The Easy Way to Control Alcohol (Allen Carr's Easyway)

by Allen Carr

People with allergies usually have an overwhelming desire not to get within a mile of the cause of the allergy. They certainly have no desire to actually take it non-stop.

The implication that alcoholics are genetically different to normal drinkers is quite astounding when you consider it. It means that the actual alcohol is really just a side issue. You can be an alcoholic without ever having drunk alcohol!

What is the difference between cure and recovery? Why does a man who hasn’t allowed a drop of alcohol to touch his lips for over 20 years, and who intends never to drink again, commence his monologue: “I am an alcoholic”? Yet a man who gets paralytic after drinking ten pints is not regarded as an alcoholic, but is merely spending a relaxing weekend. On the other hand, a clerk known to take occasional sips from his flask during office hours is automatically branded an alcoholic.

In reality neither doctor nor patient is being stupid. In truth there is only one real culprit. No it’s not alcohol, but the ignorance that surrounds it. It is this misconception that we drink because we choose to. If drinkers, smokers and other drug addicts take their respective drugs because they choose to, why do they find it so difficult to abstain or cut down? 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. This is something that puzzled me greatly. Many of my friends and colleagues, who I regarded as rather weak-willed, were able to control their drinking or quit altogether. Why couldn’t I? I knew that I was a very strong-willed person from other aspects of my life. But I was in good company in that respect. Go to any AA meeting and you will quickly realize that the majority of members are dominant and successful people, or were before the drink took control. This is perhaps one of the reasons why AA believe that alcoholics are innately flawed, physically and mentally.

Have you ever tried to quit by listing all the disadvantages of drinking? It seems to be a logical approach, and is often recommended, but as you will soon discover, the advice that society generally gives you to help solve your drinking problem, including that of the so-called experts, actually makes it harder.

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!”

we don’t drink for the reasons that we shouldn’t!

The only real answer is to remove the reasons that cause us to drink, or to drink too much.

Why is it more difficult to see with a drink problem? Because of this illusion of appearing to be both prisoner and gaoler. The prisoner is the part of our brain that wants to solve the problem. The gaoler is the part

of our brain that prevents us from doing so.

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.

Basically that we find alcohol an essential to enjoy social occasions and/or to cope with the stresses and strains of life.

Accept the simple and unquestionable fact that if you have tried to abstain or to cut down but have failed to succeed, you are as effectively imprisoned as if you were incarcerated in Fort Knox.

But the manufacturers would find it much harder to sell ‘exhilaration’ if they named it ‘misery’.

Alcohol is a very powerful poison. If you drank a relatively small quantity of neat alcohol, you would kill yourself. In fact, you are already doing that: slowly but surely.

Does it taste awful? Try just a teeny-weeny drop of pure alcohol. Why do you think we never drink it neat?

Nine out of ten of the people that you know, including you, are dependent upon alcohol.

Have you noticed that before alcohol destroys people (physically, mentally and financially) they have no desire to cut down, let alone quit? So they don’t. It’s only when they are at rock-bottom, when they have lost the support of family and friends, that they wish they could control their intake. But that also happens to be the time when they feel least able to do so, when they feel that they most need what they now regard as the only friend or crutch they have left.

It is designed to imprison you until it’s killed you.

There is no need to be miserable or depressed.

In fact, I’m taking nothing away from 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.

It’s exactly the same with alcohol. If I could transport you back to the time before you fell into the trap, better still if I could transport you just three weeks into the future to show you how great you will feel if you follow my suggestions, that is all I would need to do.

Do you think that addicts actually enjoy injecting themselves?

Non-drinkers find it difficult to believe that anyone could deliberately force pint after pint of poison down their throats, then throw up and render themselves legless. Then the victim says, “Why do I drink? Because I enjoy it, it relaxes me, it’s sociable.”

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 said, “I’m about to remove the excuses you have been using to justify your drinking.” All drug addicts make these excuses.

Do smokers actually eat cigarettes? Where does taste come into it? Obviously it doesn’t, but we hear it so many times that both smokers and non-smokers actually believe it.

Because all drug addicts instinctively sense that they are being stupid, but as I will explain in due course, one of the ingenuities of the alcohol trap is to make you use all your ingenuity to put off the day when you will address the problem.

We have to lie to ourselves to defend our drinking.

If I could systematically prove to you that every one of those advantages did the exact opposite to what you thought, would you want to quit, or just cut down?

That is exactly what I am suggesting. Alcohol has several unpleasant and undesirable effects. Two of them create the illusion that it provides certain benefits while the reverse is in fact the case. The first effect is that alcohol, far from quenching your thirst, does the exact opposite:

True relaxation is having no worries, cares, tensions, stress or pain. It is impossible to feel truly relaxed, or anything else for that matter, if you have been rendered senseless. If you think being inebriated is relaxing, then you must think being knocked out is relaxing. It achieves exactly the same effect much quicker and with far less aggravation.

I will also explain why drinking is a major cause of the ruination of social functions, and is about as unsociable a pastime as it is possible to imagine. And I will explain how it actually causes boredom and stress, and why its tendency to remove inhibitions is one of its major disadvantages.

But if we look back on the actual facts, we didn’t enjoy the taste. And when we were young and carefree, we didn’t need the effect.

The problem is that that first drink not only made you more thirsty but it began to remove your inhibitions, including the inhibition about drinking too much. Each subsequent drink just exacerbates the situation. You get progressively thirstier and your fear of drinking too much progressively dissipates.

On the contrary, you create a little monster inside your body that has an insatiable thirst, and the more alcohol you give him the thirstier he gets! It is not the flawed genes of alcoholics that, if they take just one sip, makes them want another and another, ad infinitum; that is the effect alcohol has on every living creature, including you!

The two definitions would appear to contradict each other. It is blatantly obvious that ‘intoxicate’ is a derivative of ‘toxic’, which means poisonous. ‘Exhilaration’ is included as one of the alternatives to ‘intoxication’ in the thesaurus section. In fact, if alcohol really did do all the things claimed for it at the start of this chapter, then ‘exhilaration’ would be an accurate and rather apt name for it. Yet it is the same drug that I described at the beginning of the last chapter. An apt name for that drug would be

It would be equally unfair of us to expect the liquor industry to spend their millions on depicting the occupants of Skid Row.

Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to suffer from chronic alcoholism will know that it is not possible to exaggerate the depths to which you can sink.

Does a single one even attempt to explain why Prohibition was introduced in the first place? Isn’t it obvious that society had recognized the misery caused by alcohol?

Do we idolize heroin pushers? Of course not, heroin is a real evil, we give long sentences to heroin pushers, and rightly so. Yet in the UK, for example, heroin kills fewer than 1,000 people annually, whereas alcohol decimates the population.

Why do we allow them to spend millions on advertising to push their poisons? Could it be because our governments take the lion’s share of the profits?

The reason we fall into the trap is because from birth we have been conditioned to believe that drinking alcohol is normal, sociable, enjoyable and beneficial; and that we choose to drink and are in control.

We see alcohol as ‘exhilaration’ when it is in fact ‘devastation’.

There is a stigma attached to being a pathetic alcoholic instead of a ‘happy’ drinker in complete control, so we are all forced to lie about our problem.

It turned out that there were two Uncle Teds. They were both heavy drinkers.