That is true, giving up drinking won’t fix things, but it won’t make things worse, which is what will happen if she continues to drink. It will only add another problem to the list and put an extra strain on her already strained financial situation. Plus, she won’t feel any better either. Hangovers are a killer, and they might eventually affect her work performance.
Lori, I assure you that drinking is not the answer. Trust me. And ask Our Blessed Mother to help you. She will. That I know for a fact. And I will keep you in my prayers too!
Oh, no, I don’t mean that she shouldn’t stop drinking! While I allowed that truly special occasion drinking might be acceptable, I think it would be an excellent idea for her to stop entirely until she got a handle on her thinking, lest bad thinking lead to behaviors that will spoil the workings of her physical brain and literally make her into an alcoholic. You are right, though: she would be the wisest to just give up drinking altogether, at least for the time being. What she has described says enough about that.
Once she’s cleaned up her thinking, then the question of whether she can drink or not can be addressed. Oh, no, you’re right: the last thing she ought to do is to drink while she feels a need to do it. No way. She could alter how her brain reacts to alcohol forever. If she ever hopes to be a social drinker, she needs to stop drinking right now AND THEN do some serious examination of what it is she is trying to self-medicate with the alcohol. She also needs a situation in which she is fully accountable to monitor herself if she ever decides that social drinking might be OK. That is a decision that is down the line, too, something she’d only do after she is feeling much better.
I mean only that she ought not see this primarily as a drinking problem. It is a whole new ballgame when physical dependence rears its ugly head, but a drinking problem is usually starts as a
thinking problem. Sometimes habitual abuse grows out of social pressure, but the kind of misuse she’s describing come from wrong thinking about how one can even hope to use alcohol in a healthy way.
Having said that, she and her husband might be wise to read “Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception” by Abraham J. Twerski. Here’s an example it gives:
What Is Addictive Thinking?
*Interviewing Ray, a young man who had been admitted to a rehabilitation unit for drug addiction, I asked, “What made you decide it was time to do something about the problem?”
“I’ve been on cocaine for a few years,” Ray replied, “and occasionally I’d quit using for a few weeks at a time, but I’d never decided to stop for good before.”
“For the past year my wife has been pressuring me to stop completely. She used to do cocaine too, but she’s been off for several years now. I finally got to the point where doing coke wasn’t worth the hassle, so I decided to give it up completely.”
“I sincerely wanted to stop for good, but after two weeks I started up again, and that proved something to me. I’m not stupid. I now know that it is absolutely impossible for me to stop on my own, maybe.”
I repeated Ray’s last sentence several times because I wanted him to hear what he had just said. But he could not see what I was trying to point out.
I said, “It is perfectly logical to say, ‘Maybe I can stop by myself.’ It is also perfectly logical to say, ‘It is absolutely impossible for me to stop by myself.’ But to say, ‘I now know that it is absolutely impossible for me to stop on my own, maybe,’ is absurd because it is self-contradictory. It is either ‘absolutely impossible’ or ‘maybe,’ but it cannot be both.” Ray, however, was unable to see my point.
I have repeated this conversation to a number of people, and even seasoned therapists initially show no reaction, waiting for the punch line. Only after I point out the contradiction between “absolutely impossible” and “maybe” do they see the absurdity of the statement and the distortion of thought taking place in this man’s mind.*
If a person thinks in self-contradictory (and therefore, necessarily, false) ways, it isn’t going to solve the person’s problems to simply give up the pointless self-medication that they’re using to cope. They need to learn to recognize that faulty thinking, too. When a person does that, if they do it before they’ve become physically dependent, then it might be possible to use alcohol in a rational way. Once a physical dependence alters the brain, though, that story is over. The substance that the person is addicted to has to be kept out of contact with their brain, and that’s all there is to it.
