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.

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 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.