One of the biggest things that I did when I was drinking alcohol was looking outside of myself for something, or some way to lay the blame.

You know, it’s an easy target, because the alcohol you consume, and the alcohol is the problem. I mean, if you weren’t consuming the alcohol, you probably wouldn’t have the problems because you’d be dealing with the problems, right? But the alcohol is not to blame for anything, you know, the alcohol is just a liquid in a bottle. It’s something to do anything, if it’s left in that bottle, it can only do something you can only damage you when it’s inside your body. Right?

So when people blame the alcohol for it, they’re becoming a victim of themselves more than anything else. And, you know, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to do that. It’s a natural response. But the reality is that alcohol is merely the tool. It’s the means to an end, if you want to get out of your face, if you want to get drugged up, you’re going to do it. Right? And if it’s not alcohol, it’s going to be something else, could be heroin, it could be cocaine, it could be weed, whatever it is, you’re going to find another piece of the jigsaw to fit into that same hole, the underlying behavior, the rituals, the sequences, the habit, right? They’re all part of the of the problem. But I believe that it’s your thinking or your lack of thinking, which is the real culprit here, not the alcohol. So it’s your attitude, your expectations, your assumptions, these are all things which lead you down that path, especially when you’ve been doing it for a long time. I mean, I guess I was drinking for over 30 years. So these attitudes, these expectations, and presumptions were all part and parcel of the process that I had grown up into, you know, these things were almost put into me from an early age by my parents, by my uncles, and aunties, my dad’s friends that we used to see by society at large, you know, so these are all things that are programmed into you to believe this kind of stuff. But, everyone grows.

I think it’s unfortunate that it takes that long, it took me over 30 years to come to that conclusion. It was only when I saw my son going down the same route, that it woke me up. And I started to really examine my own attitudes about that, you know, what did they expect was going to happen? It’s those things, if you have the attitude of, “It’s not my fault, it’s something else’s fault.” And if you have the attitude of the responsibilities outside of me, “it’s not my responsibility to do this”, if you have the attitude of entitlement that you’re entitled to something. For whatever reason, it doesn’t make any difference. If you have that expectation in your life or that assumption, then you’re going to be in trouble.

Another reason why people blame the outside, blame the alcohol or blame whatever it is outside of themselves, is what I call emotional primacy. And that’s when you have your emotions first. So you have your emotional, you react to your emotions without thinking about it. And, you know, I’m not saying that you do this across the board. But when it comes to this kind of thing, when it comes to you know, I’ve been there, I’ve gone through this whole thing, where I’m tired, and I feel that tiredness and I feel shitty, I think to myself, or I say to myself, now you deserve to have a drink. That’s emotional thinking, above rational thinking, you know, when you say to yourself, “Well, yeah, one won’t do me any harm, or I’ll stop next week, or I’ll cut down”, you know, all of these things are emotional thinking.

Because you’re not thinking logically, you’re not looking at alcohol for what it really is, when you leave through a magazine. And you see an article that says that there’s benefits in certain properties within any type of alcohol, wine, or beer, or whatever it is. And you take notes of that new GoldenEye that fits in with what I am, you know, I knew there was something good about it. You ignore the fact that it’s only small amounts of alcohol that really give you the benefit, if at all benefit, but then you ignore anything else. I mean, there was a study done recently, which looked at I think it was three or 400 different studies carried on what they call it, but it’s a big broad study where they haven’t done the research themselves, but they’re looking at the research of other people. And they found that their conclusions were that there was not any safe amount of alcohol that you can drink. Anybody who who drinks, you know, anybody who drinks a lot of alcohol understands that, you know, from a very basic level, when you stop drinking, look at the response that your body gives you, that should be enough, it should tell you enough. Your body doesn’t want that stuff inside of you. So, and you know what I’m talking about that emotional primacy when using real emotions, you want to do something, I mean, we start drinking, because of an emotional response. We don’t want to feel that we’re lesser than our peers, you know, we don’t want to look foolish in front of people. You know, once you’re thinking as a fault, then, you know, by definition, your actions are also going to be faulty at the same time. So I hope you got something out of that.