Veronica Callanan

Am I an alcoholic?

That’s a very good question.

Are you?

In all honesty, there is no straightforward answer to that and whichever ‘expert’ or professional you speak to will give you a totally different, if not conflicting answer. This is because there is no scientific way of measuring this, it really is an opinion. Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance, will let you make up your own mind. No one diagnoses you. Doctors and other addictions professionals have other ways of concluding an individual may be an alcoholic or not.

It is, in our opinion, fairly easy to diagnose. What follows is a description of the traits of an alcoholic, and if they fit you, then you may have to come to the conclusion that you are an alcoholic.

Firstly, and we can’t emphasis this enough, ordinary people do not think about their drinking.
It rents no space in their heads.
Period.

This means if you have spent some time on the internet looking for solutions for why you drink the way you do and have ended up on this site reading this page, then the answer is definitely yes.

You have a problem.

Alcoholics or problem drinkers know they have a problem.
They know something is most definitely wrong.
It’s a nagging feeling that won’t go away.
They are vaguely aware that they drink too much but have loads of excuses and reasons for why that is.

So, by the sheer fact you are reading this, you know there’s a problem right?
We’ll go further.
Alcoholism has nothing to do with alcohol.

No, really.
Are you surprised?
Alcoholism is about the way you think.
Let me explain.

Alcoholism is a state of mind, a way of thinking and being that is so uncomfortable for the individual that it is expressed in how they drink.

Which isn’t normal, because alongside this state of mind is a physical allergy that means when alcohol enters the body of an alcoholic they respond differently to other people. They lose the power of control over alcohol; something else takes over and they find it extremely hard to regulate or stop drinking when they start.

The mind and body work against any intentions they may have of not wanting to drink.
An alcoholic is so uncomfortable in their own skin that they will always return to alcohol to ease the discomfort in their own minds (and souls), and once they start drinking the physical allergy kicks in and they find that they nearly always drink far more that they intended.
The common misconception is that it’s how much you drink and how often that makes someone an alcoholic.
Not so!

Certainly, in most cases alcoholics drink far more than is acceptable and on a more frequent basis than ordinary people, that’s for certain. However, you can be an alcoholic and drink infrequently; it doesn’t necessarily have to be everyday.
What differentiates a binge drinker or heavy drinker from and alcoholic is how that person thinks.
We have created a culture that has normalised abnormal drinking – we call it binge drinking, and everyone seems to do it.
Not all of those people go on to become alcoholics, however. Many will naturally regulate their drinking as they mature or the circumstances of their lives change and they find they have no desire to drink at abnormal levels anymore. Others, despite becoming more mature or their lives changing, will still, whenever they have the opportunity drink far beyond what is reasonable.
What is reasonable?
The recommended weekly allowances for an adult male are 21 units a week, spread over the week and not all in one night. For a woman it is 14 units. A unit is the equivalent to a small glass of wine or half a pint of lager*. If you drink consistently over this amount you can expect to have some kind of mental health, physical health, emotional, financial, and social consequences.
Most people are surprised at how low this is. Because so many people are drinking way beyond acceptable levels, we have normalised the abnormal.

And the biggest excuse that most people give for drinking way more than is good for them?

Everyone else is doing it, so it must be ok.
Wrong!
An alcoholic will find it easy to hide amongst binge drinkers because they drink the same way. What makes them different is what’s going on inside of them or behind the mask.
Pay attention, we are really coming to the crux of the problem now; this is the most accurate description of an alcoholic we can give you.

An alcoholic just feels different than everyone else, and not in a good way. It’s like they were born different; some people have described it as looking at the world through a glass screen, watching everyone else get on with life in a way that they just can’t seem to. It feels like being born without the instruction manual for life, and whatever you seem to do it never works out in a way that seems to satisfy or fulfil you.
Alcoholics always have a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness, and they are always looking for something to fix that feeling. Alcoholics tend to believe that if they get the right partner, job, house, or car it will bring them the feeling of satisfaction and happiness they crave.
They are always looking for something outside of themselves to make them complete.
And what happens?

Temporarily, these outside changes fix that hole inside of them. Everything seems like its going to be okay, but it’s always just temporary. It escapes them again, it’s like sand running through their fingers, they can never seem to hold on to it. Just when they are almost there, when they feel like they finally have the thing that will make them happy, they lose it and they revert back to their old feelings of dissatisfaction and emptiness.
In addition to living life in this unsatisfactory way, alcoholics also experience a lot of fear.
Fear is probably the defining characteristic of alcoholics.
It’s fear of everything and nothing; it’s always with them and they spend a lot of time hiding how they really feel from everyone around them.
An alcoholic will very rarely be able to tell anyone close to them about the ‘fear’.

They are scared of what people might think of them.
They are frightened of not being good enough, of being found out, of people not liking them, of failing. An alcoholic will do whatever they can to hide this fear to the outside world, and they even find it hard admitting it to themselves. They are so used to living with this fear that they can’t remember what its like to be without it.
So you can see that when an individual feels this way on a consistent basis, it becomes so uncomfortable for them that they will do anything to change it. Alcohol does that for them. In the short term it removes that sense of discomfort and uncomfortableness and for a short while you feel like everything is okay. You feel happy and unafraid, like you fit in with the people around you; the glass screen separating you from the rest of the world has been removed.
And then it goes away.

It was only artificially and temporarily induced, courtesy of alcohol, and you are back to being the way you always were, still searching for whatever it is that will make you feel better (feel complete).

You can see then, that alcoholism is an internal problem rather than an external one. That the problem arises from how someone thinks and how they feel, and that drinking is only a symptom.
You may argue that other people who don’t drink to excess also feel that way, and you’d be right. The difference between them and you is that their feelings don’t express themselves in drunkenness the way yours do.
Pay attention, though – look around you. Notice how other people express their internal dissatisfaction through unhealthy relationships, overspending, gambling, sex, moving, food, etc. All that behaviour is just a way to deal with uncomfortable feelings.
If you have read this far, then chances are that you have read something you have identified with, that intrigues you.
Unfortunately, alcoholism doesn’t usually get diagnosed or recognised until someone’s drinking is way out of control, causing massive amounts of damage in their lives and the lives of other people. The reason for that is because people diagnosis alcoholism by amounts people drink, and this is just not the case. If you can recognise the traits, if you can identify your problem, then you can get help much earlier. The truth is that this condition, this way of being and thinking, won’t go away just because you want it to. Our experience working with thousands of alcoholics is that you can’t think your way out of it and you certainly can’t do it alone.

It comes down to this: how much longer are you prepared to accept living this way?
You may have read this and thought,
‘Yeah, I identify with some of that, but it’s really not that bad.’
Hel-lo?
Are you really prepared to accept that in your life?

Are you really prepared to accept less than you deserve?
Do you want to look back on your life and see that you settled for 70% or 50% of what you were capable of?
Are you prepared to live through one more day feeling the way you do, when now you know there’s a way out?
Now may be the time to get really honest with yourself.

Don’t settle for less than you deserve; www.beataddicitionnow.com

I think there’s two ways you can become an alcoholic, I think you’re either born that way or you simply need to drink enough alcohol and you become that way.
I believe I was born an alcoholic.
I believe this, because I’ve always felt ‘different’. My earliest memories are of feeling ‘odd’, ‘uncomfortable in my own skin’, I felt like I was looking out at the world through a glass screen, I was on one side and everyone else was on the other.
I felt separate, alone, unconnected. It didn’t seem to matter what I did, I never felt like I truly ‘fitted in’ or ‘belonged’ anywhere. These feelings began long before I ever tried alcohol.
When I finally tried alcohol at around 15 it felt like a light bulb went on. All of a sudden, I felt complete, I felt ‘right’, I had confidence and self belief.
Drink did something to me, it made me feel normal.
I never drank ‘normally’, whatever that is. I drank alcoholically from the word go. I could never get enough of this substance that made me feel so good.

Initially I was just your regular teenage binge drinker, I could get into bars and clubs when I was underage and the whole point was to get as drunk as possible. At the time it was what all my peers were doing too, I certainly wasn’t doing anything that different to most teenagers, but whenever I compared myself to them I knew I was different. I could tell they didn’t have the same feeling of desperation or discontentedness that lived with me. As we grew up they naturally moderated their drinking and drank less, I found that inconceivable.
At 15 I also experimented with marijuana, I’m never quiet sure what happened with me and drugs education, I must have missed that bit at school as it never once occurred to me to say no to drugs, or even question what it would do to me. I so desperately wanted to be liked and to feel normal that I said ‘yes’ to any substance offered to me.

I met my first serious boyfriend when I was 16 and shortly after left home, he was a recreational drug user and through him I tried LSD, Magic Mushrooms and Amphetamines.
I loved them; I used drugs regularly and partied every weekend. I had a great time, I was struggling through college at the time, I barely passed my exams but I didn’t care because I though I’d found this group of people I belonged too and a lifestyle I enjoyed. I felt like I was living life on the edge, it felt glamorous and sophisticated.
For 2 years I really, really enjoyed taking drugs and getting drunk.
I had a great time and then at 17 everything went horribly wrong.
I had taken some LSD and had a ‘bad trip’, this had never happened before and I didn’t know how to handle it, I felt panicky and scared, I was seeing and hearing things and got very paranoid. The feeling of terror grew and even when I began to ‘come down’ the fear and panic didn’t leave, in fact they got worse. I now know I went into drug induced psychosis, but at the time I had no idea what was happening too me. The worse thing was I couldn’t tell anyone around me how I felt, I put on a ‘mask’ and pretended everything was ok, I was terrified of anyone finding out what was happening, this lead to me feeling imprisoned by my own fear.

My whole life was shattered, I was terrified and paranoid all the time and having at least a dozen panic attacks a day. I couldn’t get on a bus, go into a supermarket or sit in my own living room without having a panic attack and making some kind of excuse to leave. I could barely go to college, I couldn’t cope, I was having a breakdown and was most definitely suicidal, I used to stand at the bus stop waiting for a bus I was too scared to get on and would try and summon the courage to jump in front of it.
Everyday of living was agony for me and I didn’t know how to carry on, the truth is I didn’t want to die I just didn’t know how to carry on living the way I was.
This went on for months and I was too terrified to tell anyone what was happening, I didn’t know how to. I couldn’t even begin to articulate what I was experiencing, I was too scared to say it out loud because if I did it meant what was happening to me was real and I was still clinging on to the hope that one day I would I wake up and be normal again. After a few months I could go on no longer and I went to the doctors and broke down, he wrote me a prescription for valium and recommended some counselling. I never went to the counselling but I did like the idea of being prescribed drugs to make me feel better. This was the worse possible thing to do, it started off a 10 year prescription drug habit, for years I visited different doctors explaining my symptoms of fear and paranoia and they would write me prescriptions for valium, xanax, anti-depressants, they always worked for a bit, papered over the cracks but they never dealt with the root of the problem.

The next 10 years of my life from 17 to 27 until I got clean and sober were a living hell. I was never ever free from fear it was the overwhelming emotion I woke up to every morning, some days I felt like I could hardly breath through the terror of having to get through the day and pretend to be normal.
After the incident with LSD I had stopped using illegal drugs completely and only drank alcohol, my drinking increased very quickly because it was the only thing that took away the fear, it took the edge off of my anxiety and I had a few hours of reprieve from the madness in my head and I could be ‘normal’.
At 17 my drinking shifted from ‘having fun’ to using it to cope with how I felt. I knew there was something very wrong with me, I just didn’t know what. I did try and get help, I looked everywhere, I went to doctors, counsellors, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, churches anywhere that offered some kind of hope, but none of them helped, I was treated for anxiety or depression but never my alcoholism. The truth is I either lied about how much I drank or I was simply never asked no one ever picked up on my drinking as being the problem. Whatever treatment I was offered only ever gave me some kind of reprieve and inevitably I would revert back to familiar feelings of loneliness, isolation, despair and discontent.
I tried every method known to alcoholics to try and ‘fix’ my life. It is amusing to me now to see how unoriginal I was in my attempts to try and make things better, every alcoholic or addict I’ve known has tried all the same methods.

At 19 I went to America to travel, I loved it there and thought if I lived there everything would be wonderful, I did this 3 time in my twenties, spending time in the States and then ending up in the same place again (alone, confused, scared, a failure), what I was really doing was running away from myself, but ‘wherever you go, there you are’. I’ve been to some really incredible glamorous places and I hated all of them because of how I felt. I always managed to work and got through university but I was always just ‘holding on.’ I tried to ‘loose myself’ in relationships, I almost got married to a man I didn’t love because I thought that marriage would ‘save me’ that I would be ok then. All my relationships were based on dishonesty, fear and neediness, I couldn’t believe anyone would want to be with me when they found out how disgusting I really was, it was beyond my comprehension that anyone could love me.

I was constantly searching, looking for answers.
I have a massive thirst for life and this is what really saved me, because I remained curious I eventually stumbled across the solution for my problem. When I was drinking I always felt discontented, I knew I wasn’t reaching my full potential, I knew I wasn’t the person I knew I could be and I drank on these feelings because they were too painful to acknowledge to myself.
I moved jobs, countries, relationships, friendships believing each time that this would be the thing that would make me feel ok. I blamed outside circumstances for how I felt and believed they were what needed to be changed.
Through out my twenties I drank heavily, more than I knew was good for me, I always sought a peer group who drank as much as I did. I drank before any social situation because I was too scared to face people; I drank before parties because I was scared there wouldn’t be enough booze there for me to get the ‘buzz’ I needed. I drank anytime I felt scared and couldn’t cope, I began to sneak drinks and drink on my own.

In my mid-twenties I started using cocaine whenever I drank because it enabled me to drink more. Cocaine gave me the worst ‘come down’s’ ever, I was suicidal, I would wake up the next day and felt like my soul had been scraped out and was lying on the floor next to me. I didn’t know how I was going to get out of bed let alone make it through the rest of my life. My feelings of loneliness and despair just grew.
Without a doubt their were moments of happiness, peace and calm through this period, I would have moments when I felt everything was going to be ok, but they were always fleeting, I could never hold on to them, the same inevitable dark feelings would return. I was slowly dying on the inside, it wasn’t the alcohol that was necessarily killing me it was the lies that I was telling my self. I had to tell lies to myself as it was the only way I could deal with the fear inside of me, fear is the defining characteristic of alcoholics, no one understands fear the way we do.

I never became physically dependent on alcohol, I could always go for a period of time without it, usually I would switch to something else prescription drugs, pot anything that helped me get through the day. I’m very lucky in that a lot of bad things haven’t happened to me that could have done, I’ve put myself in dangerous situations that could have turned nasty, I’ve known the shame and degradation of being a female alcoholic and sleeping with men I don’t like just to feel wanted. I’ve never been arrested, or bankrupt or fired or many of the terrible things that have happened to alcoholics, at first I thought I couldn’t be an alcoholic because I wasn’t qualified, however I learnt that it isn’t the drinking and consequences that make you an alcoholic, it’s the thinking and feelings. When I understood that I finally realised what my problem was.
As soon as I understood the problem I could embark on the solution.
Getting clean and sober was the hardest thing I have ever done, but there was no choice for me, I couldn’t go back to how I was living. I so wanted to live, to make life count, to see what I was capable of, when I got sober these things at last became possible.
I don’t fit the stereotype of an alcoholic or addict, I don’t look like one, I look just like you, I knew something was very, very wrong with me but I thought it was a rare mental health condition not alcoholism. Alcoholism can’t be measured by how much you drink it is much more a condition of thinking and feelings.

Finally I became free of the prison I had made for my self; the only thing that had ever limited me was my own thinking. Recovery gave me a new perspective on life; it gave me back my self-belief and confidence. I am finally engaging in the process of reaching my full potential and becoming the woman I was meant to be. I no longer have a 50% life of just getting by, just coping. I am no longer scared I am just the opposite I am fearless in everything I do. I no longer worry whether you like me or not because I love who I am. I wake up everyday and find something to be joyful about. Certainly my life has challenges in it, but none of them threaten to capsize me the way they used to, I relish challenges so I can learn and grow and become the best version of myself I’m capable of being.
Life is a wonderful adventure now instead of a scary threatening place. I live a life now beyond anything I could have dreamed off before, I am on fire with the possibilities there are in front of me.
There is a choice we all make deep inside of our selves, it is to ‘live our truth’ or ‘to not live our truth’ both are difficult and one is very painful.
Living your truth is about acting with integrity, being congruent, never compromising your dreams and taking action and not making excuses.
Living your truth is the point of life, its how to do it that is the challenge.
My sobriety date is: 2^nd of May 2000.