Welcome to Day 1, where we’ll discuss “Your Why?”!
And your “why” is really broken up into two areas:
1st - identify what your beliefs are about alcohol, which will require you to make a list of reasons WHY you drink. Maybe you’ll have 10 reasons on your list. Maybe you’ll have 100 things on your list. Everyone’s different, but don’t hold back! Go big or go home. I’ll post a picture of my lists - since I did the Alcohol Experiment a few times, my lists changed each month.
Do you drink to impress? Do you drink to relax? Do you drink to forget? This may be the first time you’ve ever really sat down and even given this a thought!
2nd - why you want to drink less or quit drinking completely? What brought you here? What are your reasons for signing up for The Alcohol Experiment? Perhaps this is the first time you’ve examined this, too, so you’ll want to let loose and put it all on paper.
As an aside, you’ll hear me talk about journaling a lot this month. I HATED journaling in the beginning - I pictured a little pigtailed girl sitting on her pink four poster bed writing “Dear Diary…” No thanks. But now I do it every day like brushing my teeth. Journaling is GOLD for responders. We hold a lot of terrible things up in our brain that we don’t want to share or think we can share with the people we trust. Maybe someone told you “you signed up for this” or “it’s all a part of the job.” Maybe you never learned how to share vulnerably or it wasn’t something your family did growing up. THATS OK. You now have my permission to share. This group is full of cops, death investigators, fire fighters, funeral directors, hospice staff, any other responders who answer the call - we know. We’ve seen the worst and we’ve also handled the staff shortages, the managers who don’t remember what it’s like on the road, the shifts awake for 50hrs straight, the public who thinks you’re racist, and the spouses and kids who stop relying on you to be there at the soccer games. You don’t have to share it all to the group but I need you to share it with your journal. Get that crap out of your head and onto your phone or your notebook. You can throw it away afterwards if you want, I don’t care if you never look at it again but you have to get it out.
I’ll post YouTube videos about journaling for busy people and journaling mini-challenges and the merits of using cheapo notebooks over fancy leatherbound books. Looking back on my journals from this time last year is an amazing physical example of how far I’ve come. And you will too!
Ultimately, we’re surfacing subconscious thoughts and forcing them to have a face-off with our conscious thoughts. In other words....cognitive dissonance: the tangled mess of our thoughts in conflict with each other.
P.S. In your videos, we did our first ACT. In this ACT, we discussed the evolution of our taste for alcohol. How is it that we can go from thinking that our first sip of beer or Mad Dog 20/20 (anyone else?!) is DISGUSTING, to craving it, needing it, and loving it? We’ll become aware of the belief, we’ll gain clarity of where we got this idea in the first place, and then venture into the turnaround – do we really love it? Or do we just think we do?