Believing you can quit drinking

This post was first published in the Members Feed by @daveh who was a long time and much beloved member. Sadly he passed last year but his legacy lives on in the words he shared. Below is his perspective on the importance of believing that change is possible.

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Believing that is possible to stop drinking isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, it is a mandatory component of stopping drinking and without it we cannot succeed. This seems a very blunt and negative statement to make but it is completely true, because if we don’t believe we can succeed then we are telling ourselves that we are guaranteed to fail sooner or later. So in order to succeed we must first believe that it is possible to do so.

But how do we get such a belief when our entire experience thus far tells us that the opposite is true?

I can’t tell you how you can find this belief for yourself, but I can tell you how I found mine: I found incontrovertible proof.

Think about this for a moment. Up until 1953 it was widely thought that climbing Mt Everest was impossible. But suddenly, once Sir Edmund Hillary did it, then lots of people were able do it. Climbing Everest suddenly became achievable for these people because the idea that it was impossible was removed and it was replaced by the absolute knowledge that it indeed WAS possible.

The difference between these two mindsets was EVIDENCE.

In order for me to succeed at stopping drinking then I somehow needed to shift my thinking so that I fully believed it was possible to do so, and it took me years to do this. What eventually worked for me was that in desperation I walked into a recovery meeting and what I saw there tipped my thinking upside-down. In that meeting were a couple of other people like me, people desperately looking for a way out of the alcohol nightmare, but the others had all stopped drinking and this shook me to my core.

All these other people had done something that I had thought was impossible… they had stopped drinking altogether!… not just for a day or two, or a week, but completely!

This was a previously unthinkable thought for me…. stop completely! I thought it was impossible to stop completely because I had tried so hard and so many times, but I was wrong. It wasn’t impossible to stop drinking, because all these people in front of me had all done it. Not only had they done it but they all seemed a lot happier, calmer, and more relaxed than me.

But I think the thing that stood out most of all to me about these people that had stopped drinking was that they were otherwise unremarkable. That isn’t intended to be derogatory in any way, but these people did not seem to possess any special inner drive, motivation, or characteristic that I did not. They didn’t have some special super-power that made stopping drinking possible for them but not me. They were ordinary, normal people, and they had stopped drinking. 

That was the proof I needed. I had seen lots of people that had stopped drinking and those people did not appear to possess some special quality that I did not. It was possible, and if they could do it then so could I.

That was the evidence I needed, and that was the change I needed for me to turn years of on and off drinking into a life without alcohol.

Nothing changes if nothing changes. Actively seek out the proof you need to become entirely convinced that stopping drinking is possible… because you need it: it is a prerequisite of recovery.

@daveh