Allen Carr's Easy Way to Control Alcohol

by Allen Carr

If you find that I tend to repeat certain points or over-elaborate, remember there are two basic constituents to a drink problem. One is alcohol, which is constant and never changes. The other is the drinker.

Part of the ingenuity of any addictive drug is to fool you into believing that life without it won’t be as enjoyable, and/or that you’ll be less able to cope with stress.

You haven’t been abusing alcohol; on the contrary, it’s been abusing you.

By the time you have completed the book, you will realize that the true perpetrator of those sins was not you but alcohol, and that you were the victim not the villain.

The effects of drinking alcohol are also physical, but fortunately for you the solution to the problem is purely mental, and it is never too late to escape from the alcohol trap. It is also very easy once you know how! Also please bear in mind that: IT IS NEVER TOO SOON EITHER!

It is this misconception that we drink because we choose to.

If you are choosing to do something, you must, by definition, be able to choose not to do it, or to do it less often.

This is another generally accepted fallacy: that it takes willpower to control your intake or abstain. So ingrained is this belief, that you will probably find it very difficult to believe that willpower has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The very point I am trying to make is that the list actually makes it harder. It might help you to resist temptation for a few days, and I don’t deny that some ‘recovering alcoholics’ manage to remain dry using such techniques. But they do so in spite of them and not because of them.

You are relying on willpower and eventually a day will come when your resistance is exhausted. You are tempted and you think: “To hell with the list – I NEED A DRINK!” You take out the list, not to read it, but to tear it up.

we don’t drink for the reasons that we shouldn’t! Such advice might well make us want to solve our problem, but it doesn’t help us to do so. The only real answer is to remove the reasons that cause us to drink, or to drink too much.

The more you concentrate on the reasons you shouldn’t drink, the more deprived and miserable you will feel during the periods when you aren’t drinking: the forbidden fruit effect, and the more stupid you will feel when you do drink: the guilt effect.

But the main reason that concentrating on the evils of drinking makes it harder to control your intake, is that you concentrate all your efforts on to the problem, as if that in itself will provide a solution.

Let’s return to the Count. Suppose he heeded his GP’s advice and spent the rest of his waking life concentrating on just how miserable prison life was. Would that help him to escape? Of course not! It might increase his desire to escape, but he already has that. What he needs to concentrate on is how he is going to escape – and every moment he wastes concentrating on why, prevents him from doing that, and thus actually makes it harder for him to achieve his goal.

Does the Count need someone to tell him how miserable prison life is? Does a man who has lost his job, home and family really need to write a list? He has already lost all semblance of self-respect and the last thing he needs is to tell himself how stupid or weak-willed he is being. The situation is not helped one bit when a doctor rubs salt into the wound by telling him what he already knows.

Let me make this quite clear. I don’t mean that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. I mean that there are no advantages whatsoever to taking alcohol. At this point I need to issue a warning. Part of the counter-brainwashing is to prove to you that this statement is true. This is in fact very good news, but you might not see it that way at this moment.

This is one of the clever subtleties of the alcohol trap. It is designed to imprison you until it’s killed you.

Alcohol never did give you courage or confidence; you only thought it did. In reality, it has been imperceptibly and systematically destroying your courage and confidence for years.

Do you think that addicts actually enjoy injecting themselves?

If you have a serious problem and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it, then obviously you are better off if you don’t know about it. But if an employee was systematically stealing from you, wouldn’t you rather know about it? Alcohol has been systematically stealing your money, your health, your courage and your confidence ever since you fell into the trap. If there were nothing you could do about it, of course you would be better off in ignorance. But the beautiful truth is, you not only can do something about it, you are going to do something about it!

I didn’t say, “I’m about to remove your reasons for drinking.” I said, “I’m about to remove the excuses you have been using to justify your drinking.”

When a smoker is nearing the bottom of the pit, he will admit that his reasons for smoking were in fact just excuses. When he fails to cut down or quit, the excuses miraculously turn into reasons again. This is another important aspect about drug addiction that you need to be aware of: all drug ‘users’ tend to sweeten the pill by seeing their ‘habit’ through rose-coloured spectacles. Let’s not mince words:

ALL DRUG ADDICTS TELL LIES!

Not just to other people, but to...

Fortunately, you can and will control your drinking, but you need to stop lying to yourself.

Nothing will help you to control your drinking more than observing and understanding other drinkers.

Inebriation is a process of gradually deadening your senses until you are rendered insensible

It is impossible to feel truly relaxed, or anything else for that matter, if you have been rendered senseless.

The real evil is the Big Monster: the belief that we obtain some genuine benefit from drinking alcohol, the belief that we cannot enjoy social occasions or cope with stress without it, and the belief that it is impossible for some people to control it. The real evil is the monster that creates these illusions: THE BRAINWASHING

An apt name for that drug would be DEVASTATION

heroin users see heroin in exactly the same way as normal drinkers see alcohol. They believe that they take it because they choose to and that they are in control.

As I have said, the only real difference between heroin and alcohol is that alcohol is legal.

It is only legal because 90 percent of us drink.

Advertising, Hollywood and television aren’t the culprits. They merely depict western civilization as it is.

It is true that they might exaggerate or distort the truth. But the truth as we see it is grossly distorted anyway. We see alcohol as ‘exhilaration’ when it is in fact ‘devastation’.

So why did I find life such a bind? Because when you feel physically and mentally low, molehills become mountains, slight set-backs seem like disasters, and the smallest problem tends to be the final straw to break the camel’s back.

it doesn’t matter whether your favoured pastime is darts, football, snooker, or just an evening at the pub with the lads. Nor does it matter whether your job is stressful or mundane, because alcohol seems to relieve both stress and boredom.

So now you are going to prove what you have always told your family, your friends and yourself: that you are in control? How will you prove it? By cutting down.

Once the drinker recognizes that his drinking is causing him a problem, he has not one new problem but two. When he is drinking he feels guilty and miserable, and when he is not drinking he feels deprived and miserable. I

‘It is compounded by an overwhelming craving for the very thing that can only worsen the effects of physical suffering, irrational behaviour and increasing isolation.’

So there is now only one solution: to give up completely. But this isn’t a very pleasant

thing to contemplate. The mere fact that we use the expression ‘give up’, as opposed to ‘quit’ or ‘stop’, implies that we are making a sacrifice. Even the word ‘abstain’ has the same effect. My thesaurus includes such alternatives as ‘deny’, ‘forbear’, ‘forgo’, ‘give up’ and ‘withhold’, all of which imply a sacrifice.

And why not? We do believe that the sacrif...

We hope that time will solve the problem and that, provided we can endure the misery for long enough, one day we’ll wake up and shout “Eureka! I’ve kicked it! I don’t want to drink any more!”

the actual physical withdrawal symptoms from alcohol are so mild as to be almost imperceptible. And habits are easy to break, provided you really want to break them.

the true reason that this particular practice can be so difficult to break is because of the schizophrenia. We believe we are making a genuine sacrifice.

The object of this chapter and the following few chapters is to get three facts clearly into your mind: DRINKING ALCOHOL GIVES NO ADVANTAGES TO YOU WHATSOEVER! THE SAME APPLIES TO OTHER DRINKERS! YOU WON’T BE MISSING OUT! ALL DRINKERS TELL LIES!

Do we see a drunk as someone bravely facing up to the trials and tribulations of life?

On the contrary, he is clearly someone who feels that he cannot face life on its own terms, and is trying to block it out, unsuccessfully I might add.

ALCOHOL DESTROYS COURAGE! If it’s so obvious, why can’t the drunk see it? Because he has been brainwashed from birth to believe that alcohol gives you courage; and because his slide down the pitcher plant has been so gradual that each day he felt no different to the day before. He’s forgotten what it feels like to wake up bursting with energy and full of confidence. He blames his depleted state on old age and the sort of problems that normal drinkers cope with in their stride. He doesn’t realize that alcohol is the villain. On the contrary, he now believes it’s his only friend. The more poison he drinks, the more it knocks him down, so the greater his need for another drink. The sides of the pitcher plant get steeper and steeper.