My parents rarely drank alcohol – I cannot recall seeing either of them drunk. I do recall my father being very ‘tired’ on some days, but this was very rare. My family were dairy farmers; my father worked hard, seven days a week. There were no days off to recover from a night out. We lived with my mother’s parents and most Sundays my grandfather would head off to play lawn bowls at the local bowling club. He would arrive home in the early evening quite drunk and very talkative and also very authoritative.
Around the age of 16, at a family function on the front verandah, I was asked if I wanted to have a taste of beer, which I did and I hated it. I certainly had no desire to start drinking, yet within a year or two of this I was binge drinking two or three times a week.
I have often wondered why I fell into the trap of alcohol when my parents hardly drank at all. Was I just rebelling? Was I being influenced by my grandfather’s behaviour or was I trying to be recognised in a weird and destructive way? I was heavily involved in sport and the drinking culture that goes with it –– was it this that led me to binge drinking?
I had a low tolerance to alcohol so maybe I could blame that. I can look back now, 40 years later, and see that it does not matter which one it was – or combination of them or indeed all of them together – as there was always a point where I had a choice. It is very clear to me now that I chose to continue drinking knowing what would occur and the consequences that came with it. There was something within me that gave me the opportunity to choose to go home or continue drinking. As I write this I can feel the lack of responsibility in those actions.
So, why did I make the choice to continue drinking? Was I waiting for that magical moment when someone says something that allows me to feel good about myself? Was it because I needed to be one of the boys or was it me, avoiding the tensions of my everyday life? Could it be that from an early stage of my childhood, society dictated how I was to be as a man. This never felt right but I embraced it and attempted to live my life in that way.
You would think that making the wrong choice a few times might send a clear message to me that I needed to stop doing this. These messages I did receive but in my arrogance, I ignored them. I could handle the situation. I ignored them for almost 20 years. I could convince myself that it was okay for me to have a couple of beers and then come home… I wish. Many times it was “just one for the road,” which became one too many.
I met my first wife when we were both drunk. My intimate relationship with my second wife began with us both being drunk. Had I learnt anything? Not at all. My behaviours the second time round were exactly the same as they had been since I began drinking.
I was at a sporting function at a local licensed club when I was called to the front desk. My girlfriend was ringing to say that she was in hospital, seriously ill and had been suffering a lot of pain. She explained what was going on. I had been drinking for quite a while so heard only some of what was said, but eventually I heard what I wanted to hear; “I do not want you to come to the hospital, stay at the football presentation.” It may not have been said as clearly as that, but it was what my interpretation allowed me to hear. I was having a great time drinking and could not see any sense in going to the hospital and standing around feeling useless. It was all about me!
Sport was used as an advertising vehicle for both alcohol and tobacco 40 years ago; consumption of alcohol was made out to be a ‘manly’ thing to do and there was a strong culture of drinking alcohol in the sporting clubs that I was associated with. In saying that, I cannot blame these clubs I was associated with for the choices that I was making in regard to alcohol. That was my responsibility.
Because of my drinking, I was feeling very uneasy about my life. It was affecting my work, it was affecting any relationships I had with people. I reached a point where I knew I needed to leave town. I was not honest with myself at first, saying that I was tired of my work and that I wanted to be self-employed. In the mid-nineties, we went on a family holiday to the North Coast. By the end of those two weeks, I had bought a small business. It was an interesting choice as it involved me having to build relationships and sell products to these people. I did not see communicating and connecting with people as one of my strengths at that point of time. Did I know that I was hiding something about myself?
Upon returning home, I went back to work, gave two weeks’ notice and moved to the Northern Rivers. This was my solution to my drinking problem. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself and I just wanted to run away, so I did. It certainly was a step in the right direction. The underlying issues that caused me to turn to alcohol were still there, but I managed them in a different way – mostly through my work, the volume of it and the way I carried it out.
We lived out of town, away from my work so I had no need to mix with people and I began drinking low alcohol beer. I only ever drank beer; very rarely did I drink spirits. By isolating myself and through my commitment to ‘solve’ my drinking problem, I did – almost. There were two occasions in the late 90s where I allowed myself once again to step away from the responsibility mentioned above.
Six and a half years ago, I met someone who introduced me to Serge Benhayon and the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom. By this stage I was rarely drinking at all – only light beer and always choosing to be responsible, mostly just to fit in at social events. The decision to let go of alcohol completely was very easy. It was like I needed someone to give me permission to just let it go. It is funny how sometimes we hang onto the past behaviours, whether they resulted in a good or a bad experience.
This 40-year journey has cost me a lot … I am not just talking about money here. The 20 years of needing to escape by using alcohol has dominated the way I have lived for most of the next 20 years. It has affected all of my relationships with people, particularly in the heavy drinking days. It is a horrible feeling talking to someone who was with you on a binge, not knowing anything about what I had done or said: the anxiety that I went through in the days following was terrible. My relationship with my wife and family was very unhealthy, and my relationship with myself was unbelievably toxic.
Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. I put a lot of pressure on myself. This was exhausting. I needed to escape the pressure and anxiety. I needed to escape life. Ahh, enter the drinking. This was my escape and it became a part of my life. I did not realise that the drinking created the same problems… I was going around in circles. Even when I had the drinking under control, so to speak, I used other ways of escaping, like work.
I still feel, occasionally, the guilt that accumulated from those years where I stepped away from my responsibilities. Through Universal Medicine and its practitioners, I have been able to peel back the layers and expose the expectations, beliefs and ideals that were put on me – initially as a young child and then as a man – from society, my family and eventually myself: expectations, beliefs and ideals that were not a part of me when I was born.
Thank you to Serge Benhayon, Universal Medicine, its practitioners and my partner for those six and a half years.
And a huge thank you to me for allowing me to be honest with myself… finally.
By Anonymous
Further Reading:
The Body and My Relationship with it
Giving up Alcohol
Why I Hate Alcohol
145 Comments
Our bodies rejoice when we actually listen to them.
When we finally stop the abuse there is more space for love.
Although we may not choose to see it, the effects of alcohol seep into all areas of our lives when we drink it and affect our decisions and future choices. It has a huge negative impact which we only realise when we stop imbibing and feel the difference.
Alcohol gives us the illusion of escaping, but in fact takes our life away, robbing it and making it something without any purpose. Thus, any time involved in alcohol is somehow lost. The great news are that we are the true owners of our life and we can change our choices whenever we want and fully claim it again, as you did, Anonymous. Never is too late
And I say – thank you me for letting alcohol go – it brought me nothing but trouble when I drank it and the relief in my body when I chose not to drink anymore, my body had a party to celebrate!
Many people have had a very similar journey that you describe here which may feel like a waste of time, money and broken relationships but if that was what was needed for the learning and to make the changes now felt, then it was a worthwhile journey to get to a different place now.
The reasons we have such high alcohol consumptions in society is that we quite simply do not want to deal with under lying issues.
This is very true LE and if it’s not alcohol that we choose as our go to when we don’t want to deal with our under lying issues, then it might be excess food, box set binging, computer gaming, social media, gambling, arguing and anything we can do that will distract us long enough to not feel what’s going on. If we stop for just one second then we have to feel what is going on, so perhaps this explains the incessantness of our addictions.
It is quite shocking the level of denial we are in as a whole group. Everything that is going on around us is shouting very loudly that things are not going well, yet how many of us, in the extremity of life in 2019, are prepared to stop and say that everything is not ok? We can continue to numb and then pretend that life is ok and continue to feel the literal earthquakes we are causing, or we can pause, ponder a moment and admit that the choices we make on an individual level affect our own well being and the wellbeing of everyone else around us all the time.
The journey you describe here is similar for many, until we open our eyes and see the games played and realise we don’t have to do anything that does not feel true in the body.
I now know why I drank …. because I did not have any true love for me. This highlights the importance to me of dealing with issues or things we feel instead of ignoring or burying them as when we do this, from experience and as you share here, it goes down a slippery slope.
Appreciating who we are and where we have come from is so needed – saying thank you for the choices we make.
Letting go of expectations, ideals and beliefs allows us to build a truer relationship with ourselves where the old props of alcohol and other substances are no longer needed to quell the feelings of not being good enough etc.
Why would we put something that is flammable, in our body? Remember the first time you drank something neat that burned all the way down? There was recently, once again in the news of 17 people who died from drinking alcohol that someone mixed with wood alcohol. Both are classed as poisons and can make you blind drunk, but one can do it permanently.
Yes… putting it into this context (drinking a flammable substance) and taking a step back on the situation, makes our drinking habits rather a bizarre one.
Alcohol can so easily dominate one’s life and for me anyway it was simple to justify it, and to convince myself that it was not the problem that it clearly was. As you say it damages if not destroys all ones relationships. Because of alcohol I was rarely me with those that I loved.
I return to this story because the effects of drinking alcohol in people’s lives can be so devastating but there is so much pressure on teenagers to conform with what society dictates, that it is ‘the done thing’ to drink alcohol. . When we can connect to the body and follow the messages we are given from within, we are true to ourselves.
My longest relationship that was fraught with problems, but I persevered, was with alcohol. It was a managed, unloving relationship I supported. What harm did this relationship do to all of my other connections to people around me?
Alcohol does nothing for our society, it just fuels the deep unrest and lack of love we have for ourselves.
My journey was similar in the fact that I vowed never to take drugs and then low and behold spend most of my 20s doing just that. Thanks to studying with Universal Medicine I have been able to identify and heal the deep self loathing that was driving the self harm and today stand free of all desire to poison my body and dull myself. The result is an immense commitment to life, people and myself that I previously had no idea was within me.
Alcohol and drugs make a huge hole in one’s commitment to life if not decimate it entirely. And once we get into such a mess we cannot see it for ourselves and we avoid associating with those that could reflect other choices to us preferring instead to stick around people in the same boat who are unlikely to tell us the truth we need to hear.
When we begin to recognise that which is not who we are and let it go, it is life changing; we live the truth of who we truly are.
The belief that we are what we do is such a false paradigm, yet it becomes so unconsciously embedded. It is wholly liberating to let it go in the awareness that who we are is deeper, more loving, more gentle and still, more delicate authoritative and powerful than I ever thought possible.
And it is our ‘doing’ that seems to lead us into comparison and competitiveness with each other. We see what another is doing and so often we react to that. But there is something very passive about a person who is in their beingness, it’s almost as if we are encouraged to be absorbed back into our beingness when we’re with them. Being doesn’t trigger nearly so many reactions in others that doing does and feels like it encourages inclusion rather the individuality that doing seems to promote.
Peer group pressure is what distracted me after all we all wanted to keep up with the Jones and would virtually do anything to fit in, and this feels like a wanting to be recognised and liked. Life is definitely a trap to keep us from re-connecting to our essences and dull our awareness’s so we end up looking for a fix that is outside of us.
I can feel the history of drinking throughout this lifetime in my family. There have been some who have been absolute devoutly tea total and others who have imbibed a lot to the point of it controlling their lives. I can feel it with the older generation I knew as a child and see it in the younger generation below me. There are judgements from both sides of the fence about how others live, and this feels like it represents the bigger picture of society too. I have decided to come off the treadmill this lifetime by not drinking myself and allowing others to make their own choices too
I inspire by my movements living life by what I feel is truth. I cannot tell another what to or not do – that is not my responsibility.
Alcohol has played a destructive part for years within my wider family and continues to do so. Sometimes I wonder what the quality of my relationships would have been like without it.
The body would be saying a big thank you to saying no to alcohol. What a celebration – and no alcohol needed.
Drinking alcohol always comes at a high cost in more than one way, ‘The 20 years of needing to escape by using alcohol has dominated the way I have lived for most of the next 20 years. It has affected all of my relationships with people’.
I can remember when I was growing up and going through my teens there was tremendous pressure from everywhere in society to drink alcohol. It really did not come from my parents (even though they drank at the time) it was more from my peers, but also media, advertising, sport was even linked to it so it was everywhere and the message was loud and clear – you are abnormal if you don’t drink so I joined in, even though my body told me loud and clear many times that is in fact not natural to drink. Eventually I stopped listening to all the pressure from outside and started listening to my body and my health and wellbeing has not looked back since.
YAY to listening to your body, health and wellbeing and not pressure from the outside! 👏👏 Very Cool ✨
So many of us have had similar patterns with alcohol as discussed here, we have allowed it to play a huge game and have a giant impact on our lives. When we choose a different way to live, its hold is gone.
The appreciation in this blog is very rel and so it needs to be to appreciated.
What struck me one day when having lunch with a friend is how much we upset our metabolism when we drink alcohol. A glass of wine with a meal needs to followed by a coffee to ‘pick us up’ and all the while the liver is attempting to process two lots of poison at the same time. And then we wonder where the afternoon headache comes from.
Great points Rowena, it would make the choice simpler for everyone if society was honest and called alcohol and caffeine the poisons which they absolutely are. The first time I heard that presented it woke me up and I knew that I had always known it but allowed myself to deny it.
“Going against what so often I felt was right created a lot of anxiety and nervous energy in my body. ” if only we got taught as part of everyday education that if things don’t feel right in our body – they generally aren’t .
This is a show stopper, Anoymous, ‘….if things don’t feel right in our body – they generally aren’t.’ And yes, why don’t we get taught this as part of everyday education?? We get taught irresponsibility from a very young age and the older we get the more willing we become to enjoin this way of life that is lacking any sense of responsibility. It is my lived experience that picking the reins of responsibility back up is the beginning of bringing life back into a rhythm and harmony so sought after but that all the world’s waywardness has been unable to deliver.