Better conversations (Part One)...

We should stop asking people to justify their decision to stop drinking

A few weeks ago, I was deep in conversation with a friend/colleague about other people’s reactions to me stopping drinking. Reactions have ranged from support, admiration and indifference to confusion, irritation and annoyance. She relayed a conversation she overheard between two mutual colleagues at a social event at work. It was roughly eight months into me stopping drinking.

Paul’s not drinking then?

Yeah, I heard. Do you know why?

No. He’s been cagey about it.

Is he an alcoholic then?

I don’t know. Perhaps. He’s always liked a drink.

Interesting, I guess he must be. Just shows that you never know what’s going on inside someone’s head.

That’s true

She hadn’t told me about the conversation at the time, fearing it would upset me. I’m glad she didn’t. At that point, it would have been mortifying to hear colleagues talk about me in those terms. It is the kind of conversation that many people who are struggling with their drinking dread. Everyone who gives up alcohol will experience a version of this conversation at some point. I remember one friend fixing me with an intense stare and asking, ‘so, would you say you are an alcoholic then?’ I struggled to construct an answer. I mumbled something about ‘alcoholic’ being a label that I didn’t relate to. It was embarrassing and humiliating. I felt frustrated and angry with myself that I had such a strong reaction and could not offer a more robust response. I know the question was well meaning. I’m sure that in her head it was an attempt to communicate that she was willing to listen. But it left me floundering and doubting my decision. Did I want to carry on if this is what people are going to think of me? The more I talked about not drinking, the clearer it was that reaching for the concept of alcoholism was the only way some people could make sense of my decision. It was an uncomfortable realisation.

…reaching for the concept of alcoholism was the only way some people could make sense of my decision to no longer drink.

There are many challenges on the path to stopping drinking. One of the hardest has been explaining that decision to others. I’m not unique in finding this difficult. Conversations with friends who have also removed alcohol suggest many of us struggle to explain why we have made this choice. Our difficulty with explaining ourselves to others can reflect difficulty with explaining the decision to ourselves. Deciding not to drink, whether for a defined period or forever, is complex, and the reasons behind it develop with time. The reasons I took an initial break differ greatly from the reasons I persist with not drinking. On the day I completed a year without alcohol, I wrote the following in my diary:

I stopped from a place of desperation

I persisted from a place of bloody mindedness

I continue from a place of joy

In every alcohol-free journey, there’s almost always an ‘oh fuck’ moment. A moment when you realise that stopping drinking isn’t as simple as switching out your pint of lager for lime and soda! The process of stopping drinking can be like the scene in Alien where the medic cuts open the body of the infected crew member to reveal that the parasite has wrapped itself inextricably around its host’s major organs. Communicating this complexity is difficult, especially when we have such a limited and stigmatising vocabulary to draw upon. No wonder so many of us flounder in our attempts to talk about our decision to not drink. The challenge of finding the right words to explain this decision, whether this is to oneself or to others, can keep people drinking way beyond the point it might be useful to take a significant break, or stop.

I want to help people liberate themselves from the trap of alcohol. This can only happen if we can communicate about drinking in ways that are open, honest and free of stigma. Having better conversations about alcohol involves removing two roadblocks. First, we need to dismantle the idea that stopping drinking is something that requires justification. Second, we need to create a richer and less stigmatising lexicon to communicate the experience of no longer drinking.

Let’s explore the first of these issues: why does stopping drinking require justification?

If you are known as a drinker, stopping drinking requires an explanation. In the early stages, most people could readily understand why I might want to give up drinking for a month. But the longer I went without drinking, the more mystified people became. Comments morphed from ‘good for you, I should do that too’ to perplexed ‘so you’re still doing the not drinking thing…’ and ‘why would you do that too yourself?’ My decision to continue not drinking seemed to require something more than an explanation. It was not enough to explain that I was doing this for myself, I needed to justify the impact it was having on them. Some people behaved in ways that suggested they were hurt or offended by my actions. At a work Christmas dinner, a colleague spent the whole evening trying to get me to drink. As the evening progressed, light pressure and banter turned into hectoring and then aggression, culminating in an exasperated ‘for fuck’s sake man, just have a fucking drink and stop being so fucking boring!’ There were five of us around the table and not a single person challenged this boorish behaviour. I was made to feel like the success of everyone else’s night depended on what was in my glass. I sometimes felt more shame about not drinking than I ever did about the drinking to excess!

Incidents like overhearing colleagues talking about your drinking, or the Christmas Dinner Debacle are common for people who stop drinking. They reveal an interesting and disturbing truth about societies’ relationship with alcohol– not drinking is less socially acceptable than drinking. This is a truth felt very deeply by those of us who give up alcohol. It is a crazy truth when you dig deeper. Not drinking is less socially acceptable than binge drinking to black out every weekend, arriving at work with a head splitting hangover, or turning up to the school gate absolutely hanging from last night’s book club wine. But that’s how it is for millions of people on a weekly basis. On a weekly basis, approximately 20 - 30% of people in the UK drink in such a way that they are impaired the following day. That is between 13 and 20 million people. In the USA, this represents 66 to 99 million people. This is a lot of hangovers!

It is only when you stop drinking that you realise what a conflicted relationship society has with alcohol. Not drinking is so socially unacceptable that society has had to create specific events like Dry January to give people permission to back away from the booze. We don’t have similar events for other recreational drugs. Where is the ‘Meth Free for March’ campaign? Or ‘Crack Free February’? We don’t need national-level events to promote abstinence from other recreational drugs because society does not have a fundamental ambivalence about whether these drugs are good or bad. Society has an extremely toxic relationship with alcohol. It hypes consumption of a dependence-forming substance and then condemns people who become trapped by that dependence. It’s a form of cultural gaslighting. Campaigns like Dry January exist because society knows that its relationship with alcohol is problematic. Society offers drinkers Dry January as a cheap apology for convincing us that drinking is beneficial. It’s the ultimate non-apology by a shitty partner we would do well to dump!

Dry January and other abstinence campaigns serve an important function in the current alcohol-centric climate. Dry January is a good thing, but the reason it needs to exist is not. Many long-term alcohol-free journeys begin with Dry January and Sober October. These campaigns provide a welcome refuge from the relentless promotion of alcohol. They create a safe space where people can explore their drinking free from the requirement to justify their behaviour. Most people don’t need an explanation as to why someone might not drink during Dry January. Taking part in Dry January is the explanation. What we now need to do is make it socially acceptable to take a sustained break from drinking at any time. It’s a long time from Dry January to Sober October, and people can do a lot of damage to themselves and others in that period!

When you first stop drinking, it can feel that you are always on the back foot in social situations. Always apologising for your behaviour or avoiding events where people will question your decision. Many of us respond to the question, ‘why are you not drinking?’ like a deer trapped in headlights, even when we are confident and secure in our decision. The requirement to justify not drinking adds significant and unnecessary burden to the already difficult task of resisting the constant invitation to drink. Some people minimise this burden by withdrawing from alcohol-centric social events for a while. Others struggle gamely on, showing dignity in the onslaught of others irritation and rudeness. Requiring people to justify not drinking makes doing the right thing the hardest thing. And actually, that’s not ok.

So, how can we change things?

We need to retire the requirement for people to justify their decision not to drink. It’s a common but harmful social script that needs to be put in the bin. When we demand that others justify their decision not to drink, we communicate that drinking is the normal behaviour and that not drinking is the dangerous aberration. In reality, the reverse is true. Most people dislike their first experience of alcohol, but considerable social pressure overrides this initial distaste and brainwashes them into believing that drinking is a necessary part of adult life.

Stopping drinking in an alcohol-centric society is a radical act. It takes tremendous courage and determination. It’s a real flex – a hard swim upstream against the tide of societal expectations. It shouldn’t be this hard, but it currently is. Retiring the requirement for justification will make things a lot easier, but it won’t eliminate the need to talk about drinking. The reality is that not drinking does affect other people and we need to communicate with others so that others can support us. To do this, we need to remove the second roadblock to better communication: the limited and stigmatising language we currently have available to talk about alcohol and drinking.

That is the subject of Better Conversations (Part Two)!

The end stuff..

Johann Hari wrote that ‘connection is the opposite of addiction’ and these posts are my way of helping people have better conversations about alcohol and drinking - conversations with themselves, and withothers.

I’d like ‘control issues’ to be a conversation, not a monlogue. Let me know what you think about this article, the things that you might like me to write further about, or simply share your own experiences. You never know how your words will shape someone elses journey.

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash