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by
Allen Carr
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July 21 - July 26, 2020
And sure enough, if a drug addict is going through a period of trying to control the drug or to quit, the longer he craves the drug without giving into that craving, then the greater the feeling of deprivation and misery and the greater the feeling of pleasure or crutch when he finally gives in to the craving. Make no mistake, in such circumstances both the misery and the pleasure are genuine and intense. Hence the expressions, “The drinking wasn’t so bad. It was the bits in between that were tough”,
The other genuine stresses in your life which have nothing to do with your drinking problem, but which you would have addressed and solved, had you not chosen to block your mind from them by inebriating yourself.
5. The mental craving.
During the bits in between the drinking, the alcoholic craves a drink. He knows a drink will temporarily satisfy that craving and take his mind off the other factors. However, during these in-between bits, for whatever reason, he has to suffer the craving rather than relieve it. That is real misery!
What you really enjoy in an alcoholic drink is not the drink itself, but the ending of the irritation of wanting that drink. Non-drinkers enjoy that all the time.
Once a drinker decides he must satisfy his craving for a drink, he will be utterly miserable until he is able to do so. And the longer that misery lasts, the greater will be the relief and the illusion of pleasure.
The illusion is that alcohol itself provides the pleasure and that it satisfies the craving.
No one would be stupid enough to deliberately wear tight shoes for a whole week, just to receive a few moments of pleasure after removing them. Far from satisfying the craving, alcohol is both the initial cause of it and the sole reason for its perpetuation.
you need to discount those moments of illusory pleasure that I have just described above: the relief when ending a period of abstinence. Do not confuse the ending of the misery of craving with genuine pleasure. A pain-killing injection might well end the misery of pain, but that doesn’t make it a pleasure in itself.
The period of abstinence always seems so long and miserable, and the moment of ending it so ridiculously brief. Why should those moments be discounted? Because they are not really part of the pleasure of drinking. Because we are miserable when we aren’t allowed to drink, we assume that we must get tremendous pleasure when we can.
The relief we feel when ending a period of abstinence is just that: relief. The real drinking starts from that point on, and that’s what we are going to examine.
Isn’t it true that drinking alcohol only became so precious to you after it became a problem? Doesn’t all the evidence suggest that it’s not so much that we enjoy drinking alcohol, but that we feel miserable and deprived without it?
So it would appear that the times when we are drinking are no better than the miserable times in between. Indeed, they are often worse. Never forget that the misery at both times is caused by drinking alcohol, and that it provides no pleasure or crutch whatsoever.
We only crave something if we believe it will provide us with a genuine crutch or pleasure. We only crave drugs because we are deluded into believing that they provide a genuine crutch or pleasure. Once the delusion is removed, so is the craving.
Drinking, however, is a completely natural function that is not only a genuine pleasure but also vital to survival. Drinking alcohol isn’t any of these things, but our perception of it is clouded by the brainwashing we have all received from birth: the hammering home that drinking alcohol in moderation is both pleasurable and natural.
You haven’t solved any of your problems, and you know it. But there is a simple solution. Another dose of the drug can get you back to the same stage of inebriation, so your problems don’t weigh so heavily on your mind.
So even if you’ve reached the stage where you begin to suspect that you might have a drink problem, now is never the right time to do something about it. Better wait until life is less stressful. But if you are caught in the drugs trap, life is guaranteed to get increasingly stressful.
The point I want you to get clearly into your mind is this: because we seem to need to take a chemical that is also a poison on a regular basis, it is logical to assume that there is some physical property in the chemical itself which compels us to do so, and that we must suffer physical withdrawal symptoms when we stop taking it. It is all illusion. We are never addicted to the chemical itself. What addicts us is the belief that we get some genuine benefit from taking it, which in turn creates a false belief that you cannot enjoy certain occasions or cope with others without it. What addicts
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Alcohol actually creates the craving for alcohol. It doesn’t even quench your thirst. Far from satisfying the need for alcohol, it ensures that you’ll suffer it, and the other undesirable effects that go with it, for the rest of your life.
but drinking alcohol is not a habit either. It is simple drug addiction.
Because over 90 percent of adults in Western society drink on a regular basis, drinking is still regarded as normal. But just as you could argue that it is extremely abnormal to inhale cancerous fumes, so you could argue that there is nothing normal about adding a foul-tasting poison to an otherwise pleasant and nutritious drink.
But if smokaholics and alcoholics really did have a congenital flaw in their physical make-up, surely a doctor could examine them, X-ray them, take samples of their urine and blood ... or do whatever it is that doctors do to diagnose physical diseases. With the miracles of modern science, particularly in the field of genetics, surely it would be possible to detect the flaw and warn addicts before they took their first cigarette or drink? If alcoholism was due to a chemical flaw, it wouldn’t take from two to sixty years to become an alcoholic: you would become one immediately. In fact you could
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No, the congenital flaw theory itself has too many flaws to be viable.
We use the word ‘addict’ to describe someone who would dearly love to quit a drug but cannot. But the word does nothing to explain why that person has to go on taking the drug, when no one but themselves forces them to. The expression ‘addictive personality’ is equally meaningless. It doesn’t explain the anomaly, but is merely a red herring used by people who do not understand drug addiction. It just piles further confusion onto an already confused subject.
If any of these distinctions really did exist (apart from in the minds of these so-called ‘experts’), that would mean that the drug itself is irrelevant, there would be no such thing as an addictive drug!
You might ask why some people don’t sink in the quicksand? What if I told you that they were sinking, but so slowly that they didn’t realize it, and nor did anyone else? After all, think about one of these so-called ‘normal drinkers’ that you know. I bet you they drink more than they did ten years ago. They certainly drink more than they once did. They must do, because at one point they didn’t drink at all. And in ten years time they’ll be drinking more than they do today.
Some people believe they are dependent on one whisky a day, some on thirty. In either case it is an illusion and both people are suffering from the same disease, and that is the disease: the belief that alcohol does something for you and that you are dependent on that so-called benefit. You are cured once you see alcohol for what it is: a poison that does nothing whatsoever for anyone.
Bear in mind that another of the ingenious subtleties of alcohol is to make us believe that the fault lies inherently within ourselves rather than the drug.
Our rational brains are telling us to cut down or quit. We know that no one but ourselves forces us to take the drug. And we believe that the majority of drinkers are in complete control. Because of all these factors it is logical to assume that we are part of a minority inflicted with a physical or mental flaw.
“The occasional drink is the only pleasure I’ve got left!” It’s incredible that the last brief statement can contain so many misconceptions. To begin with, it is never made by people who drink occasionally, but only by people who have become completely dependent upon alcohol.
Is life really that gloomy a business? Unfortunately to the alcoholic, it seems to be true. And it is true in the sense that he no longer has other pleasures. But it doesn’t seem to occur to him that it is his drinking that has robbed him of those pleasures.
When you feel physically and mentally low, life is depressing. Another misconception is that there is genuine pleasure in consuming alcohol for anyone. The so-called pleasure that occasional drinkers believe they get from alcohol is an illusion. And the final misconception in the statement is that for the person making it, even the illusion of pleasure has gone!
Alcohol is a chemical depressant and a powerful poison. It destroys us both physically and mentally. By inebriating us, it destroys every survival instinct that we possess and takes the joy of life with it. In short: it makes us feel suicidal.
Like any other poison, the more you consume, the greater those effects will be. Alcohol doesn’t suddenly change from being one type of thing when consumed by a so-called normal drinker to another type of thing when consumed by a so-called alcoholic!
So why, when analysing the difference between a ‘normal drinker’ and an alcoholic, do some people advocate that the alcoholic suffers with a physical or mental flaw that ‘normal drinkers’ don’t possess? Why don’t they plump for the more obvious explanation: that alcoholics are merely at a more advanced stage of the same disease?
It is a fact that all alcoholics start off as ‘normal drinkers’, that it usually takes years for them to cross the line that divides one from the other, and that where that line actually lies is a matter of much rather vague debate by the so-called experts.
But how many ‘normal’ drinkers do you know who have never thrown up; or been drunk or hung-over; or been offensive or acted stupidly through drinking alcohol?
You would expect an ex-alcoholic to jump at the chance to see no longer having to poison themselves in its true light: as a heaven-sent release from an awful disease, rather than being deluded into feeling permanently deprived because they can no longer enjoy the pleasures of ‘normal’ drinking.
Even if you present that drinker with all the evidence and facts, it will get you nowhere. Why not? Because no matter how intelligent and open-minded that drinker might be about other matters, the nature of the drug is to make you close your mind to the facts even when they are jumping up and biting you on the nose. Don’t waste your time even attempting to do it. It will only cause you frustration.
The fact is that the majority of ‘normal’ drinkerswho degenerate into alcoholism do so because they were highly intelligent, strong-willed and successful people.
Drug addiction is particularly rife among the professionals that you would think would be put off by the fact that in their working lives they come face to face with the very worst effects of drugs: like doctors, nurses, lawyers and police.
Just the reverse, these people were tough and sophisticated in spite of drinking and smoking.
Likewise, weak-willed people do not choose to become doctors, nurses, lawyers or police officers. To reach the pinnacle of these professions, you must be incredibly strong-willed.
facts. Think back to one of those times when part of your brain was saying “Don’t have another drink: you’ve had enough”; and another part was saying “I know I’ve already had too much and that I’ll regret it tomorrow, but I still want another drink.”
one of the problems when using the willpower method is that you begin to question your decision immediately, and part of your brain starts to say:
But your rational brain is still saying: “Please don’t give in and take that drink!” You can’t understand why one part of your brain is saying one thing, and another is saying the exact opposite. It’s very confusing, and not at all pleasant. No one likes being told what to do, least of all by themselves.
They forget to tell you that you will have to go on refusing that next drink for the rest of your life. Another alternative is to end the misery and have the drink. That doesn’t solve the dilemma: you are out of the frying pan and back into the fire.
Smokers and drinkers aren’t weak-willed. A smoker who has run out of cigarettes will swim the Channel to get a packet, and I don’t have to tell you what an alcoholic will do to get alcohol.
Of course we try to block our minds to the bad effects! If we had to think about them every time we had a drink or a smoke, even the illusion of pleasure would go.
I was lucky that I gave up that willpower attempt after only six months. I admit that at the time the last thing I felt was strong-willed. That’s because I had been brainwashed to believe that my failure was due to lack of willpower.
