Quick Start Preparation Course (FREE)

Download our Quick Start Preparation course as our FREE gift to help you stop drinking alcohol and get the best start to your new life. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD.

Connecting with your Emotions without Alcohol

by | Stop Drinking Alcohol | 2 comments

How’re you doing? I’m Kevin O’Hara for alcoholmastery.com.

Today, I want to talk about an email I got from a guy who was still drinking, but he was saying that one of the reasons he didn’t stop drinking was because he linked so much of his emotions with alcohol that he couldn’t be emotional without drinking.

Today’s video is in answer to an email from a listener who just can’t find some of his emotions unless he drinks.

This is something that affects many drug users; many people trying to find solutions to their problems with alcohol.

It’s something that affects people when they first start out drinking.

They’re seeking something from alcohol that they can’t find in their normal lives.

For me, that was growing up.

Impossible to find that in my normal life because I was about 13 or 14.

I wanted to feel at least like I was grown up; I drank for that.

Other people drink for different reasons; peer pressure or whatever it is at that early age.

The problem with emotions and drinking are that over time, your emotions start to become entwined with the alcohol or whichever drug you’re using.

You start to lose some of your emotions that you would normally get because they become so associated with drinking alcohol, and you can’t find them unless you’re drinking.

That’s one of the biggest problems that people suffer from.

Another side to this coin is when people use drugs to escape or repress emotions.

They feel pain and sorrow, and they want to try and push those emotions down underneath conscious awareness.

A lot of people want to escape from their normal reality.

Drinking becomes a vicious cycle.

You drink to escape something, but that problem doesn’t disappear.

In fact, it ever so slightly gets worse.

So it comes back around again, and next time it’s slightly worse.

It accumulates.

The more you do it, the more it accumulates.

People tend to do this with a multitude of different problems, so they have all these gradually growing problems that they’re trying to suppress and hide away form.

The more problems they have, the more they try to hide instead of saying ‘I’m not hiding away anymore. I’m going to face my problems regardless of what they are’.

You won’t deal with all your problems overnight just by quitting alcohol.

Because you have to face these problems.

You have to look at them and find out how to solve them.

It’s a gradual process.

You have to build a habit of solving your problems and facing them head on.

You’re not going to advance in life unless you do.

If you keep these problems hidden, or you try to suppress them, then where is that going to lead you?

I’ve spoken about this before, about my own personal need to suppress a lot of my unwanted emotions, to get rid of sadness, pain, personal misery.

I think everyone’s life is sort of a mixture of negative emotions and positive emotions.

You try to balance things out, but as soon as you try and use a tool to suppress your emotions, then the other side of the coin is going to suffer as well, because the problems are still there when you wake up the next day.

You have to go to work and keep on living to sustain your life, and this problem is there nagging at you while you do all these.

It might only be when you get home in the evening that you can unwind and relax, and that’s what people mean by relaxation. They forget about the problems that are accumulating.

I’ve also talked about you becoming so entrenched in the alcohol drinking, in this culture of alcohol drinking, that you can no longer have fun.

You can no longer feel happiness, joy or a physical buzz in your life until you’re drinking.

You can’t find these emotions in yourself, because they become so inextricably linked to the alcohol.

There’s the other side which is a double sided coin with stimulation on one side and boredom on the other.

This is another variant where people use alcohol to create stimulation or to avoid boredom.

At the end of the day, no matter what it is, negative or positive emotions, whether you’re trying to find stimulation or avoid boredom, these are all things you have to face up to once you quit alcohol.

You have to be 100% responsible before you do anything else.

If you don’t feel you’re responsible for any part of this, you’re fighting a losing battle.

It’s not easy to do any of this stuff in the sense that it takes a long time to develop new skills, but it’s a bit by bit process.

On the other side, it’s very easy to go ‘I know a solution I can do right now that’s going to give me some relief, and that’s going back to the old behaviour’.

It’s an instant relief, but with a lot of consequences.

You know that once you head down this road, once you understand that alcohol is doing you no good, and it’s bringing you down into this negative spiral; that it’s creating more problems in your life, you can never go back.

You can’t go back to not understanding that.

So, every time you drink to get that instant gratification, you’re giving yourself a negative vibe.

You feel guilt, regret and pain.

It’s something you have to push through.

This thing of instant gratification is something you really have to try and get away from.

It’s an emotional thing, but you have to try and develop some emotional coping skills that in the beginning are just very simple, very basic stuff like just getting up and doing something, saying affirmations in your head over and over.

These are all very simple, but they work.

They don’t take a lot of thinking about, and that’s the whole thing in the beginning.

Your emotions are going to stabilise much more when you don’t have this toxin in your body from the perspective of you being physically capable of handling more shit.

You’re not adding to the pile of shit.

Your brain is a lot clearer, and you can see problems a lot clearer.

The more you deal with them, the better skilled you become at doing them.

No one can do this but you.

I’ll leave it there.

If you have any comments or suggestions on topics to cover, please leave a comment below.

If you want the Quit Alcohol starter pack, just leave your name and email on the website and I’ll send it to you.

Until next time, stay safe and keep the alcohol out of your mouth.

Sticks And Stones May Break Your Bones, But Pills and Alcohol Won’t Fix You.

Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!

 

You May Also Enjoy…

2 Comments

  1. Lawrence Hunter

    Thanks Kevin.. I use to beleave alcohol could help me to either avoid emotions or heighten emotions and that was the great delusion I held onto for years. In truth it only created negative emotions and experiences then I chose to drink to escape the consequence (the great trap).. anyway.. ‘you got to feel it, to heal it!

    Reply
  2. Brian

    Great work kevin..

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.