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Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind is answering reader’s questions live. Today she answers, How do I get free when I’m trapped in alcohol addiction?
If you’re trapped in alcohol addiction you might be left wondering how to ever get free. Alcohol addiction seems like a cell without a key. A virtual black hole. You can break free and you can make your way out.
Allen Carr, an author and addiction expert best known for helping smokers overcome nicotine addiction, uses a perfect analogy for how addiction works: the pitcher plant. This analogy is powerful, both in making sense of addiction in your conscious mind and in reconditioning your unconscious mind.
Alan Carr uses this as a metaphor for alcohol because he says it’s all around us and it’s held up as this beautiful thing and we’re so susceptible to it from a young age. Super bowl commercials, parties – it just comes on hard and fast that this is somehow the elixir of life. So we believe this and we don’t see the harm or danger in it. We’re on a trajectory of drinking more. That’s just the nature of alcohol – not only are we building a tolerance but it’s also addictive so it’s very similar to the pitcher plant.
How do we get free when we’re trapped in alcohol addiction?
My passion is to awaken people to the situation, to the addictive nature of alcohol (despite societies glamorization of it) before they reach a point in the plant where getting out becomes next to impossible.
I want to open this conversation so that we’re talking to our kids and to each other before we get to a point where we feel like we’re trapped in alcohol addiction. Why are we waiting until that point? Why can’t we have this conversation drinking Chardonnay and how we should just have one because of the dangers of breast cancer or liver damage? Is there a reason we are not having that conversation and bringing some consciousness and some mindfulness to the issue?
How you get trapped in addiction is that there is a line that is crossed, in addiction, in your brain.
The key to escaping once you’ve reached this point of being trapped in alcohol addiction is to really understand how you got there. Many studies show that addiction is really deeply connected with stress. One of the reasons people can go on for years just drinking socially on occasion and not develop into addiction is that the stress never became overwhelming. I think often when you develop into addiction it’s when you start drinking to self-medicate. It becomes a form of relief. Now you’re drinking your way through stress.
We’re not like the fly. We are human beings and we have an intellect. Understanding the dangers of being trapped in alcohol addiction and knowing we need to find escape.
By understanding why you’re trapped in alcohol addiction it can provide you the tools to escape the pitcher plant. When we’re deep in it when we’re seeing the bodies, when we’re stuck in the nectar how do we escape? It’s through understanding.
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