What exactly is your alcohol voice? It’s certainly not something real… It’s a label that we give to a part of our own minds that we see as encouraging us to take another drink or to stay with the alcohol lifestyle… As you know, I don’t like any references or labels which bring you back, or maintain a connection with the alcohol… I much prefer to call this the Gollum… It’s that part of me which likes instant gratification, staying in the comfort zone, doesn’t like change, and tries to convince you that it is in the right… This Gollum can be attributed to many different areas of your life, not just alcohol… Hope you enjoy the video!
Today I wanted to talk about something called the alcohol voice, you might have come across this as AV – alcohol voice.
Some people say it’s part of the inner brain that makes you want to keep drinking. That keeps telling you over and over again that – “You want to have a drink” or “One won’t do any harm to you, you can give up again on Monday or Friday”
In my opinion, it’s just a load of shit, it’s like saying to someone I’ve got the:
Cigarette voice
Heroin voice,
Chocolate voice
Six Cheese Pizza voice
Play Station game voice
I’ve got the Golf voice which is telling me to play Golf when I should be working.
It is instead people making excuses and holding onto this form of alcohol behaviour that they had in the past which they can’t let go off. They can’t distance themselves from the old alcohol drinking habit.
It’s the same type of thinking as that which is behind saying that people are alcoholics for the rest of their life, that it only takes one drink and they will be back on the alcohol again.
It’s the same type of thinking that gets people to say “I’ve been off the alcohol for twenty years, I’m twenty years sober, I’ve been living the sober life for twenty years and thank God, I’m doing this!”
It is that typical type of thinking that the majority of the dry out clinics and the twelve step groups will try to tell you – that you will always be hooked you’ve got an alcohol, addictive brain – and for me, that doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t boil down to the alcohol, it boils down to the habit. As far as I am concerned, I stopped drinking alcohol and I am moving on with my life and going and doing different things. And that is all that matters.
The thing that matters is what I think about it and all that matters for you is how you think about it.
When you give a name for something in your mind it is like someone say that the alcohol demon has got a hold of you. The alcohol voice is the same thing.
You are labelling your own thoughts of wanting to have a drink and of wanting to do the behaviour of drinking, which you want to do because it is easy and gives instant gratification and seems to solve a few problems and you are naming those thoughts as the alcoholic voice, when it’s not a label at all, it’s actually you just rationalising the thoughts.
A thought goes through your mind that says – you are tired and that you really feel like you could do with a drink to help you relax and you think “That’s not me having the thought it is the alcohol voice” and you start believing this little part of your brain is the alcohol voice. You start believing that you will always have this alcohol voice inside your system and that you will have to continuously push it into a recess of your mind.
You don’t have to do that at all. It’s your thoughts, pure and simple.
You are in control of your thoughts.
So accept the thought when it comes into your mind, say to yourself – “That’s a thought, it’s there, the thought is telling me a drink would be nice and probably a drink would be nice, but at the end of day I know that drink is not good for me, it’s toxic and it’s going to ruin my life” and rationalise it out that way.
Don’t rationalise it out by saying there is an alcohol fairy above in my head or Father Christmas of alcohol is residing somewhere up there, it’s a fairy tale.
Don’t be putting this stuff into your head. Get rid of it. The whole point of everything that I teach here is to reduce and weaken the old habit, reduce, weaken and ignore and put down the old habit as much as you can.
Get into your head that it’s something wrong and when the new habit that you won’t to foster presents itself, praise that you bring it up, lift it up into your own mind and pay attention to it, you boost it, you strengthen it up.
You want to put as much distance as possible between the old habit, the old behaviour and the old shit you used to do and bring in the new stuff, strengthen it and take away all the barriers from the new stuff.
“We are what we repeatedly do, excellence is not an act but a habit”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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