When I first realized how bad alcohol actually was for me, I kept that new found knowledge to myself for several months. By then, my friends obviously knew I wasn't drinking alcohol right now because of the disease I was still dealing with, but everybody was under the impression that I would return to my old drinking self once my condition would have improved again.
It took me quite a bit of time to finally find the courage to tell at least some of my friends that I wouldn't return to drinking again and that I actually intended to never touch a glass of alcohol again. There's a lot to be said about how people change if you stop drinking in general, but I'm going to focus on this at another time. For now, I only want to talk about the most common response that I got. That was that I wouldn't quit for good anyway and that I should instead learn to control alcohol.
To a lot of people, this must sound like the logical thing to do and like it would be some solid advise. The truth is, though, this is only ever going to work for people that don't have an easily addicted mind in the first place. And so the advise mostly came from friends of mine that never had a problem with alcohol themselves. Friends that would enjoy a cocktail once in a while or have a nice glass of wine for diner but simply would stop after that and switch to something non-alcoholic.
I've had a lot of discussions around how you would or could control your consumption of alcohol and most of the advise was just that - have a drink or two and then stop. Well, if it would be that easy, I probably would have never become addicted in the first place. In reality, though, there really was no stopping for me. Or at least, I didn't stop before everybody else stopped.
My general strategy when drinking usually was like that - I would drink as much and for as long as anybody else would be able to keep up with me and when everybody stopped and went home, I did the same. This worked quite well for a surprisingly high amount of times. It really only was an issue when nobody was around that actually knew when to stop, or, and this became more of a problem in recent years, if the people I was drinking with could handle more than I could handle myself. In these cases, I'd usually have a blackout eventually and wake up either in my bed or on the couch of one of my friends the next morning.
I was very fortunate that I never had something really bad happen to me and I only have a few tougher stories to share of where things went south. Overall, though, I usually got home somehow but I also never learned from it.
From talking to and observing others, I came to the conclusion that there are basically two types of alcohol drinkers. A seemingly larger portion of the people I've interacted with just have a drink or two and when they start feeling a little dizzy, they just stop. I don't know how it works, but they have some sort of mechanism in their brain that will tell them to go and drink something else. They do like the taste of alcohol, they do like the feeling of being a little bit drunk, but they don't like the feeling of getting shit faced. So before things get out of hand, they will just stop. Maybe they had a bad experience in the past, maybe they got drunk a couple of times when they were young, but after that, they learned their lesson and they indeed can control alcohol.
The other type of drinker, and I fall into that category, simply doesn't have that switch in their brain. They'll start drinking and then they'll just continue doing so until something or somebody interrupts them. I can't count how often I've met with a friend or two after work to have a beer and ended up completely drunk in the middle of the week because we simply never stopped drinking. In fact, I sometimes managed to just have one beer and then move on simply because I had to be places afterwards or I had something else planned. But once I had my second beer, there was nothing stopping me from having another 5 or more.
The fact is, I can't control alcohol and I also can't learn to control it. Alcohol controlled me and it was very rigid in that control. What is crazy about it is that I could very clearly lay out to you what was about to happen in the next few hours once I had started drinking. How I would order one beer after the other, how I would end up in my bed totally drunk, how I would feel terrible the next day, and so on. But despite understanding exactly what was about to happen, I had absolutely no power over changing or preventing any of these things.
I'm about 18 months sober now and I would lie if I told you that I didn't feel like having a beer every now and then. To be quite frank, there's almost no day where I don't at least once think how nice a cold beer would be right now. Heck, I'd enjoy getting one this very second. But I know that if I was to drink a single beer, I wouldn't stop there, my brain would crave more and I would have no power to stop it.
So the only way for me to control alcohol is to keep it out of the system entirely. There's no moderate consumption for me, only not drinking at all or getting back to where I never want to be again in my live. I'm happy for everybody that knows how to deal with it, but I'm not one of them and I'll never be.
While I haven't had a problem at any point with it, I have some friends who have and the only way for them was to stop altogether. One friend came to the realization when we were 16 or so, and he was getting violent. He said, "I don't want to turn into my parents" - and that was that.
Glad you are on top of it now.
It's awesome that he came to that conclusion at such a young age and also was able to act upon it!
Luckily, alcohol never turned me violent or anything, it just messed up my live for more than two decades without me really realizing it.