E335: Convincing Yourself You Can Drink Again: 2 Reasons This Happens

0:00Many of us, myself included, get stuck in the cycle where we keep convincing ourselves that we can drink again and then we're completely shocked when it doesn't go well. There are a couple reasons why this happens, and it's not simply because you keep forgetting. There's more to it. And you're also not doomed to keep repeating this cycle forever if you do something about it. So in this episode, I want to explain the two reasons why this happens and what you can do to get out of the loop.

0:45The fantasy that you're cured and you can drink again depends on the belief that the problem was either who you were back then or what was happening in your life. You tell yourself that you were drinking that way because you were stressed, depressed, burned out, lonely, or stuck in a bad situation. You didn't understand your patterns yet. You weren't taking care of yourself. You were impulsive and reactive, but now you're different. You've done a lot of work on yourself. You understand what alcohol is doing for you, and you would never, ever let things get as bad as they did before. Some of that is true.

1:27Your circumstances probably did contribute to your drinking. Stress, loneliness, poor emotional regulation, and a lack of coping skills can make alcohol a lot more appealing. And yes, we are responsible for understanding our patterns and building lives that don't require alcohol to get through. But personal responsibility doesn't mean that alcohol was a neutral substance just sitting there while the old version of you made a bunch of bad decisions. Alcohol changed your brain state. once alcohol was in your system having another drink became more valuable while the reasons you wanted to stop drinking became less important and that's not just because alcohol is alcohol it's because of how your brain experiences alcohol and that is not something that you have any power to change it's just the way your brain operates the end so the question isn't am I more responsible now?

2:26It's what happens when this more responsible person puts alcohol back into the same brain that already learned that alcohol equals relief. Because you can change your routines, become more self-aware and emotionally stable, develop better coping skills, and build a life that you don't need to escape from, but you can't make yourself experience alcohol the way that a take it or leave it drinker does. You can't decide that alcohol won't eventually become an obsession again. Doing the work can change the reasons that you once reached for alcohol, but it's not going to change how you personally drink alcohol.

3:08And if you take a long enough break, maybe you can drink differently in the short term, but eventually you will return to how you actually drink. That cannot be changed. This is what happened to me after my 90-day break which I explained all the way back in I think it was episode 164. I took that break because I believed that I was different. I wasn't someone who needed to stop forever and a long enough break would cure me. When the 90 days were over I thought that I had proven I was capable of controlling myself because a real alcoholic couldn't take a 90-day break so easily, right? So I went back to drinking on my birthday, and the plan was to share one bottle of wine with my birthday dinner and then stop drinking.

3:58But we finished the bottle before our appetizers were even over, so then the plan became one additional glass with dinner, so three total. Then our server brought us limoncello because it was my birthday and even though I don't even like that or care about it, I couldn't be rude, right? After that, we went on a sunset cruise but all I wanted to do was stay at the bar and keep drinking. I blacked out and I woke up the next morning ashamed and confused. And I remember how confused I was. I really didn't understand why I wasn't cured and this put me in an uncomfortable situation. I had stayed sober for 90 days and I believed that meant I would be able to drink differently.

4:47When I couldn't drink differently, I had two choices. I could accept the reality that the break hadn't changed the way that I drink or I could rationalize, minimize, and put the blame anywhere else. So I blame the server for bringing the shot. I blame the kitchen for taking too long. I blame my husband for drinking too quickly and making me feel like I had to drink faster to keep up. Those explanations protected alcohol and protected my belief that my break should have worked and that allowed me to write the night off as a one-time thing instead of acknowledging how I really drink and how that will never change.

5:27Part of why I needed those explanations was that the outcome conflicted with how I wanted to see myself. I believed I had fixed myself. Admitting that I lost control immediately would have meant admitting to myself that I was still the weak-willed loser that I thought I was 91 days earlier. This conflict is called cognitive dissonance. When our behavior doesn't match our identity, we can change our behavior or we can change the story. I changed the story because that's way easier than changing my behavior. I decided that the conditions were wrong so then I could keep believing that I was capable of drinking moderately under the right circumstances.

6:11This can happen again too after you've been sober for a while. You see yourself as more mature, responsible, and emotionally stable. So not being able to control alcohol may feel like evidence that you haven't really grown at all. Drinking normally becomes a way to prove that you're healed, but using alcohol to prove that you don't have a problem with alcohol still makes alcohol the center of everything. And that's one of the main things that separates us from take-it-or-leave-it drinkers. Time changes a lot. Cravings become less frequent and less intense. Your nervous system starts to stabilize.

6:49You build routines and hobbies that don't include drinking. You get through vacations, holidays, stressful days, and social events, and eventually these experiences stop feeling like major challenges. Alcohol also stops taking up so much mental space. In the beginning, you may notice every drink around you. You may have to actively remind yourself why you quit, play the tape forward, change your environment, or reach out to support often. And over time, the thought can pop into your head and then disappear without a lot of effort from you. That's the goal. You want alcohol to become less important to your brain.

7:31But when that happens, it's very easy to misinterpret it. You might think, I haven't wanted alcohol in a long time. I don't even think about it anymore. Maybe that means I could drink normally now. But not wanting alcohol, while it's no longer part of your life, is not the same thing as being a take-it-or-leave-it drinker once you let it back into your life. The pathway is quiet because you're not activating it. That's it. You're creating new routines and new responses. But new learning doesn't erase old learning. Your brain can learn new responses to stress without completely forgetting that alcohol instantly did whatever you wanted it to do.

8:13And if we start to reinforce old pathways again, they grow stronger and stronger. Another component of this is the fading affect bias. And this is the tendency for the emotional intensity of negative memories to fade faster than positive ones. The brain does this in many different areas of life. It allows us to move forward instead of feeling every painful experience with the same intensity forever. But with alcohol, it can create a distorted comparison. Your ordinary sober life is happening right now in full detail. You experience every boring day, difficult emotion, conflict, disappointment, feeling left out, and any moment when you have to cope without an immediate escape.

9:04But your drinking life exists in your memory, and that memory is selective. All the bad stuff loses its emotional intensity even though you still remember it. But at the same time, the exciting night, the vacation drink, or the feeling of finally shutting your brain off remains easier for you to access. Plus, you're probably seeing other people drink in real life on social media and on TV that are reinforcing these things as well. So then you end up comparing your sober life to an edited version of your drinking life. And of course the edited version looks appealing. and your current stability can change the story that you tell yourself about the past.

9:47You start thinking, was I really that bad? Maybe I was just being dramatic. Maybe I didn't need to quit forever. Maybe I just needed a long break. So we use the absence of current consequences as evidence that the old problem doesn't exist anymore. But the reason that we're not experiencing alcohol-related consequences is because we're not drinking alcohol. And that's one of the strange things about long-term behavior change. When the change works, the original problem becomes way less visible. You stop seeing the evidence that made the change feel necessary to you, and then you start seeing the structure that protects the change as unnecessary.

10:36So why is this thought showing up? Sometimes the thought appears because life is going well. Like I said in the beginning of this episode, alcohol feels far away, you feel like a different person now, and you use that progress as evidence that you could definitely handle a drink now. But you're different because you got sober. That's it. And other times these thoughts show up because life is uncomfortable and you want your old exit back. The original reasons that you drink are showing up again, and this can happen months or years into sobriety. This doesn't have to be an early sobriety thing. And in my opinion, based on what I've seen with others, this is the more common reason.

11:24It's not that anyone is genuinely forgetting the way that they drink. It's that we get overwhelmed and we want relief. We're bored and we want to feel excited about something. We're lonely or feel left out and we want connection. We feel awkward around other people and want instant confidence, or we're resentful and want to turn it off. In those moments, maybe I could drink differently now is not really a conclusion about how much you've changed. It's your brain trying to make alcohol available because it remembers how alcohol used to help. It didn't solve any of your actual problems, but it gave you a break from experiencing them.

12:04So when that same discomfort shows up in sobriety, the brain pulls up the old solution. But instead of saying, I want to escape how I feel, or I don't know how to experience emotions without drinking, your brain gives you a more comfortable argument. Maybe it'll be different this time. I've learned so much. I would never let that happen again. Maybe I only drink on special occasions now. And now you don't have to face the fact that you're desperate for relief and you don't know what else to do. You can turn the problem into an intellectual debate about whether you're capable of moderation. If you spend your energy trying to determine whether you can drink, you don't have to look at why drinking actually sounds good.

12:53You don't have to acknowledge that you're lonely, bored, that you need help, or that the way you're doing things isn't working for you. You can imagine the relief and focus on that instead of dealing with the reasons that you need relief. But once you can pause and slow down and identify what's really going on, the question shifts from can I handle alcohol now to how can I handle this feeling without using anything to make it disappear. That's the work that your brain is trying to get you out of. And although this work will make your life a million times better, it is very difficult work to do.

13:34Alcohol gives you one response to many different problems, but sobriety requires you to figure out what problem you actually have. That's frustrating because healthy responses are slow. A boundary isn't going to change your state as quickly as a drink will. You're probably going to feel uncomfortable first. Real rest may require you to disappoint someone or leave something unfinished. And building connection is way more vulnerable than drinking next to other people that are also drinking. But this is how your life becomes more manageable overall instead of just temporarily easier. So when this fantasy shows up for you, there are two possibilities to consider.

14:19Maybe life is going well and you've forgotten what led to all of that stability. Or maybe life is difficult and you're looking for permission to escape it instead of learning how to stay present and deal with what's happening. Your progress isn't proof that alcohol has magically become safe for you and likewise your discomfort is not proof that sobriety isn't the right choice. You don't need to give yourself another test. You need to let the new version of you handle what's going on in your life. Thoughts like maybe I could drink differently now become way more convincing when they stay secret.

14:59When it's just inside our head, we can keep building evidence, make exceptions, and build a case for why this time would be different than the past 317 times that were not any different. But saying the thought out loud gives someone else the opportunity to help you see what is going on. And you can do that with any type of support. In-person meetings, therapy, coaching, online meetings, online communities, treatment. There are so many options. On Saturday morning, October 3rd, in Living a Sober Powered Life, we're going to talk about why alcohol sounds like a possibility again, figure out what we really need and how to reality check this fantasy before it leads us back down a very familiar sad path if you want to join us for this meeting on saturday morning then you can learn more and become a member in the show notes i would love to have you there and if you're already a member then thank you for doing your pre-work and i will see you soon

16:10Thank you.