What is the pain of discomfort?
What is the pain of withdrawal?
What is the pain that happens when you stop drinking? What is that discomfort?
Is it natural, or is it part of having abused alcohol, drank alcohol for all those years?
Today, I want to talk about this discomfort that always happens upon quitting drinking.
I want to ask if it’s natural or if it’s part of the reason because you were abusing alcohol, because you were using alcohol, because you have been using alcohol for so many years.
Pain is just a natural part of who you are, it’s a natural part of your system, of your defence system.
If you didn’t have pain, you’d be screwed as a person.
You wouldn’t know when you’d injured yourself.
There’s different types of pain; there’s the physical pain which you feel…we’ll talk about that in a minute, and then there’s discomfort which most people are going to feel when they quit drinking.
Now, the physical pain itself is a part of your defence system which says ‘you’ve injured yourself’ or ‘this is something that is happening to you which could cause you physical injury’.
So, it’s letting off an alarm bell inside your mind that’s saying ‘stop what you’re doing’.
Let’s take an example of when you’re walking along and you get a small pebble inside your shoe.
That pebble works its way down into your shoe and goes under your foot, and as you’re walking, you can feel it there.
Everything in your mind is going to concentrate on the pebble at that moment because it’s causing you pain,
it’s causing you physical discomfort.
So, most people won’t be able to carry on because it’s distracting them from everything else.
It’s like this constant thing inside their head that’s going ‘Bing! Bing! Bing! Take me out! Look after it!’
And you have to stop and take it out.
What would happen if you didn’t get that?
There’s a book written by a guy, called The Gift of Pain.
He was a leprosy doctor for many years.
He studied leprosy patients and he was one of the first people that actually did a lot of good for the leprosy community over his lifetime.
He’s dead now.
He would have people who were in this same situation, who had a small little stone inside their shoe and they did nothing about it because they didn’t feel it.
And the stone would work and work and work its way until it burst the skin, then it would work its way into the foot and that injury would cause lots of different problems for the people.
You can imagine.
And some people would actually get their feet amputated because of this injury.
The injury would grow septic and then would get worse and worse until the damage was so bad that there was no alternative than to have the foot amputated.
So, he would insist that without the knowledge of pain, without these people knowing that there was a pebble in their shoe, that they had to check themselves regularly…not just for pebbles in their shoe, but to check for cuts on their legs, to check for other injuries.
I mean obviously if you break an arm, you know in a second that you’ve broken an arm because you can’t use it anymore, but for that little thing that happens, you have to check; these people had to check.
So, that’s physical pain, that’s what it does.
It causes you to understand that these things are going on and these problems are going on allows you to deal with them very quickly before the irritant becomes something which is much, much worse.
The physical discomfort on the other hand, is much the same.
It’s the same sort of thing.
It alerts you to problems that are happening in your mind and in your body.
If you’re drinking alcohol and it’s causing you physical discomfort, you know, the hangover, the pain in your liver, all that kind of stuff, that’s physical discomfort, that is.
It’s sort of telling you that what you’re doing is wrong.
It’s alarm bells screaming out at you to stop what you’re doing, to give up.
To stop what you’re doing and take yourself out of that situation where you’re drinking.
Nobody knows,
your body hasn’t got a clue that you’re doing this deliberately, that you’re deliberately putting the poison into your body.
Your body hasn’t got a clue about any of that stuff.
All it thinks is that, if it gives you enough bad feeling, that you will remove yourself away from the area where you are, or you will stop doing what you’re doing.
So, basically, the system of pain, the system of discomfort is there for your benefit.
It’s to let you know that enough is enough, and to stop doing what you’re doing.
PAIN IS TEMPORARY, QUITTING IS FOREVER
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
I’d hoped you’d address the discomfort that comes with quitting but it seemed to me that you asked that question but didn’t answer it other than to say pain is natural. If it’s a natural part of my defense system, why is it making it harder for me to stop doing something harmful?