When You “Just Want More” And You Don’t Know Why: Solving “Addiction”

Ann’s Struggle with Alcohol

Last week a long-time friend confided in me that she is struggling with alcohol. I have known Ann since high school, and she has always been self-confident, highly motivated, and a very high achiever. At just 60 years old, she is retiring after a lucrative 30-year career at a very prestigious company. She has every reason to be excited about her future, but is now struggling with depression and health issues due to her heavy drinking.

 

Identifying the Shift in Drinking Habits

Like so many women I’ve worked with, Ann is absolutely baffled by why she has been drinking so much. Throughout their lives together, she and her husband had always liked to relax with a glass or two of wine in the evening, but over the last few years those two glasses have become two bottles. When I asked her when she began to go beyond two drinks, she had to stop and think about it. She said it started a few years earlier, and she would drink more only on nights when she knew she didn’t have to get up early the next day. Then I asked, “Why would you drink more those nights?” She had to take some time to really think about it, and then said, “I’m not really sure, I just wanted more.”

 

The Myth of Powerlessness and Addiction

Sometimes the reasons people “want more” are not obvious to them. Simply wanting more of something we like is not all that strange, but when we indulge in more and it begins negatively impacting our lives and we keep indulging anyway, it can be disconcerting! This is when people begin to attach the label ‘addiction’ to the substance or activity, and start believing they are actually powerless to stop.

The Influence of Alcohol Marketing

Alcohol marketing is everywhere, and it’s absolutely alluring. Does Corona take you to the beach? Does Maker’s Mark make you more sophisticated and classy? Do Busch and Coors Light take you to the mountains? And does a glass of Pinot Grigio or Cabernet actually relax you after a long day? They don’t do any of those things – not even relax you. But this is a hard reality for many people to recognize and accept. It goes against not only beliefs they formed from years of their own personal experiences, but also from continuous marketing campaigns by both the booze companies and also the treatment industry and 12-step programs that paint alcohol as having all kinds of magical powers.

 

The Path to Freedom

Ann and I have four more sessions scheduled. I have given her specific instructions on how to identify her reasons for “wanting more”. She must first identify those powerful beliefs she has in the benefits she gets from going beyond those two drinks. And then I will show her how she can become mindful as she drinks so she can recognize the actual physical effects of alcohol that are the result of the pharmacology, and then recognize the mental and emotional effects that are not actually the result of the pharmacology and are instead happening by her in her own mind.

There is much Ann will be learning about herself and about alcohol in these next four sessions. I am looking forward to when Ann sees alcohol for what it actually is, an otherwise inert substance that has very predictable physical effects, but no actual mental and emotional effects. She will learn that she has been giving alcohol the credit and the blame for what she has been doing in her own mind, her entire life. And this realization will absolutely set her free.

Michelle Dunbar is the co-founder of The Freedom Model, co-author of The Freedom Model for Addictions: Escape the Treatment and Recovery Trap, and Executive Director of Baldwin Research Institute, Inc. She is one of the leading addiction experts in the world today. She has been researching addiction and coaching people to solve their addictions for 34 years.

If you would like to talk with Mark Scheeren or Michelle Dunbar about private coaching to solve your substance use problem or other “addiction” for good, go to Freedom Model Coaching or call them at 1-888-424-2626.