How It All Started: When Does Alcohol Become a Problem?By Michaela

How does alcohol become a problem for us in the first place?

How do we fall into the alcohol trap?

How do we become addicted?

How does alcohol become a problem for us?

How it all starts…

It starts before we ever realise it…It starts before we ever know anything. It started for me, as it may have started for you, as for every single drinker on the planet, by modelling what we see around us. We grow up seeing our elders drink, we grow up seeing society drink, we grow up seeing movie stars drink, we grow up in a society where we can’t even buy a card for Mother’s Day without it saying ‘Gin, Mummy’s little helper’.

We are literally bombarded by a society that believes in alcohol. So, it’s inevitable that we are going to believe in it too. And so before we have ever sipped a drink of alcohol, we already believed in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow as something that was something that we should want.

Most early drinkers are initially repulsed by alcohol.

Now despite the current marketing of popular alcohol drinks, targeted to get young drinkers to drink earlier and earlier. Most early drinkers find their initial contact with alcohol to be repulsive. You know the little kid that gets a sniff of wine and goes ‘urgh’ That’s the body’s reaction, that’s the body’s natural reaction. It makes us feel dizzy and it makes us feel sick, but we persevere through that because we believe in it. We believe in it because of all these wonderful things that we have seen.

We have seen our parents do it, we have seen our aunts, uncles and friends do it. As we get older we continue, as the belief is constantly being reinforced. That young drinker is lured into the trap, you can liken it to a fly catcher, you know the plant (Venus Fly Trap)? The fly is flying along happily minding its own business when it smells the nectar, and is lured into the trap by smelling the nectar. It will land on the rim and will realise the nectar is what it thinks it is, and to the fly it will think to itself that the nectar is delicious, as it starts to drink the nectar and slowly but surely it descends into the trap. It’s only when the fly realises it is in a trap that it starts to struggle to get out. At that point the fly sinks quicker and faster to the bottom… When a drinker realises, they are caught in a trap, the drinker starts to panic, struggles, tries to moderate, tries to get out of the trap. And that is the point at which the drinker CAN GET OUT, because there is no trap in the same sense as a fly trap.

We can unpick the alcohol trap by changing our mindset, by learning, growing, and seeing through the illusion of it all.

So, society sells us the idea that alcohol is not just okay, it is the thing that grown-ups have that grown-ups do that it’s cool, it’s fun and everything else…

Let’s imagine…

Imagine for a moment that you land afresh in your spaceship, on an alien planet. And on that alien planet are these beautiful, wonderful, and gifted beings. With the most amazingly, wonderful planet with all the gifts and resources they could possibly want to live an amazing life. And you notice that these beings regularly are injecting themselves with this stuff that completely blacks out all the wonderful gifts they are given. It clouds their thinking, their judgement, their whole being…Just clouds it all, it poisons their system. As you arrive, you just see them all, lying around, completely zoned out. We might liken it to heroin… That is EXACTLY what some being arriving on our planet in a spaceship would see, if they landed on Planet Earth. And I hope that when you see it like that, it seems like lunacy. Because the truth is, what we are doing is using a highly addictive drug that really serves us no purpose because, we were forced to believe in it by society and because it’s an addictive drug. It starts to force its own belief when we take it…

Alcohol hijacks our bodies.

The point is that because it’s highly addictive, and it hijacks our natural biology, our natural motivation, it hijacks our brain and our biochemistry. The initial belief just perpetuates and grows even though there will be an underlying feeling of unease as we begin to fall further into the alcohol trap…

So, at what point was that fly caught by the trap do you think? Was it when it was halfway down, struggling to get out? Or was it the point at which it’s flying along and became diverted before it had ever sampled any of the ‘nectar’?

At what point is the young drinker caught in the alcohol trap? Was it at the age of 45, 50, 55, 30 years? When they realised it was a problem in their lives that they wish dearly they could solve. Or, is it when they are sitting at age 5 years, watching a film, watching their parents, observing what’s going on?

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