Stop Drinking Podcast by Soberclear

If you notice THIS, you're an alcoholic

• Leon Sylvester

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol-free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. When you think of an alcoholic, what comes to your mind? Well, I'll tell you what comes to my mind. I think of maybe somebody homeless, somebody unshaven, somebody with long hair, dirty clothes, somebody that's drinking super cheap cider that's like $2 a bottle, someone that's begging on the street just to get their next drink. But is that really the case? Would you picture a successful businessman with 100 employees? Would you picture an athlete? Would you picture a loving parent that has an amazing family and goes to church? Well, more often than not, we wouldn't picture somebody like that. But the typical idea that we have of what an alcoholic is is very, almost far-fetched. What we're really looking at is like this bottom 1% of alcoholics, the people who have gone so far that there's no question about it. But how can you tell if you're an alcoholic? How can you tell if you're an alcoholic for real? Today, I'm going to show you my journey of discovering what it meant to be an alcoholic. If I am an alcoholic, how I fixed my drinking problem, and I'm also going to show you how you can test if you're one as well. But this isn't going to be like an AA test or anything like that. So the first thing I want to do oh, actually, I can't go in the sun. That is hot. I need to stay in the shade.

Speaker 1:

So a little bit of backstory is I'm 32 years of age. I've not drank for almost seven years. I stopped drinking when I was like 25 because alcohol was just destroying my life. Now, when I first wanted to get off drinking, stop drugs, I didn't know what to do, right, I mean, there were no videos like Sober Leon videos back then. There were. I don't know if there were any books. I couldn't find any books. I didn't know what to do. So I asked my family. I said, mum, I want to stop drinking, I want to stop smoking weed, I want to stop doing all this stupid stuff. What do I do Now? My mum, at this point, had been to AA. She's now been for way over 20 years. At this point it might've been going for 18 years or something like that.

Speaker 1:

And because of drinking, because of drugs. I actually left home at 17 years of age and pretty tragic, but that's the kind of stuff that happened to me when I was drinking. And I remember, you know, life had just got really bad. And I don't I don't want to share the stories, I just hate sharing the story but I went. I basically I'm not going to name it because it's not really fair, but I went to live with a family member and when I live with this family member I drank more than ever. You know, they gave me my first line of cocaine. I mean it was pretty tragic. And I remember, you know I hadn't been, I hadn't had like the best relationship with my mum and my stepdad. And I remember calling my mum up and I was like I want to come home, like, and I want to stop this lifestyle, I've had enough. And she said, if you go to meetings and you get sober, you can stay at home again. And to me, when I was maybe 18 or 19, I was like, oh my God, yes. So I did it right.

Speaker 1:

And my mum's found success with Alcoholics Anonymous. My mum is an alcoholic in her mind. She does a 12-step program and she's not drank for 20 plus years Program saved her life. As a result of that, my upbringing was fantastic, up until about 17, right, but I had a very nice house, lived in a really good neighborhood, it was very safe, so I did have a pretty privileged upbringing. So Alcoholics Anonymous to me has had so much impact on my life probably more so than the people that stopped drinking with it, because I've been the almost like the consequence of somebody who stopped drinking with alcoholics and all this right. So I am not here to slade that program, but we'll get to my problems with it in a second. You'll see where this is going.

Speaker 1:

But she encouraged me to go to these meetings right, and you know I did smoke a lot of weed back then and I was also like sniffing drugs as well and, right, I almost felt like the drugs and stuff was like a phase that I went through when I was a teenager. But then when it came to alcohol, that's when things got really bad and that's when I'd drink and then sometimes take drugs as well, but it was always alcohol that was a problem. So I don't really talk too much about this, but for this video I'll tell you about it. So she said go to these meetings, right. So I remember I go to my very first meeting and I go to this meeting and there was maybe seven or eight people there. It was a narcotics anonymous meeting, so this was for drug addicts, right. And I go there and I remember the guy who he did this thing called a main share, and the main share is where basically, somebody tells you their story of how bad things used to be, and then in the second half of the meeting then everybody starts introducing themselves. They'll be like, you know, my name's Gary, I'm an addict, and blah, blah, blah. And then in Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm John and I'm an alcoholic, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

And I went to some NA meetings and then I started reading this book and then I started listening to all these people and everybody's got the same story right, they're all there because they drank too much or took too many drugs, or to varying different degrees. But I kept hearing these stories and I thought, well, hang on, I must be one as well. I must be one as well, I must be one of these people as well, and you don't want to feel left out. So I started giving myself this label. I started saying, okay, I'm an addict, I'm an alcoholic. That's what I am, and I carried this label for 90 days and I think that's how long I got my first big sober stretch, and that's a great thing. That was the first time I stopped drinking for 90 days.

Speaker 1:

So I found some success in that program not here to slate it but then I did find some problems. Later on I knew a few people that died through relapses in that program and then I started doing a little bit of research into AA and this word alcoholic, and I've done a lot more research in it now. But what I started realizing is that words are powerful, they're freaking powerful. And if I'm to call myself an alcoholic and I do drink again am I going to drink two drinks or am I going to remind myself of all the stuff I got told in AA and am I going to go insane? Am I going to drink a bottle of vodka? Well, to me, I think I'm going to go on the bottle of vodka route, because it's almost like I've got this excuse. It's almost like now I believe that I truly have a problem. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1:

So after I started having these realizations and these moments of like wait a minute I just stopped going and you know I stopped going. I did drink and and party again, I'm not gonna lie. But then I remember I did like have this day where I just I wanted to go back to a meeting I can't remember why, probably some massive hangover and I just remember walking out of a meeting and this guy chased me out of the meeting it was actually a really nice guy until I decided to leave and he chased me me down and he was like Leon, you got a fucking disease. If you go back out there you're going to die, jeez. Okay, well, that was completely incorrect. Actually, I'm absolutely fine. I've not drank for seven years and I'm living the life of my dreams. Anyway, not here to prove him wrong or anything like that. I'm sure he had the best intentions, I'm sure his heart was pure, I'm sure he genuinely wanted to help me. But where am I even going with this?

Speaker 1:

I speak to a lot of people and they say to me a lot of the times like, oh, I'm a functioning alcoholic and we never really questioned this term and I think it gets misused a lot. I had a drinking problem and, being somebody who is an alcoholic, if I have a drinking problem, right, that's a problem I can fix If I'm an alcoholic. I can never fix that because you have it for the rest of your life. So to be clear here, the word alcoholic is a made up term. It's a self-help term that comes from AA, alcoholics Anonymous. No doctor will ever call you an alcoholic.

Speaker 1:

If you actually go on the website and do the criteria to find out whether or not you're an alcoholic, I mean, probably most drinkers, probably 80% of drinkers, are going to go through that and they'll be told you might be an alcoholic. So the criteria is very loose and no doctor will ever give you this medical diagnosis. There's actually a book, I think it's the NACSM, where they give you like 11 questions and if you have that then there's a high likelihood that you have a certain level of severity of alcohol use disorder. So do you see? The difference here is I had a drinking problem but I wasn't the problem, because if I was, the problem I can never be fixed and technically the only fix to being an alcoholic is to go to alcoholics and on this meetings that's what they say. You've got no known cure. The only solution is the 12 steps You've got to go to these meetings for the best of your life and recruit new members, which is a little bit cult-like as well, I'm not going to lie, it's a little bit cult-like.

Speaker 1:

But hey, I'm not here to criticize that program. If that program works for you, I am so happy for you because maybe you go and build a great life for your family and I'm so blessed to have AA in my mom's life, right? So, going back to this thing of are you an alcoholic? Well, I've got a better question for you who gives a? Who gives shit? If you are and I'm not being mean, I'm not trying to be rude or anything like that but like, what are we trying to do here?

Speaker 1:

Like a lot of people when they say, you know, I'm a functioning alcoholic or you know, I hear it a lot as well. I've probably spoke to like 2,500 people, by the way, who have got a drinking problem. I've had in-depth conversations with them, plus the hundreds of videos I've made and the tens of thousands of messages and emails. I hear it a lot of the times like, well, you know, leon, I'm not an alcoholic and I'm like, what are we doing here? What are we trying to justify? Well, I'm not as bad as him, I'm not as bad as her. It's not like I can't hold down a job. It's not like I don't. You know, I'm a very fit and healthy. This is another one here. I'm not a very, I'm a very.

Speaker 1:

I mean, what are we doing here? Are we just trying to compare ourselves to everybody else? And it's pointless, right? It's just a pointless question to ask yourself whether or not you're an alcoholic, because what you're trying to say is it's almost like when I'm that bad, then I'll stop drinking. All you need to do is ask yourself this is alcohol causing problems in your life and do you want to change? That's all that matters. And what we need to do is we need to separate the identity that we're the problem with the problem itself. Because once we can distinguish the two and we can attack the drinking problem, we can attack alcohol. Then it becomes a fixable problem like any other problem.

Speaker 1:

We don't see people who have stopped smoking call themselves nicotineaholics for the rest of their life, do we? We don't see. I don't know people who have got gluten intolerance call themselves gluten-aholics for the rest of their lives, do we? They don't walk past croissants and beg God to help them and have to go and do a 12-step program and make amendments to people so they don't eat a freaking croissant. See, we need to stop asking ourselves whether or not we think we're an alcoholic. But we do need to get real with ourselves and ask ourselves do we have a drinking problem? And the likelihood is no offense. But if you've watched this video this far and these stories are resonating and you're thinking, oh, maybe this guy's making sense, maybe you do have a problem. But that's not for me to say. Right, that's for you to say. But I want to say this Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by Sober Clear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.

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Leon Sylvester

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