One of the first things you have to ask yourself about moderation is “Why are you doing it? Or what’s your motivation for doing it?”

And then ask yourself, what are you going to do after you? Moderate? You have to look at it from not only the perspective of why you’re doing it now, what is the reason for you’re doing it now? But why? What’s going to happen after you finish with the moderation? And most people, they go into the moderation because of some form of pain. And it’s either they’ve had too many hangovers, or somebody said something to them, you know, it’s the same sort of reasoning why people will stop drinking alcohol, but it hasn’t gotten to that stage yet. So there’s a level of pain there before people decide that they really want to moderate and like I say, I’ve done this numerous times, more times than I can count.

I know I stopped drinking, I stopped smoking cigarettes, I had an attempt to stop smoking cigarettes, over 100 times, probably 300, 400 or 500 times that I tried to moderate alcohol because it was a regular thing. And I was doing it on a on a regular basis. And because you can’t get away from the pain that is caused by alcohol, because it’s causing you constant, either physical pain, or it’s causing you pain within your life, and that’s the thing that is very difficult to get away from. So there’s always going to be this cycle of pain and moderation, and pain and moderation and pain. As far as my experiences going, as far as all the attempts that I had, I was always kidding myself, I’ve moderate for a few days. And I always congratulate myself and say to myself, “well, here we go, look, I proved that I’m not an alcoholic, because I can only go out and I can go to a pub and have two or three, and I could walk away, didn’t want to walk away, you know”, I wanted to stay there from all but that’s the whole thing, you know, and then you congratulate yourself about it.

Everything is good, and that leads you down this rabbit hole of delusion, where you’re kidding yourself. So what happens is that the end of the second time you do this, or the third time, or the fifth time that you do this, you really want to, to go back to normal, I mean, you want to go back to normal, just as you’re going through this whole journey, but especially towards when you’ve done it a few times, and the pain is wearing off. In my case, there was a lot of people who were who were in the same boat. So I was going out with my drinking buddies, I was drinking at home. And there was always a sort of a pressure either from myself at home, and how to be more alcohol around and it’s like, “Oh, just have one more, I wouldn’t buy any more. But I want to go down to the places to buy more or my drinking buddies was drinking with them in the beginning, go and stay for another one.”

You know, normally we’d have, let’s say I would normally have five or six points. And I’d only moderate it to two or three points, which is a decent moderation. You know, you’re cutting it down to by two thirds. And then there will be that pressure to stay if you’re going to continue along with the moderation. If you’re going to do it into the long term, you’ve got to push yourself through those temptations, you’ve got to push yourself through when your buddies are saying to look, go and have another one or you know, you just want to have another one. You just want to have more. Because if you look at it, why are you drinking alcohol in the first place? From my perspective, it wasn’t the taste. It wasn’t that I wanted to socialize or I wanted to do any of the things that are associated with alcohol was because I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to get high. I wanted to get blasted, a lot of the times I wanted to forget about the week I wanted to forget about my sore muscles because of work. I wanted to forget about the tiredness. I wanted to forget about the bills that I had to pay all of those things it worked with with alcohol. So you’re not able to go into that with moderation. Do you get what I mean? You’re all the time having to cut yourself short of the reason the whole purpose behind you drink it.

And like I said, we kid ourselves to think that we love the taste of alcohol. It’s an acquired taste and the taste becomes a part of who you are. But you’re not doing it for primarily for the taste. When I was drinking, had been built up around how much I could drink, the habit of me drinking alcohol my whole life. So my buddies were all drinkers, what I did at the weekends was all about alcohol. What I did in the evenings at home was a lot of it was about alcohol. And it was all about the tolerance levels that my body could take, that was built into my values. And I valued the fact that I could drink more than somebody else, people are moderating are already doing the moderation. They’re not coming from a motivation of trying to get really drunk and going back and thinking back to something that they’re not. And what an unhappy life to even try and do that.