The question today comes from YouTube: does my partner still drink and how does that affect me, and in what ways?
My partner still does drink. It doesn’t affect me at all at this stage. I’m completely used to not drinking and others still drinking. It’s a part of my life. I just don’t think about it anymore.
How’re you doing? I’m Kevin O’Hara for alcoholmastery.com
A question I got today on YouTube was: does my partner still drink and how does that affect me, and in what ways?
My partner still does drink, yeah.
It doesn’t affect me at all at this stage.
I’m completely used to myself not drinking.
I just don’t think about it anymore.
It doesn’t make any difference if I see someone in a pub drinking, or someone who is sitting next to me.
I could go to a party, and people could be getting drunk around me and it makes no difference.
It’s just that kind of thing.
My thinking has moved onwards from that.
It’s like anything else in life.
You get used to it after a while.
In the beginning it was a bit more difficult.
I’m not saying it wasn’t.
All of a sudden, I’m taking something which was a real, massive part of my life.
If you think about it, I don’t really remember much about my childhood.
There’s the odd thing I remember every so often, and I get this flashback.
You get a smell and remember something you haven’t remembered in years, or you see something or someone says something to you and it happens.
But, in general, I don’t remember much about my life in England before I was 12, how much more Ireland.
I got to Ireland in 78.
What I’m saying is that I started drinking when I got to Ireland, roughly around 12 years of age.
That’s when I had my first drink.
I stopped drinking 4 1/2 years ago.
So I was drinking for most of my memorable life.
I was smoking before I can remember.
I started when I was 7 or 8.
Not full time obviously, because you can’t afford it at that time.
I smoked whenever I could get my hands on a cigarette.
But it wasn’t until I was in Ireland that I started inhaling the cigarettes.
There was a Bill Clinton; I didn’t inhale so I wasn’t really smoking back then.
But drinking alcohol was just something that I did.
It was a massive part of my life, and to go from drinking one day, being a drinker one day, to not being a drinker the next day and having to deal with all that, is difficult.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow regardless of how motivated and persistent you are, and what reasons you’ve got behind you, it’s still difficult to unravel that part of your life, to take it apart bit by bit and to replace it and all that kind of stuff.
The biggest difficulties are in the first 30 days because you’re overcoming a lot of emotions, a lot of physical feelings and mental feelings, and a lot of thoughts and the Gremlin is there in full swing telling you you can’t do this, and to go for another week or just cut down.
All that kind of stuff is in full swing.
It’s difficult when someone is there in front of you just drinking.
It’s a lot easier if you can surround yourself with people who don’t drink.
You can get rid of the alcohol out of your system.
You can put yourself in situations where there is no alcohol and you’re not thinking about it.
You’re outside of that whole environment where you would normally drink.
That’s why dry out clinics work because they take people out of their environment and put them in a place where there is no alcohol and no chance of getting it, everyone is talking about not drinking and teaching you how not to drink.
But the problem with that kind of situation is that once you leave the dry out clinic after a week or a month, you’re straight back into the environment that you were.
As my recent trip to Ireland goes to show, it’s very easy for your brain when you haven’t been somewhere in a long time, once you get back and the place is the same, it’s very easy for your brain to start taking you down that same route again.
It can happen very quickly.
The longer you’ve been away from alcohol, the more you know that you will deal with this thing in an intelligent way.
You’ve gotten rid of all the cravings.
You’ve set up your life in such a way that alcohol doesn’t play a big part in your life.
The more distance between the alcohol and yourself, the easier it is to know that it’s bullshit.
That was a bit depressing for me in Ireland but that’s a different story.
What I’m saying is, those first few days are difficult.
It was difficult for me to have someone that was drinking and refused to stop drinking.
She helped me out as much as she could.
She gave me a lot of encouragement and kind words and said I was doing the right thing.
I remember her saying to me after a couple of weeks that I was acting and looking different from an outwards perspective.
It really helped me.
So now it’s become a bit of a joke for me and her.
I take the piss every so often and say ‘there you go, the alcoholic’.
It’s a running joke with the two of us, about her drinking.
She doesn’t drink that much.
I’m not going to go into her drinking.
The main point is that she does drink now and I don’t find any temptation there at all.
You have temptation everywhere
There are people who are going to drink around you and offer you drinks.
We went to a wedding last year, and it was a free drink all night long.
You never had to pay for whatever you wanted, wine, beer, whiskey.
That would have been heaven to me before. I would have left there in a taxi.
This is what I remember, some other people that were there didn’t know how they got home.
They missed taxis and had to work and work.
This was a long walk, but it was warm.
But at 5 in the morning when there was no more taxis…I think they called two different taxis, and these taxis showed up and nobody was there because they were inside boozing it up.
And eventually when they called the third time, the taxis didn’t turn up and they said they weren’t going to send any more taxis, so they had to walk.
I think it was bout 5km.
When you’re pissed, 5km is a long way.
At one stage, one of the guys told me that he’d just got into his bed and there was a knock on the door, and they said one of the party was lying in the middle of the road outside of the hotel, and he was in the way of a taxi coming up.
That kind of thing makes me laugh because I get up in the morning, fresh as a daisy and you see most of the other people and they look…
Anyway, it doesn’t affect me at all.
She doesn’t get drunk.
She has a couple of glasses and she’s always drinking the same thing.
Anyway, until next time, keep yourself safe. Keep the alcohol out of your mouth.
Bye now.
GOOD HABITS RESULT FROM RESISTING TEMPTATION
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
My wife actually decided to stop ingesting alcohol several months before I did. I am convinced she made that decision based on her belief that my drinking was out of control and she wanted to show me that stopping was possible. I must say, her stopping cold like that did have a significant impact on my decision to give it a go. It is definitely easier to leave alcohol behind under those conditions, but it cannot be the main motivator. You need to be willing to enter into the “grand experiment” of sobriety through your own personal motivation. You need to truly desire the experience of feeling natural again and not being constantly influenced by the artificially induced effects of alcohol in your system. And it helps me to be reminded that over half the worlds population deal with stress, social discomfort and even physical pain on a daily basis without ever using alcohol. Drinkers are actually in the minority on a global basis, but you would never sense that living in places like America or Ireland where we are brainwashed to believe that life is just better with booze. Oh what a fantastic lie that is.