Written by One of the areas I especially enjoy are the personal letters I get from people asking questions that they may not be comfortable just asking anybody. While in these articles there is one that tells you how to self-diagnose for drugs and alcohol, this gentleman just assumed you can’t diagnose yourself for alcohol problems when he wrote me.
This powerful organ must be fought by any alcoholic or addict, and it has proved itself to be a frightening adversary
I told him actually you can do a few things to diagnose yourself, and now that we are around the Holidays the exercise is actually a little easier at being able to give you an answer. You simply need to be brutally honest with yourself and don’t let your brain play tricks on you in an attempt to escape the challenge — because it will certainly try to.
With alcoholism and addiction, you learn to treat your brain counter-intuitively as “the enemy” some of the time. You see, your brain itself definitely wants to hold on to whatever makes it feel good, even if it is a substance that is BAD for you in the long run. Smoking cigarettes is a perfect example of this where your brain knows on a cognitive, rationale level that smoking kills and predominantly leads to cancer.
Yet the excuses for smoking are endless: “It relaxes me, I like it, I guess I just love the effect of nicotine, I have tried to quit and it’s too hard, I am gonna quit on my next Birthday – I swear, and so on”. When you think about the fact that smoking will likely kill you, these are pretty lame excuses — but the brain is in control and readily supplies them so it can hold onto those hundreds (of the brain ‘feel-good’ chemical) dopamine highs that occur each time that person inhales lung fulls of tobacco. And so it goes even moreso with drugs and alcohol. Here was my answer to the man’s letter:
Dear Hank:
You say you can not self-diagnose, but actually you can. It is pretty simple. Just make a commitment to yourself that you are not going to drink for 30 days, Thanksgiving included.
Those of us who have had alcohol and drug problems in the past call people without problems “normies“. Well a “normie” can just as easily NOT drink as he CAN drink, and when he does after a few drinks his brain says “enough” and he stops for the night.
A problem drinker cannot stop drinking for 30 days without it bothering him. For example at Thanksgiving you will make an excuse as to why you can drink ( everybody else is having a drink) or some rational seeming reason as to why you don’t have to stick to the 30 days now. You will do it after the holidays. Or if you did NOT drink over thanksgiving, your thoughts would be dominated by drinking ( why can’t I drink too, this 30 day commitment is silly, I am not an alcoholic because I am not drinking, so now I can have a drink, etc).
Bottom line is if you do NOT drink for 30 days through Thanksgiving or Christmas, and it doesn’t bother you and you don’t hardly think about it, then you are not likely a full blown aloholic. You could be a binge drinker, who likes to drink occasionally and when you do you drink too much and just don’t stop when most non-problem drinkers can stop, and that is another kind of problem. It can happen 2 times a year, but you get in trouble or do something you regret those two times. That is a very tricky type of alcoholism, because it strikes at random, and you can get away with it for longer.
Drinking and being an alcoholic does not mean you are some slob in the gutter. I knew an American Ambassador to an important Nato country who drank a bottle of Vodka a day starting at about 11am, and he was able to function well enough. But his wife knew about it and was going to leave him if he couldn’t stop. He basically stopped, but drank when she wasn’t around. My own alcoholism was very tricky because I would drink most of the time with no problem, but then on the 10th time get a DUI or wake up with a strange girl in Las Vegas or something like that, usually after blacking out. Any kind of blackout is also a sure sign you have “the bug”.
The last thing is how much space in your head is taken up by wondering and thinking about alcohol and drinking, etc. Near the end for me — and I was able to keep a million dollar job up until the point at which I stopped, age 44, I thought about alcohol all the time. Way too much. Could anybody smell it, had I done or said anything bad under the influence, or I couldn’t remember certain easy things when speaking publicly because of a high degree of anxiety. Anxiety and or depression go hand in hand together with alcoholism, too, so if you get those symptoms you may have turned alcoholic while drinking away the anxiety or depression.
When I started mixing painkillers for my back, I realized that I was clinically depressed and just trying to feel better with all the “stuff”. It suddenly occurred to me that other people were not acting like me, or getting DUI’s and it was terrifying because I could not IMAGINE my life without cocktails. After getting my depression disorder treated and admitting I might have a problem, it for some reason helped rid me of the feeling I needed to drink — and magically it seemed to lift the compulsion to drink.
Gradually I found I didn’t need it anymore but for me I chose to admit I had a problem, and it almost took care of itself with about a year of adjusting, treatment, and sober living. Then I got to feeling happier than I ever have been in my life. All the peace and happiness I had ever wanted while using the booze and drugs, I found without them. I used to hate people in meetings who talked about miracles but now I have experienced one myself, and have been happy building the site soberlivingsearch.com.
At that address under blog and resources is an active blog and at another blog of mine listed in the signature below called Depression, Anxiety and Addiction I include alot of my thinking through these periods. I now feel no shame being an ex-alcoholic or an ex-drug addict and have written about alot of my experiences. I have found people look up to those people who have overcome the problems of drug and alcohol abuse.
Some people have a stigma about the word “addict” or alcoholic. I know I did. I dreaded being labeled an alcoholic and that fact alone kept me from being able to believe I had a problem to the point which kept me from seeking help. All the money I was making just prolonged the problem too, and now I feel like I wasted some of my best time just struggling to get through life.
I hope you can work things out if you have a problem. If you do, the next step would be inpatient treatment if you have insurance, or you could do outpatient treatment and live at a sober living at the same time. Write with more questions after trying the self diagnosis, and look in the blog for the piece “Do I have a drinking problem” self diagnosis, or something close to that. It’s the best one of the self diagnosis pieces I have seen.
Good Luck — Tom
