthday, a day at the races, a Christmas party.
The belief that alcohol is necessary to have a good time leads many people to spoil the occasion and have a bad one. Once you’ve freed yourself from alcohol and learned once again to trust in your ability to relate to other people and have fun, just as we do as children, you will go into all social occasions with greater confidence and come out having had more enjoyment than ever.
It’s a classic scenario, acted out time and time again on TV and in the movies, as well as in real life. A person comes home after a long, hard day, kicks off their shoes, flops into an armchair and says, “I could murder a drink.” They’re stressed, their nerves are frayed and they believe that alcohol will help them unwind. In fact, the opposite is true.
Nerves and stress, like fear, serve an important purpose. They alert us to problems. Sometimes the problem is simply that we’re overdoing it. If we don’t heed the warning signs and do something about it, we run the risk of grinding to a halt.
It’s the oil warning light syndrome again. Stress and nerves are a sign that we need to do something to take care of ourselves. If we remove that warning sign with alcohol, the problem doesn’t go away, it gets worse. And so the stress increases.
In fact, the effect is twofold because alcohol is also a major cause of stress. As it leaves your system it creates a restless, insecure feeling, which you interpret as “I want a drink”. Until you satisfy that feeling, you will feel stressed and nervous.
“Ah!” you might say. “But if alcohol gives the impression of relieving stress, what does it matter if it doesn’t actually do so?”
Because it not only causes stress but also has numerous other undesirable effects.
The feeling of relaxation you experience is the partial relief of the uncomfortable feeling of withdrawing from alcohol brought about by the previous drink.
While you go on believing it relieves stress, you’re failing to address the real cause of your stress and the real damage to your health is getting worse. It’s like responding to the oil warning light by topping up with sand. The light might go out but the engine is doomed!
Remember, as alcohol leaves your body you start to feel uptight. If you have a drink, you do feel more relaxed. That is not an illusion. But all you’re trying to do is relieve the withdrawal caused by the Little Monster, which non-drinkers do not suffer anyway. In fact, the more you drink, the more stressed you become.
Kick off your shoes, change your clothes, take a shower, eat something, flop in your armchair… all these actions will help to relieve the discomforts of a long, hard day. Alcohol will not.
The words habit and addiction are often used synonymously these days. People talk about a “drug habit”. But there is a clear distinction between them and it’s absolutely essential that you understand what it is, otherwise you won’t fully grasp either the nature of the victim or of the trap, and you will always be vulnerable.
With habits, you’re in control. They might be unpleasant habits, but you do them only because you want to. Habits are easy to break provided you want to break them. We drive on the left in the UK but have no difficulty switching to the right when abroad. The important thing is the underlying reason why certain behaviour becomes habitual. That reason might be beneficial. If so, why break the habit? It’s unlikely anyone would deliberately get into the habit of repeating behaviour that provided them with no benefit, unless, of course, they were deluded into believing that an evil was beneficial: as in the case of alcohol addiction.
Drinkers believe that they choose to drink because it gives them some kind of pleasure or support, but if, at any time, they were to take their head out of the sand and list all the advantages and disadvantages of drinking alcohol, the conclusion would be, “You’re a mug. Stop doing it!” This is why all drinkers and all other addicts instinctively feel stupid.
In fact, they’re not stupid. There is a powerful force that more than balances the scales, and that force is called addiction. But while you believe it’s just habit that compels you to drink, what you’re really saying is, “I don’t understand why I drink. I don’t believe that I get any genuine pleasure from it. It’s just a habit I’ve got into and, providing I can survive long enough without a drink, time will solve the problem and my craving will eventually go.”
But you would be kidding yourself.
The only way truly to escape from the alcohol trap is to understand how the trap works and how you fell into it in the first place. Only then will you be free from the temptation to fall back in. I don’t mean you will resist the temptation, I mean there will be no temptation. You will have no need or desire to drink.
Closely tied to the habit illusion is the belief that your drink problem is a symptom of your personality. Either you put your failed attempts to quit down to a weakness in your temperament – a lack of willpower – or to a predisposition to drink, over which you have no control – an addictive personality.
Either excuse is a cop-out. What you’re effectively saying is, “I’m powerless to stop drinking and, therefore, I have no choice but to carry on doing it.”
The problem is that the bulk of information we receive about addictions such as drinking, smoking and gambling, is that you do need willpower to quit and that there is such a thing as an addictive personality. The fact that this misinformation is disseminated by reputable organizations, which, I have no doubt, act with purely good intentions, only adds to its potency. Why would an organization that genuinely wants to help people stop drinking disseminate misinformation that serves to imprison them more deeply in the trap? The simple answer is because they too have been brainwashed.
Remember the STOP diagram. Once you look at it in a different way and see the true message, you can never be fooled by the illusion again. That’s why I asked you to keep an open mind and follow the instructions: because the truth is often the complete opposite of what we assume it to be.
The belief that your alcohol problem is down to a flaw in your personality is a form of denial. Rather than accepting that you have an addiction and taking the necessary steps to overcome it you can say, “I have no choice but to carry on doing it.” But why would any problem drinker want to say that? Why would anyone who is suffering the misery and slavery of alcohol addiction make an excuse that took away their option to walk free?
The answer is the fear that they can’t cope without alcohol; the fear that they can’t enjoy social occasions or handle stress without alcohol; the fear that they have to go through some terrible trauma to get free; and the fear that even if they do manage to stop, they will have to spend the rest of their life resisting the craving.
But drinkers, like all addicts, lie. They lie to themselves and to others. The reason they lie is to perpetuate the illusions that enable them to kid themselves that they’re in control.
But if the alternative is honesty and freedom, why on Earth do they opt for lies and imprisonment?
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell
The answer can be encapsulated in the word which lies at the root of all addictions:
FEAR
SUMMARY
•Alcohol impairs your ability to judge situations.
•Alcohol impairs your social skills.
•Alcohol causes stress and fear.
•Shyness and inhibition serve a useful purpose. So do nerves and stress.