This video is part of SDA 73

Having a “Last Drink” Transcript

This question is from Chris over on the website.

Hi Kevin, great podcast. What’s your view on having a designated ‘last drink?’ I’ve heard that some people make a point of making it memorable, or even deliberately unpleasant. Do you remember your last one?

My Last Drink

It was a glass of wine that I had at my sister’s house on New Year’s Day. I didn’t intend to go out with a bang, as they say. I didn’t even finish it. It’s funny because I tried to build myself up to it. I didn’t want what I was doing because I was completely done with it.

It’s like saying goodbye to an old friend. The whole process is like a grieving process when you first start out. You do miss them out of your life. It’s like you go through a wake, have the last drink and hold it up.

As far as this goes then, my last drink did taste disgusting. It wasn’t pleasant in any way. I think I filled my head with so much negativity about alcohol in general by that stage.

I’ve gone through the whole thing over Christmas. I drank enough and I was well on my way to quitting, especially with the argument with my son that just shook me up. It was just one of those things where a lot of different catalysing events started coming together as they happened over the years. One event is all it takes to push you towards the edge and then you start thinking about everything else.

At the moment, we’re in an apartment overlooking the Med. It’s a great place but it’s just a holiday home. So we’ve been trying to move inland. It’s just that my work never feels like it’s done. When I want to relax, I can’t relax. When I want to work, the vibe is still in that environment where I’m trying to relax.

The point was that if we move inland, it’s just going to be a lot better. When we first moved in here, we said that we’d stay here for four or five years. Now that we’ve decided to make the move, we’re finding stuff that is wrong with this place. We’re dumbing down what this place is like and we’re bigging up what it will be like to move in to another house.

That’s the type of process that you go through once you’ve really decided that enough is enough and you’re going to quit. You start to look for reasons why you want to quit. For me, it was just that one catalytic moment – the argument.

I’ve been thinking about quitting for a long time. I had gone on to different websites and forums. I remember one of the posts that I put up where I was talking about moderation.

There’s no problem about moderating. Surely I can moderate my alcohol consumption. The people that had quit were saying it’s actually the same thing that I’m saying now. That it’s almost impossible. Once you’ve been in that frame of mind where you drink to get drunk, you’ll always want to moderate.

Should You Have A “Last Drink?”

So the last drink again. It’s a good idea if you can try to make it as disgusting as possible.

At the beginning of his book Easy Way to Control Alcohol, Allen Carr said, “Don’t stop drinking until you’ve read this book. Wait until the end to take your final sip of alcohol.” I get where he was coming from that perspective.

He was saying carry on drinking while he’s talking about the different aspects of drinking and breaking apart all the misconceptions and perceptions that we have about alcohol. He was just smashing them all down, all about “I drink because it relaxes me,” or “I drink because I like the taste” for whatever reason.

While you’re reading it and you’re drinking, you’re thinking about this and it’s going through your head. Once you get to the end, he says, “Take your final drink now,” and he explains why he left it until the end.

Don’t make the final drink into a celebration. If you’re trying to make your final drink taste as good as it can and say au revoir to it, you’re just putting it up on that pedestal again. All it would take is one drink for me and I’d be back on it.

I can tell you now from my point of view that if I had one drink now, not that I won’t have a drink or I will ever have a drink, I don’t want to drink. I wouldn’t go back on it. I don’t believe that. I think it’s that all or nothing mentality.

If I had one drink now, it just proves that I can’t do it. It just proves that I’m an alcoholic. All it proves is that your thinking is skewed. All it proves is that you really want to go back to the drink. Because if you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t drink anyway. Period.

Thanks for visiting the site.
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
Kev

Some Previous Posts From Alcohol Mastery

Will Quitting Alcohol Cure Your Depression?
Quitting Drinking And Going To Bars or Clubs?
Alcoholic Cardiomyopathy

Where Else To Find Alcohol Mastery

Alcohol Mastery TV on YouTube
Alcohol Mastery Shorts on YouTube
Alcohol Mastery on Facebook
Alcohol Mastery on Twitter