What lies do you tell yourself?
I bet you have a few stock phrases that you say to yourself over and over about your drinking.
Things like:
- I’m so done with it
- I know what I need to do
- I’m such a dumbass
What These Lies Do To You
These tired old sentences are keeping you stuck.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice that at the moment one of these phrases comes to mind, you feel particularly anxious.
If you check in with your body, you’ll feel it, like neck or jaw tension, or a racing heart, or a pit in your belly or chest.
Then your brain trots out one of these clichés. It happens automatically and you barely even notice it.
But it takes the edge off of that anxiousness and turns it into something like blah sadness. You’re used to that feeling, it’s like home, and so you can rest easy there. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s familiar and safe. It’s soothing.
What would happen if every time you caught yourself in one of those self-soothing indulgent thoughts, you made yourself stop?
You’d be stuck with that anxious feeling.
You might admit that you don’t know what to do.
Maybe you’d acknowledge that you’re not really ‘done with it’ yet, and wonder why.
And maybe you’d do something different, something that would move the needle.
What Moves The Needle?
One thing I start my clients off with is Drinking Decisively.
For every drink, pause before you open it or pour it and acknowledge that you have a choice. You can still go ahead and drink, just wake yourself up to the fact that it’s an option.