Back to: KCB Recovery MasterClass
Transcript
People judge you by how much or how often you drink. If you drink, then you are not doing very well. And if you do not drink, then you are doing well. But that’s just not true. There are other aspects of life that help to determine how well you’re doing. These aspects include:
- your employment status – are you working?
- the job that you do – are you happy with the job that you do? Do you like going to work daily
- your friendships – do you have good friends that you can trust or confide in?
- your family relationships – how is your relationship with your family?
- your purpose – do you feel like you’re fulfilling your purpose?
- your mood – how well are you feeling on a particular day?
- your stress level – how stressed are you?
- your happiness – are you truly happy and living a fulfilled life?
Whether you drink or not does not predict how well your life is going. If you have been relapsing, the problem is that you’re not looking at the whole picture, you have bought into this idea that you’re an alcoholic and you need to stop drinking, ‘I’ll stop being an alcoholic and I’ll be better’. You have to focus on everything that is necessary to get better, not just one aspect.
If you’re being told or you’re thinking that you’re an alcoholic and you need to quit drinking before you look at anything else, that may not be correct.
If you only focus on stopping drinking, you won’t be making much progress.
And there is a reason for that. Now, this is very important – your drinking or usage is there to help you deal with the issues of why you’re dissatisfied.
So if you take away the alcohol, you’ll still have a life that you’re dissatisfied with.
You’re going to be very unhappy, even without the alcohol, and you’re going to find yourself drinking again to deal with that dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
You need more than just getting rid of alcohol, you need a more holistic change.
In the worksheet area of this section, we have a worksheet that where we want to rate and score the different areas of your life from 0-10, then pick the categories that are most urgent to address. This will help you to identify the different areas of your life that you are dissatisfied with so that you can put a plan in place to address it. So that even when you stop drinking, you’ll have a satisfying life and will not need to use or drink to suppress the dissatisfaction.