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How are you doing I'm Kevin O’Hara for alcohol mastery and today’s question is:
So in my opinion recovery is a condition that you will be in if you accept that you are
a complete alcoholic, that you’ve got a disease called alcoholism that is incurable
or that you’ve got a genetic heritage. That it’s your parents fault, it’s in your
genes and you just can’t get away from it.
If you accept that its part of your growing up, and it’s just a part of your culture
and you’re never going to get away from it, that’s just who you are.
If you blame your alcoholism on somebody else or something else or just say that you can’t
help it, that’s what your going to be in for the rest of your life, this recovery,
this cycle of drinking and stopping drinking, and drinking, stopping drinking.
In order to quit drinking you have to quit. You have to say it’s just not going to happen
anymore, regardless of what else happens in my life, there’s just going to be no more
alcohol poured between these lips.
When you do that there is no such thing as recovery.
Recovery is just one of those words that I used for the time when you’re… when you
have stopped quitting that actually keep you in the loop, keep you in this alcohol loop.
It’s the same as saying 20 years after you’ve quit drinking that you’re still an alcoholic.
There’s still people, after 20 years when they haven’t drunk anything that will say,
well I'm still in recovery.
To me, recovery is about recovering my self respect and my dignity.
It’s about getting back the life that... not that I used to have but, the life that
I gave up by drinking. The life that I put on the wayside because I preferred to have
a drink and get pissed every night, and be out of it instead of enjoying life.
So that’s my definition of recovery.
My reality is that I used to drink, a lot. And now I don’t.
It’s as pure and simple as that. Drink becomes a part of you, the process of drinking, not
the alcohol, but that process of drinking alcohol, over drinking alcohol, going to bed,
crashing, getting up, and doing it all again - the cycle.
You do that so long that it becomes a general part of who you are.
When you stop you have to get away from that, your body has no choice but to get away from
that and the recovery is that, your bodies’ adjustment. The symptoms and the cravings
are just your body adjusting to the fact that there is no more alcohol going into your body.
That you’re not actually going to the pub every night, or your not cracking open up
a bottle of wine every night, or a bottle of poison every night.
Maybe your body is thinking ‘Christ, is this really it, is this over, has the poison
stopped entering my system? Whoohooo, thank God’.
Like I said before, just take the symptoms and the cravings as your body just getting
back to its normal self, getting back to the way it should be, that would be if you’d
never had a drink, if you’d never touched a drop of alcohol.
This is the way that your body is trying to get back to that, to that level. Whether or
not we can truly get back to that level is another thing, but I think the remarkable
human body will always, always try to get to that optimum level.
Just remember that it’s simple to stop drinking. You just simply don’t put any alcohol into
your mouth.
Until next time, my names Kevin O’Hara for alcohol mastery.
Onwards and upwards.