When you’re stopping drinking alcohol, you have to look at things from a blame perspective.

I think from two different perspectives. And each of these perspectives is not mutually exclusive. So the first one is that you are not to blame. You’re not to blame for the drinking, because this is the way it was. I mean, I drank for over 30 years, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with what I was doing for myself. It was only when I got to the stage where I was suffering from the consequences of that drinking, both physically, mentally, and in my life. So three things, three areas that I really started to question what it was doing. And it was only then that you step across the line into another perspective of lane. So we’ve got so many cultural influences, we’ve got so many familial influences. So you’re here, parents, your brothers and sisters, you’ve got social influences from your friends and from people around you. And it’s just an expected thing to do, depending on where you live, so it’s very contextual. At the same time, once you understand what you’re doing to yourself, once you see that putting this poison into your body is not a good thing for you, on any level, then you start to shift the blame to yourself, and you start to say, “Well, it’s me, that’s putting it inside my body, it’s me that’s lifting my arm, it’s me that’s opening up the bottle, it’s me that’s pouring the bottle into the glass.” But at the end of the day, it’s me, that is empty, and the contents into my mouth and swallow me. And I’m doing this over and over and over again. So if I had known these things, if I had been taught differently, when I was younger, then it would have been my responsibility all along. From that beginning time, when you first swallow alcohol, your body is trying to tell you, in so many different ways, in very basic ways not to do it. There is a tendency to vomit, the world start spinning around this just a whole load of negative feelings that should point you in the direction that you should be going, but we don’t. So we ignore those we push through them, because we have to get the acquired taste. We have to accept that as part of the the buzzer we’re getting, there’s gonna be this little negative side. And it becomes sort of a game of, Oh, well, you know, you can handle the drink, you can handle the hangover, you can handle this, you can handle that. So it becomes sort of a natural thing. From a male perspective. I’m not sure what the equivalent is, from a female perspective, but I suspect that it’s something very similar.

Well, I can say, once you get to a certain stage, and you understand what it is, that is happening, then you have to start blaming yourself. And this is where I think the disease theory falls down hard on its face, because it’s another cop out, it’s like, “Well, I can’t blame myself, This is not my fault.” So it’s something else, it’s something within me that I can’t do anything about. And if you have that attitude, if you have that belief in yourself, then it just not only gives you an excuse, but even if you’re trying to stop it makes it a lot more difficult for you to make the changes happen. Because you’ve always got this thing to fall back on. We always say that, in habits unplugged, you have to be 100% committed to doing this because if you are only 99% committed to stopping drinking alcohol, it’s in that 1% where you will find all your excuses, where all the shift things will happen to you. Do you get what I mean? So it’s, it’s the same thing here. If you’re looking for blame, if you’re if you don’t take 100% responsibility for your drink, and once you understand what’s happening, then the blame lies perfectly on your shoulders.

So, there can be a situation where you are not to blame. The alcohol is to blame. But you are to blame because you understand. So you start out not being to blame. You know the culture there. Your family, your friends, these are all influences that are pushing you in a certain direction. But then once you get past that level, you start to understand that there are severe consequences, to how you’re living your life, whether it’s alcohol or not, you know, this works the same with anything else, then you’ve got to start really looking at yourself. And once you do that, then from that moment onwards, you’re the one that’s to blame. If you don’t stop every time you’ve put alcohol inside your mouth, you’re the one that’s to blame.  There is no one else to blame.