Can I just have the odd one?
Well, that all depends... Real moderation should mean having one or two drinks occasionally, without the need to use any willpower to control your drinking – without really thinking about it. A truly ‘moderate’ drinker does not use alcohol to modify their emotional state in any way. Do you fall into that category (no shame)? I certainly didn’t. In truth, the term ‘moderation’ is largely misused and what is actually being suggested is controlled drinking.
A truly moderate drinker would never think about drinking or not drinking, and probably wouldn’t be reading this book. There is a small group of people who genuinely don’t drink much – their drinking could be categorised as moderate because they drink rarely and only ever a small amount, and this has always been the case for them. Typically, they didn’t go from heavy drinking to the occasional one.
So, for the vast majority of people, let’s blast that myth away. If you are spending a lot of effort controlling your consumption, you are already displaying maladaptive behaviour around alcohol and using the painful, exhausting, debilitating willpower method to do this. Willpower isn’t infinite, and at some point, it will break and you’ll be back to square one. Wouldn’t it just be better to simply be free?
You matter – your happiness matters, your health matters, your skin, your hair, your zest for life. This book is about getting to the really good stuff, where you are free from allowing alcohol to take centre-stage. If you are still trying to control your drinking and allowing yourself ‘the odd one’, you are not getting the gold of an alcohol-free life.
My great confusion, which kept me on the hamster wheel for years, came from the fact that sometimes I could control my drinking and then sometimes I couldn’t. It was like Russian roulette: the starter gun would go off and then I’d be two bottles of wine down at 1 am, smoking cigarettes, despite never smoking when I was sober. In AA, one of the first things that you have to acknowledge is that you are ‘powerless over alcohol’. For many, it’s not as black and white as that. I would say a better way of looking at it is that if you are trying to control it and set rules around it, you have already crossed the fuzzy line between unproblematic social drinking and problematic drinking. Interestingly, now I know I have ADHD, this makes complete sense.
You may not have known to call it that, but you will probably have been trying to ‘moderate’ or control your drinking for a while. You may, like I did, make rules around it such as, ‘I’ll only drink at weekends’, and then break them when, come Wednesday, you are gagging for a glass of wine, and so you end up breaking your rules. Please note that this is not because you are weak willed, but because alcohol is an addictive drug and your brain has developed habits that are dependent on it.
Moderation doesn’t work because all too often, as Lucy Rocca says in her book, The Sober Revolution , alcohol is like a bad boyfriend/ girlfriend. They keep telling you it’ll be different next time; offer you a great time, amazing sex, fun, connection, joy, and love. But, the next day, you wake up and they’ve gone, but not before telling you how you made a fool of yourself, how ashamed they are of you, and how you are worth nothing. You need to dump them for good. If you shack up on weekends or holidays, you are still involved with them and are not free to meet the love of your life, Mr or Ms Sobriety. This is who will love, honour, and protect you, listening to your real needs and supporting you in your goals, rather than encouraging you to have a drink and forget about it.
When you are trying to control how much you drink and failing to meet your self-imposed limits, you are actively lowering your self-esteem. Each time you break a promise to yourself, you break trust with yourself, just as you would with a friend. This damages your incredibly important, number-one relationship – the relationship with yourself.
It’s a losing game with booze, because not only is alcohol addictive and designed to make us want more, but also because our bodies get more proficient at processing the poison so the booze buzz wears off more quickly. Over time, we end up wanting more and more alcohol to get the same effect, and the time between the initial buzz/numb and the withdrawal becomes shorter, making us want to drink more, and more quickly. This is why alcohol problems are progressive and why it’s easier, if you are at this stage with it, to just stop completely.
And the logical flip side is that when you keep meeting your goals by not drinking, you are keeping your promises to yourself, thereby boosting your self-esteem. You feel more confident and the beautiful process of becoming who you really are, as an empowered woman, can start to happen.
The future is bright, my love - better wear shades.
Kate x
