No Desire For Alcohol, Is That even Possible?

Are you like a moth to a flame with alcohol?

Back in 2007 when I first stopped drinking, I used willpower. Conditioned my mindset, stopped the behaviour, and then spent the next eight years arguing with myself about staying stopped.

Whenever I hit a bump in the road, I countered any desire for a drink with the internal rhetoric of a crazed temperance advocate.

That internal rhetoric was on and off for the eight plus years I was not drinking. At times it was barely a whisper, barely acknowledged and ineffective in changing my behaviour. It depended on what might trigger me. Sometimes there was nothing, especially as time went on. Then, I might happen to give a longing glance at someone slaking their thirst on a hot day at one of four pubs in my home town and think about one in that moment. I would quickly have to push down any thoughts like "just one.. it'll be ok" Other times, watching a table full of diners pouring voluminous amounts of red wine into their glasses, I would be reduced to countering my drinking thoughts with mantras of "you have a disease, you can never drink again, you are not like other people, and so on.."

For the first year or so, I didn't go to the pub or rarely ate out in a restaurant, which was hard on my wife as she had lost her drinking buddy and her social life attached to my drinking persona.

My internal barrier against surfacing thoughts and beliefs that alcohol had benefits was like swiss cheese, it leaked a lot and required a lot of effort to plug the holes.

Brow beating myself to sobriety. Shaming myself to piousness. Unpleasant but what I believed was necessary to maintain my life of self imposed exile without alcohol.

"At your very core you still believe alcohol has benefits but the pain of drinking is more than the pain of giving up the perceived benefits of alcohol."

Such is the nature of behaviour based change, you are using willpower to overcome any thoughts or beliefs that counter your willpower. At your very core you still believe alcohol has benefits but the pain of drinking is more than the pain of giving up the perceived benefits of alcohol. It requires energy to argue with yourself about maintaining your steadfast stance on changing the behaviour, enforcing sobriety. On the one hand you have the quiet sympathetic voice seeking to ease your discomfort by seducing you into having a sip of alcohol, only to be countered by the critical nasty voice telling you how stupid can you be even thinking like that. The arguing with yourself is painful and your willpower is a finite resource. Much like holding a 10 pound weight over your head, your arm muscles will tire and fatigue, eventually giving way... so will your willpower over time.

The interesting thing about both of these voices is that they actually both want the same thing for you, they want you to be free of pain, they want to protect you and they want the best for you.

The sympathetic voice wants to ease the pain that it knows is caused by abstaining from the very thing you subconsciously believe is necessary for your being.

The angry, nasty, critical voice is scared that you are going to go back to the very behaviour that you sought to escape from and seeks to keep you on your chosen path by shaming and blaming you into submission.

Trouble is, the sympathetic voice is using the wrong tool to fix you - more alcohol

and the critical nasty voice is also using the wrong tool to fix you - shame and blame!

So what to do? Many traditional forms of giving away drinking involve willpower whether it be counting drinks, counting days, morning mantras such as "I will not drink today". These can be useful and can have their place to set intention and stick to the plan, however those pesky thoughts and beliefs that you still hold that alcohol is your "friend with benefits" will still seek to break your resolve.

What if you could get to a place where there is no conflict, no desire for alcohol, no thoughts surfacing on how your life is over, that you alone cannot drink, while everyone else is happily swimming in it?

"Meh, like ok, that's not me anymore, that's not what I do now"

IS it even POSSIBLE? Yes, it is. If you had told me in the years between 2007 and 2016 that one day I would get to a place where I had no actual desire for alcohol I would have laughed at you, impossible! Even on my second journey to freedom from alcohol in 2021 it didn't click that the end result of my learning and reframing my alcohol use would be no desire for alcohol. It took a while to realise that had actually happened to me. I can take it or leave it, where others are busy with drinking, I don't look lovingly at their half full wine glasses. I just think to myself each to their own, live and let live. Just don't breathe on me, or spill your drink on me! If things get rowdy and I start to get uncomfortable, I just move away, or take my leave altogether. I can go anywhere, be anywhere were alcohol exists but I have no desire to drink at all. I can honestly say though sometimes very rarely, old neural pathways will pop-up and be like "a drink would be nice" but then it is quickly countered with curiosity like "Where did that come from, was it a familiar place, a smell, a memory, am I romanticising alcohol in a similar environment from bygone days?"

"Meh, like ok, that's not me anymore, that's not what I do now" They're nothing to be scared of or to get frightened about, often they are just old "neural stubs" in the brain that are queued when the conditions are right and they pop up. Just like an annoying pop-up on a web page they are examined, dealt with and closed off.

The way through to this point has been educating myself, reading "quitlit" (quit literature), listening to podcasts, working on my subconscious and conscious thoughts and beliefs around alcohol. Understanding that my old nemesis does not hold any benefits for me whatsoever! That our relationship was at its core toxic to my mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health. It does take work, it's not a "one and done" process. Annie Grace's book "This Naked Mind" has been the how to, I read it about five times (takes me a while to get the message lol) on the bus to and from work. I did a lot of the exercises and even did some journaling to get my thoughts and beliefs on paper where they could be viewed, reviewed and changed. I made a list with what I thought were the good things about alcohol on one side and what I thought all the bad things were on the other side. The bad side had a lot more entries. It was useful to see on paper what my conscious beliefs about alcohol were. The more difficult beliefs were the ones I couldn't see. That I needed alcohol to fit in, to be liked, to connect with others. None of that is true for me now, but it was then. Somewhere along the way that shifted.

That is the nature of understanding-based change. When the way you feel about alcohol changes, stopping becomes a different kind of decision altogether.

No more FOMO. No need to hide away or avoid anywhere alcohol is served. No need to worry about how much or how often. And always being able to respond when it matters.

We had a late night call from an elderly relative who needed an ambulance. I drove my wife and I to a country town thirty minutes away, followed the ambulance to hospital, and waited until they were assessed and discharged. Something I couldn't have done when I was drinking heavily most nights.

The way through has been education and understanding. Working on my thoughts and beliefs around alcohol until I could see clearly that it held no benefits for me whatsoever.

That's exactly what the Men's Guide to Alcohol Freedom is built around. Eight learning modules that work through the understanding behind your drinking, at your own pace, in your own time. Because when the understanding actually lands, everything else follows

If you're curious whether no desire for alcohol is actually possible for you, a good place to start is a confidential conversation. Book a Free Strategy Call and we'll find out where you're at.

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