Quit Drinking Alcohol

I decided to quit drinking alcohol in December 2008. It was about time. I could almost hear my higher self and spirit guides breathe a collective sigh of relief and say 'well SHEESH! That took long enough!'

I had a long relationship with alcohol, first as the daughter of an alcoholic and then as a sometime binge drinker. My father struggled with alcoholism his whole life and lived a horrible, diminished, shame filled existence before it finally killed him when he was 51 years old.

I have a photograph that was taken a few months before his death. It shows a greyed, stooped, malnourished, infinitely sad wreck of a man who looks closer to 80.

My father spent a good deal of time in rehab and made many attempts to quit drinking alcohol. He did very well in rehab and managed to find some semblance of self worth from helping others who were even worse off than he was.

However, when he came out, the ragged remains of his life must have seemed just a little too hopeless, or the pull of the alcohol just a little too strong. He always went back to it.

In spite of my father's devastating experiences with alcohol and his inability to quit drinking alcohol despite his best efforts, every one of his children went on to try and capture the societal ideal of being 'happy normal drinkers'.

Because of marketing, the media and overwhelming societal pressure, we are all led down the garden path of believing that the same substance that means devastation to one person, is somehow good fun for another. We try to forget that every shattered alcoholic who cannot quit drinking alcohol was once a 'happy normal drinker'.

The first time I got drunk I was 15 and my friend's parents were away. We bought a bottle of spirits and some sweet fizzy mix and invited some friends over to drink it with us. A short while later I hit a crying jag and just couldn't stop. I felt SO sad.

My friends were either vomiting or stumbling around. My overall impression was that it wasn't much of a good time. Nevertheless from then on my friends and I drank whenever we could and always to excess. However, it wasn't every weekend that we found the means or the opportunity.

When I had that first drink, I never made a conscious choice that this was something I was going to keep on doing for my whole life. I hated it that first time, it made me sick, it made me cry! But as time went on, I began to think of drinking alcohol as my ally. I thought it helped me dance more freely, have good conversations, make new friends, be more confident, have better sex.

In my early twenties I became involved with a man who drank very heavily. We moved in together and nights were frequently spent sitting at the dining room table with a bottle of whiskey. I got bored with this very quickly. This wasn't the way I wanted to live.

When we went out together he would drink so much and get so rowdy and aggressive that I had to make sure I stayed sober so that I could look after things. I quit drinking alcohol for a while in order to cope with his behavior. We moved to London together and then split up.

For a while my life was extremely positive. I was feeling the first inklings of my own personal power and ability to create the life I wanted. I made some great friends. Drinking was once again a regular part of my life, but I had the illusion of control. My best friend and I drank ciders only, and never more than three over a whole evening. This made us tipsy but never drunk.

After my father's tragic death from liver and kidney failure, my life started to fall apart; ironically just after I had made a vow that I would honor his sad wasted life by making sure mine was nothing similar.

I began to drink myself sick. Vomiting out of cabs and lying puking in the street after the pub had closed became regular occurrences. My spiraling drinking coincided with my spiraling depression and plummeting self worth but I didn't see a connection. The penny hadn't dropped.

I turned to recreational drugs such as ecstasy and cocaine and did them as much and as often as I could manage. When I became involved with my next boyfriend I found fulfillment in the relationship and the drugs and drinking eased dramatically. However, I still drank. The fine line between enough and too much is a difficult one to navigate and I didn't always get it right, or even try to.

We returned to South Africa and I was encouraged to make something of my life. I finished two years of high school in six months and went to University.

I worked in a bar to support myself through University. Heavy drinking went with the territory. I found an enormous capacity for tequila shots, and during a bar shift I could easily get through 10 or more tequila shots, and still be able to balance the till and the stock at the end of the shift.

When I met and fell in love with my soul mate, Jaye, we began a process of conscious personal growth that we plan to continue throughout our lives.

Unlike me, Jaye had always questioned societies addiction to alcohol. While he had been a heavy drinker as a teenager, by the time he was 18, he knew without a doubt that drinking did not fit with the person he wanted to be and that he would eventually quit drinking altogether.

He quit drinking for a couple of years at a time, but always went back to drinking a little socially as it seemed such an important part of fitting in.

When we got together I remember feeling self conscious in my drunkenness as I always drank way more than him. As things progressed between us and we moved in together we embraced change and growth and wanted to inspire and encourage each other to become the best people we could be. Jaye was relieved to quit drinking alcohol and cut it out of his life for good.

I read some books, the most influential among them were Allen Carr's Easy Way to Control Alcohol and Smashed: Growing Up a Drunk Girl

These, together with Jaye's influence, helped me begin to see alcohol in a new light. I started to see that it didn't give me anything. It only took. It didn't give me confidence; it took my confidence away. I began to see that it wasn't just raging alcoholics who would benefit if they quit drinking alcohol.

Before alcohol came into my life, I didn't need it to make friends, to have good conversations or to go dancing. From the moment I started going to discos at the age of eleven, I danced my ass off whenever I could. I didn't need to get drunk first.

I thought about the way I would be sitting with a close friend and having the most amazing conversation over a bottle of wine and enjoying myself SO MUCH and have so much I wanted to discuss and so many thoughts flying through my head, when suddenly I would be too drunk and it would all be over.

I wouldn't be able to remember what I wanted to say and would lose the train of the conversation, and the same would happen to her. I would feel so disappointed! The alcohol STOLE the many more hours of happiness and good conversation we could have had if we hadn't felt we needed to add wine to the mix.

The times when I fortified myself with a few drinks, thinking that I would have wilder and more uninhibited sex when I got home seldom worked out as planned. By the time I got home I had either had too much and felt sick, or I found that the alcohol had made me irritable and aggressive, or I was depressed and crying over some imagined slight. What was alcohol giving me?

I watched and monitored how the alcohol trap worked. I noticed how a party could be bad, everyone drunk, couples fighting, fistfights breaking out, people vomiting, but a few days later in the retelling it could become the most awesome night ever.

Why are our memories so selective? Why do fighting and vomiting begin to comprise a good night out? Sure it can make a funny story, but it wasn't fun in the moment, and this is what we seem to forget.

I noticed how people drank to get over low self-esteem and poor social skills. It didn't help.

The alcohol simply turned them into drunks with no self-esteem or social skills!

I continued to drink. I thought people wouldn't like me if I quit drinking alcohol.

I cut my drinking down and became highly aware of when I drank and how much, but I didn't think I could quit drinking alcohol altogether.

After someone's birthday party where I drank a bottle of wine and a shot of tequila in the space of an hour and went on to vomit, shout randomly and behave abusively towards Jaye I realized that I needed to take responsibility for my behavior.

I was lying in the bath feeling miserable the next day. I had a ruthless hangover and that awful feeling of embarrassment common on the morning after the night before.

The reason for drinking so much in the first place was that I had wanted to relax and make some friends; I felt out of place and wanted to fit in a little. What happened instead was I alienated myself further. The problem wasn't that I didn't fit in. The problem was that I was trying to fit in with what I no longer fitted in with.

The person I was on the inside had changed. My behavior on the outside needed to catch up. For me to be authentic with who I was becoming on the inside, drinking could not continue to be a part of my identity.

With enormous love and kindness Jaye told me how horrible it was to be with a loving wife one moment who in the next moment became an aggressive, unpredictable stranger. He told me how hard it was to deal with me when I was drunk. How hard it was to try and look after me when I was drunkenly determined that he was trying to control me.

I knew exactly what he was talking about: I had seen this behavior so many times in my life, from my father who had terrorized us from birth with his aggressive unpredictability and later from my boyfriends.

I wondered if I should quit drinking alcohol, but the thought seemed too scary. What would I do at a party? What would people think about me? I decided on a compromise: I would never be drunk again.

I kept that promise but it didn't go far enough. I needed to go all the way, I needed to quit drinking alcohol completely. For another year I drank moderately, a couple of glasses of wine or cider every couple of months. I still thought that to quit drinking alcohol altogether would be too difficult.

Gradually I started to associate more and more pain to alcohol and less and less pleasure.

More and more I realized how little I enjoyed it, how little it gave me and how much it stole! Even after just one drink my quality of sleep was radically diminished, I became dehydrated, retained water and suffered headaches and irritability.

My usual positivity and zest for life would dim and be replaced by fatigue and depression. My immune system was lowered and I had more chance of getting a cold or flu. Why was I insisting on keeping this poison in my life? What was the pay off? Why not just quit drinking alcohol once and for all?

I made the decision to go teetotal, just quit drinking alcohol completely, and I could not be happier! I never have to worry about how much I'll drink or if I'll drink. That decision has already been made! I NEVER have to suffer another hangover!

Since making the decision to quit drinking alcohol my confidence has soared! I don't need alcohol. I NEVER DID! There is nothing more liberating than starting to behave on the outside in a way that is congruent with the person you are on the inside.

I am not afraid of fitting in or being able to make new friends; on the contrary I relish making truly authentic connections. The authentic connections that I already have in my life would have happened irrespective of alcohol. They are deep soul connections and I am better able to value them, enjoy them and be fully present for them now that I have quit drinking alcohol.

Alcohol steals your time, your money, your health and your confidence!

It steals the dreams you once had for your life, the hopes you nurtured once upon a time. It shuts you off from truly facing the person you are and the person you want to be, and encourages you to stagnate and drown your disappointment instead of living your dreams and being the person you always dreamed you could be.

We have everything inside of us that we will ever need.

There is no substitution for true euphoria, true happiness!

Drugs do a poor job of mimicry. Deep down inside we know how much we are selling ourselves short. There is no shortcut to self-confidence or courage, no quick fix for poor social skills and fear. These are things we have to work on, develop and overcome. There is no substitution for the genuine self-esteem that personal growth inspires.

If you're struggling to put alcohol behind you then perhaps you need to find the best Alcohol Rehab Center.

For the first time since my father's death a decade ago I feel that I have learned the lessons I know he would have wanted me to learn from his tragic life, and only now that I have quit drinking alcohol do I feel I am honoring the vow I made to his memory.

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