Veronica Callanan

I was asked to take part in an ITV documentary being filmed called ‘The truth about binge drinking’, by the same people who made ‘The truth about size zero’ with Louise Redknap earlier in the year. Michelle Heaton from Liberty X was presenting the programme and had to undertake a commitment to binge drinking for 1 month. Michelle has a reputation well documented in the tabloids for enjoying a drink or two and falling out of clubs at 2am, she confesses to being a former binge drinker who still enjoys a drink or two but has calmed down considerably since meeting her husband (Andy Scott-Lee). Michelle was charming and professional and very willing to talk about her experiences, she was already half way through the experiment when I met her and beginning to feel the pain, although she loved going out and enjoying herself she was finding it heavy going and suffering from hangovers. Michelle is typical of any attractive 27 year old, she had a job she loved (singer, performer, presenter) she enjoyed a drink but in no way saw it as being a problem, she saw it as being normal and something that most people her age did.

The focus of the programme was to see if Michelle changed her views about binge drinking by the end, Michelle was drinking 7 or 8 times over what is considered low-risk alcohol use in one session (80-90 units), over a week her alcohol consumption was massive. Michelle said this is more than what she drinks normally but is reflective of what she was drinking when she first joined Liberty X. Michelle’s’ drinking as dangerous and risky as it is typical of a lot of young professionals and the only reason that they aren’t worrying about it is that ‘everyone’s doing it, we’ve normalized abnormal drinking.

Luckily Michelle has had no adverse consequences from her drinking apart from some stinking hangovers but just imagine if she was a regular girl from Newcastle who had never become famous and worked in a call centre and whose highlight of the week was going out at the weekends as it is for thousands of young women. Unfortunately there are always consequences to what we do and these young women are paying the price, these are the ones who are who wake up on a Sunday morning with their dignity and integrity in tatters at the very least and worse wake up the victim of a sexual assault or rape, involved in a brawl or in casualty. And underneath this is the time bomb of what they are doing to their physical health risking liver damage and endangering their fertility not to mention mental health. I see a lot of ‘normal’ young women as clients who can’t figure out why they’re dissatisfied with their lives. Depression and anxiety is one of the leading consequences of drinking (alcohol works as a depressant), there’s no coincidence that doctors are prescribing more and more anti-depressants every year, generally speaking these people aren’t depressed they’re just drinking too much leading to depression and dissatisfaction. We are an anaesthetized generation. A generation who doesn’t feel anymore because there is a chemical answer to all our problems.

We are a nation of binge drinkers that’s for certain, that’s why major television companies are making programmers about the problem; will it be enough to change the opinion of young women like Michelle Heaton? Who knows? Because we have a problem bigger than the drinking, its our denial, England is in denial about the level of our drink problem we all think its happening to someone else and it isn’t. We can’t drink the way we are and expect to get away it. There is a price, and we’re paying it we just haven’t woken up to the fact yet.

Fear is a universal experience, everybody feels fear very few of us talk about it. If we do it’s at a superficial level, people rarely open up about what they’re really scared about which is extraordinary because we’re all scared of the same things

• Rejection
• Being vulnerable
• Loneliness
• Other people
• Not being good enough
• Not being loved

And:

· Other people finding out we’re scared!

These fears are experienced by most people at one time or another and to some extreme or another; the problem is how we deal with them. Dealing with fear is something we’re all trying to figure out on our own and no ones asking for help. We all have to cope with this feeling and some of find inadequate methods of dealing with it, because fear is basically an uncomfortable and unpleasant emotion and we want to get rid of it as quickly as possible, we will choose what ever solution works the fastest. We often make the big mistake of choosing something that is ultimately destructive however because our need is immediate we are unable to consider long-term consequences – If we are frightened we want it to end NOW!

Here are some common methods of dealing with fear:

· Drinking alcohol

· Taking drugs

· Cigarettes

· Overeating

· Gambling

· Moving

· Inappropriate relationships

· Ignoring facts

· Doing anything to not be alone

· Rationalising reality

· Complete denial

The truth is we will never be free from fear, as long as we continue to grow we will experience fear – however what we can change is how we deal with it so it no longer disables us.

The universal law of life is that we are either growing or we are dying, if we aren’t growing then we are dying – if we are alive and have a pulse then we have to grow, which means we have to find more effective ways of dealing with fear. We are all here to be the best version of ourselves we are capable of being, our purpose is to experience this process, this means we will have to grow and we will experience the full spectrum of feelings that goes with that – the good, the bad and the uncomfortable.

So if we are going to become who we are truly meant to be then we have to accept that fear isn’t going to go away but understand its ok, we can deal with it, and we just have to learn how!

The first and most important part of dealing with fear is to admit: “I’m frightened!” trying to deny how we really feel or ignore the feelings or minimise them just enables us to stay stuck in the same uncomfortable place searching for temporary relief. Acknowledgement of how we really feel is vital, to deny our feelings can be deadly, literally it can kill us.

Ironically admitting the fear is far easier than trying to pretend you’re not frightened, although still uncomfortable there is a certain kind of relief in finally being able to admit your fear. And I’m going to let you into a little secret that may possible change your life; if it doesn’t then it will certainly make you feel a little more comfortable:

EVERYONE ELSE IS FRIGHTENED TOO!!

Whenever you’re frightened because you’ve been pushed out of your comfort zone and your doing something different, everyone else around you is probably feeling the same way. And if they can find a way to push through their fear then you can too.

There is only one way to deal with fear and that is to face up to it, to understand you are going to feel it but move forward anyway, it’s a paradox, the only way over it is through it. It’s the fear of………that is worse than the reality of……….always.

The trick is to start with small steps, if you’re reading this right now then you must have already had experiences in your life that were frightening to you (starting school, a new job, going on a date, social event). We’ve all done something, if we hadn’t we never would have left our mothers arms! If you were recall some of these events you may notice that you were frightened before all of them but you got through it right so you know you can! What happens is once we master something like for instance starting a new job we then ‘normalise’ it and forget how frightened we were because now it’s now a normal part of life.

If we did it once we can do it again.

So start small, choose a small step, something your frightened of doing and remember how you’ve been frightened before is situations but it has been ok. Decide what you’re going to do and think about the outcome positively; remember that other people are scared too so it’s ok, DO IT!

Observe how you feel.

Yes you were scared, but you survived didn’t you?

Now, you can do anything…………………..

It comes down to what we want our lives to have been about.

Wake up!

Your life is happening right now, it’s not going to start when you find the right job, house, partner, loose 10 pounds. These precious seconds right now are your life – are you going to make them count or are you going to fall back into your numbed state and sleepwalk through your life.

I often tell clients that early recovery – those first few painful months when you ‘wake up’ to who you are and what you have become is like the experience of when you have to wake up at 3am to catch a flight to Barbados because your going on your dream 2-week holiday that you’ve been looking forward to for ages. For those few seconds when the alarm goes of in the middle of the night in the pitch black when you are in the deepest of sleeps, dreaming about a wonderful fantasy you grope around trying to still that intrusive bleeping, your mind begins an argument with itself where for a few seconds you consider just closing your eyes just for a couple of minutes to experience that warm, comfortable, seducing lure of sleep again. Despite knowing you don’t have long to get to the airport their is that voice calling you to just shut your eyes and go back to sleep and everything will be ok. The pull is intoxicating nothing matters than the bliss of sleep, of unawareness. But of course you force your tired eyes awake and stand blearily in the shower with the excitement in your belly and the adrenalin beginning to pump through your veins because you know that very soon your going to be on a plane to Barbados and what a wonderful place that will be.

The first few months of recovery for an alcoholic are like the first few seconds of being awoken by the alarm clock. Even though you know where your going to is the most wonderful place you’ll ever visit, even though you know that this will be the best experience you have ever had and you have been waiting for so long for the time to come around, even though you know you would be devastated if you gave in and shut your eyes and woke up to realise you’d missed the plane, even tough you know all of this, there is still a strong temptation to go back to sleep and block out all of those possibilities and experiences for the sake of a few hours of nothingness.

This is what the alcoholic experiences in early recovery, for so long they lived half asleep, half aware, missing their lives and now finally the opportunity has arrived for them to be fully awake, fully conscious to their experience its very tempting to go back to sleep, this is because recovery is hard and painful at times, especially the beginning. Even though Barbados will be great, the getting their can sometimes be uncomfortable, painful, irritating and inconvenient. The driving to the airport, carrying bags, queuing at security, airline food, cramped seats, all of those things we would rather do without but we put up with them because of the destination.

The destination is our truth, our real, authentic selves, living out loud to the fullest being who we really are.

And becoming the best version of ourselves we are capable of being.

Who wouldn’t want to visit that place?

I have yet to meet anyone who counts there alcohol units, have you?

I mean, does anyone go out on a Friday night and think; “well I had 4 units on Wednesday and Monday so I can only have 4 tonight and the other 2 tomorrow lunchtime”.

Nobody does this.

The government drinking guidelines are that men can drink up to 21 units per week and women can drink 14 units per week, by the way these aren’t safe drinking levels (as there is no such thing) but low-risk drinking levels. These units need to spread over the week (not taken in one go) with at least 2 alcohol free days.

It was in the news today that alcohol manufacturers will start labelling bottles with how many units are in each bottle to help drinkers regulate how much they consume.

Don’t get me wrong anything that drinks manufacturers are willing to do to address our nations drink problem is a good thing, however there’s something here that doesn’t quiet add up. Alcohol is a mood and mind altering substance people don’t drink it because they like the taste (generally speaking who actually liked the taste when they first tasted alcohol?) we drink it primarily for the effects. And the effects are that they alter your perception slightly, loosen you up and make you feel differently so there is something bizarre about expecting people who drink this mood and mind altering substance to be able to regulate the amount they take in.

It changes how you feel, so before you drink it you may feel you only want two glasses of wine but after having those two glasses its not unlikely that you feel differently and may feel that another 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 glasses are a good idea.

It’s kind of like asking 5 year olds to regulate their candy intake all by themselves.

There’s something about alcohol that makes you want more of it no matter what your intentions were. I don’t really see how labelling bottles differently is going to change that, after all there are big labels on cigarette packets that scream “SMOKING KILLS” and thousands of people still die of smoking related illnesses every year. Well done to the drinks industry that they are doing something but they are going to have to go much further than that and take responsibility for the drinking culture they helped create. This is what needs to change.

There is a lot of money at stake here, the drinks industry is booming and the more alcohol that is sold the more taxes the government can rake in…………………is it any wonder that no one wants to regulate our alcohol intake too much?

I would be interested in your comments on this issue.

There was an article in these months Red Magazine that I can’t let go by without commenting on.

I read it with complete disbelief; it was tucked away in the magazine, no big deal, a commentary piece by a journalist on a subject many readers could relate to.

Drinking, getting drunk, being hung-over.

What’s the problem?

It wasn’t that what shocked me, it was the complete normalization (and acceptance) of the abnormal.

The denial of the author, (editor and possibly readers) that they were innocently writing about something as harmless and irrelevant as say; adult acne or bloating, or ‘shock’ the effects of too much chocolate cake was staggering.

‘The curse of the 48-hour hangover’ like this is some niggling little quirk that one must accept as one increase’s in years.

The author describes sending out emails to friends saying she’ll be off their radar for a couple of days because she’s going out drinking that night and excepts to be hung-over for at least 2 days after?

Hel-lo?

She also describes her younger years where a consistent diet of alcohol and cigarettes (spritzers for lunch, shots and whiskey for tea) was normal and gleefully capitalised on (one bar considered her such a lush a cocktail was named after her).

It’s not her drinking I object to it’s the complete load of B*****ks she’s implying in her article.

This isn’t normal behaviour, this is serious and dangerous alcohol abuse (don’t ask me to quote statistics but I will if you insist) paraded out as a life style challenge.

The article goes on to mention how she and other women try to cope with; anxiety, depression, paranoia which result after their use of alcohol.

There is nothing normal or ok the behaviour this article is describing. It is colluding with the mass denial and deception this country is in around its alcohol use.

For those of us who have a problem with drinking and for those of us who know someone who has a problem drinking but who isn’t admitting it, we are all taking part in some kind of mass deception.

If I’ve learnt anything in my 5 years as therapist then its people doesn’t always present their truth on the outside, it is often hidden inside of them. Often their insides and outside don’t match.

The deception is our relationship with alcohol and how we justify it.

The deception is our devotion to the effects of alcohol and what we are prepared to loose, compromise or lie about in order to get it.

The deception is we are all colluding with each other and drinking abnormally and dangerously whilst calling it something else. (Exactly what this article did).

The deception is we prefer the manufactured feeling it creates because we’ve forgotten how to create feelings we crave organically.

So we have normalised abnormal drinking.

Alcohol abuse is the purpose of their business.

I’m at huge risk here of sounding like a pious, reformed drinker who believes any form of fun with alcohol is sinful and devious and should be outlawed at once for the sake of our souls or something.

Forgive me if I do. Because that isn’t my intention and there is nothing wrong with alcohol in moderation.

But sometimes I feel like the little boy who stood in line to watch the emperor parade his finest robes to his people that had been specially made by two con-merchants (drinks industry, politicians?) who spin the message that the cloth is so special, so fine that only really clever people can see it, to the stupid it is invisible. Of course no one dare admit they can’t see anything because they don’t want to appear stupid or different to other people, so they all lie and exclaim how fine the robes are. So when the emperor is marching in these new robes he is actually naked but nobody dares tell him.

Except one little boy who points and says ‘but his not wearing any clothes’.

So I’m hear pointing saying you/we have a huge alcohol problem that everyone is pretending is ok and is normalised to such an extent that no one can see how naked we are.

I was coming back from London and picked up the Evening Standard to read on the train, I came across an article about Meg Matthew (formally married to Noel Gallagher from Oasis); she was talking about her new wallpaper line and her life in recovery. Apparently last year after a trip to Ibiza she realised she had a problem and checked herself into rehab to get help. It was interesting reading her story because in many ways she’s had such an amazing life, rock and roll lifestyle, parties, famous friends, rich, successful, pretty, she basically had the best this world had to offer and she still wasn’t happy.

She spoke of her dissatisfaction and unhappiness, in particular just not feeling ‘good enough’, although she says she doesn’t regret it most of it she says she’s lucky to have a second chance at life.

Whenever I read of a celebrity who is getting sober I relate so much to what they’re describing. My life was as opposite to Meg’s as it’s possible to get, there was absolutely no glamour and no rock stars to speak off. So that part I don’t relate to in fact I used to envy. Yet here is a woman who supposedly ‘had it all’ and was still not happy, still felt dissatisfied and not good enough which is exactly how I felt.

It seems that it doesn’t matter what you have on the outside, if you feel empty on the inside then nothing can change that, all the money and glamour in the world just highlight the incongruence of your ‘insides and outsides’ not matching, and just how painful that is.

I remember feeling worthless, no confidence, unattractive and my friends told how attractive I was, how any guy would be lucky to have me (like Meg I couldn’t get a date for love nor money, and had resigned myself to singleness). I knew they meant it and weren’t just being nice as they were genuinely shocked that I could feel that way about myself. But it didn’t matter that they were incredulous and my lack of self belief, it didn’t matter how many people told me how great I was, or pretty etc, I didn’t feel it myself, I didn’t feel good enough and there’s something about believing that about yourself that makes it manifest itself in your reality.

Because I felt and thought badly about myself, I became that person. We are what we think we are.

No wonder we use alcohol to numb that.

There just isn’t a day that goes by when there isn’t another story on all the awful things drinking can do. It’s a wonder the pubs can get any trade at all its so dastardly bad for everyone. I don’t know about anyone else but I have an amazing ability to ignore this kind of information as I think it doesn’t apply to me. During the worst of my drinking I was always getting different pills from the doctor, for my various ’symptoms’, depression, anxiety, paranoia etc, of course I couldn’t make the links that the massive amount of mood and mind altering substances I consumed could have anything to do with these deeply unpleasant feelings. So when I was checking out the side effects of said pills there was always a big warning, something to do with not mixing them with alcohol or driving heavy vehicles.

Of course the warnings weren’t referring to me they were referring to other people. People who drank too much.

I rationalized that it couldn’t make that much difference, the risks weren’t very high, they probably didn’t mean it, they were just be over cautious.

Now I’ve ‘woken up’ I hope to God I stopped in time, even now I worry from time to time the long term damage I may have caused myself through alcohol and drug abuse. Now I have been ‘restored to sanity’ I don’t even drink coffee because caffeine isn’t good for you. It’s funny though when drinking all the risks in the world wouldn’t have stopped me drinking, potential breast cancer, heart disease, mental health problems, rape, that was stuff that happened to there people. Drinking took priority over all of these potential hazards.

That was stuff that happened to other people, not me right?

Asda has taken the lead on clamping down on underage drinking by refusing to let anyone buy alcohol who looks under 18 and doesn’t have ID. I’m not going to go into the controversy of ID cards, as I don’t have a strong opinion either way on this. I do however think that retailers have to take responsibility for who they serve alcohol. With so many young people drinking we, as a society have to do something about this so it can only be a good thing that Asda are being responsible in this manner.

Unfortunately it is only a small part of the solution; anyone who’s been a teenager can remember how easy it is to get hold of alcohol, either from their parent’s drinks cabinet or getting an older friend to buy it. I was getting served from the age of 13, with make up I looked old enough and nobody seemed to bother IDing then. Ultimately making alcohol hard to get will make it more attractive to young people, especially if grown ups are still acting irresponsibly with alcohol.

Drinking and getting as drunk as possible seems to be a right of passage for most young people these days, when I was a teenager it made me feel confident, glamorous and sophisticated all the things I felt I wasn’t, of course there is nothing remotely glamorous about a 15 year old collapsed outside of a pub with a bucket of water being thrown over her lying in her own vomit as was the case with me.

Twenty years on you visit any high street on a Friday night and this would not be an uncommon sight, how terribly sad that we believe we’re having a good time, are we deluding ourselves?  I look back at my own drinking and can see it was all a sham, a big lie, I wasn’t having a good time I was just doing what everyone else was doing.

Not selling alcohol to under 18’s is a start, but we are going to have to go a lot further than that.

My name is Veronica and I am a reformed alcoholic. And I don’t want it to happen to you too, which is why I have trained as a therapist and have launched a training programme.

Today’s media has highlighted a proposal by Alcohol Concern urging the prosecution of parents who allow under 15-year-olds to drink. However, I don’t believe prosecuting adults this way is the right approach. I remember when I was a teenager; how anything that was forbidden immediately became more attractive and desirable. What I feel is needed is investment into young people’s emotional lives; we need to look at the root causes of why people drink to such extreme levels.

They are absolutely right in bringing this serious issue to our attention, the massive problem we have in this country due to alcohol abuse, how we have indeed created a culture where binge drinking has been so normalised that most young people see this behaviour as acceptable and emulate it. This isn’t the odd person from a bad background drinking too much, this is the majority of the population who drink, drinking more than is good for them and many too dangerous levels.

However, I don’t believe prosecuting adults this way is the right approach. I remember when I was a teenager; how anything that was forbidden immediately became more attractive and desirable. What I feel is needed is investment into young people’s emotional lives; we need to look at the root causes of why people drink to such extreme levels.

I was a teenage binge drinker, I remember lying in the gutter in my own vomit after pub closing time, the reason I drank was it changed how I felt, I had no confidence or self-esteem, I didn’t know how to have relationships with people. Alcohol made all of that better, it gave me confidence and bravado, I felt invincible, and then of course came the hangovers, depression, self loathing and guilt.

What I’m saying is we need to look at the reasons why young people and adults drink and start there; it has nothing to do with accessibility of alcohol. If someone has a drink problem and likes the effects of alcohol as much as I did, trust me they’ll find a way to get it.

I read with interest the recent reports about the rise of teenage binge drinking in this country. It seems to finally have come to our attention that we have a huge alcohol problem in this country. Not a day goes by without a shocking story of a 15 year-old admitted to hospital with alcohol poisoning or teenagers out of control on booze, the general public are horrified and I’m sure believe it’s not their adolescent.

The truth is we have succeeded in creating a culture that condones, encourages and mostly normalizes what is abnormal drinking. We have done this over the last 30 years or so, visit any town centre in the country over the weekend and you will see adults falling out of bars into the gutter in the quest of a ‘good time’. How can we be so surprised that are young people are copying this behavior? Young people want to be like adults, from when a little girl tries on Mummy’s high heels to having their first sneaky drags on a cigarette; they are trying to be cool, grown-up, just like us. They see what we do and want to copy it. Our culture has formed the belief that you can’t have a good time without getting drunk, that you drink in order to get p****d, that this is normal and harmless (the general public is still of the opinion that only smelly old men on benches have drink problems) we have passed this faulty belief onto our children and now we are surprised. Lots of suggestions have been made as to how to rectify this problem, there was a big debate that the change in licensing laws would inflict more damage, raising the drinking age has been considered, Alcohol Concern (the independent advisory body on alcohol) have even suggested that parents giving alcohol to under 15’s should be prosecuted. However all of these solutions seem to be wide of the mark, surely what we need to address is what’s underneath the problem, what’s driving the behavior, the way our culture thinks and relates to alcohol. Tackling are nations drink problem means a cultural shift that needs to start with the younger generation, we need to educate young people not on units and ’safe drinking’ (a complete failure if you look at the results we’re getting) and educate them on emotional intelligence, how to deal with stress, how to deal with failure, how to understand how they feel so they aren’t driven to use alcohol and other substances to cope with their feelings.

As a therapist I treat many successful individuals whose lives are falling apart because they have never been offered any guidance on how to deal with their emotional lives, they have turned to alcohol for fun, pleasure and finally to cope.

This is the behavior we are role modeling to our young people. They’re just doing what we’re doing.

The solution must start with looking at ourselves.