If you have become physically addicted to alcohol then the decision most likely to prevent a return to alcoholic levels of drinking is that of committing yourself to complete abstinence in the long term - for life. However, some people who have become physically addicted in the past will manage to control their drinking in the future without a return to previous damaging levels of drinking - these people are in the minority.
Whatever your decision and even if you are not physically addicted but are drinking at damaging levels, I recommend that you should make a commitment to at least six months completely dry following detoxification. Why is this?
Well firstly, statistically, the longer you are abstinent the less likely you are to start drinking again at damaging levels. That's the plain fact - a simple matter of observation by researchers who have observed people who have stopped drinking and have remained dry for up to a number of years. Those who start drinking again shortly after detox has been completed are more likely than those who don't, to relapse to alcoholic levels of drinking.
There are several ways of trying to understand why this occurs.
From the physical point-of-view this is explained by the gradual changes that take place in your brain both before and after you have given up drinking. The brain has a natural tendency to try to keep things stable for you, a natural tendency to adapt and change itself so that you continue to experience things normally despite changes in the world and the environment around you. A brain that has been bathed in alcohol every day for years-on-end slowly develops methods of trying to ward off the effects of this, so that you can continue to function as normally as possible. These methods involve the occurrence of long-term changes to the structure and functioning of the brain which enables it to become less responsive to the effects of alcohol over time - it does this in an attempt to keep everything normal despite the alcohol infusing it. One example of this occurring is the phenomenon of tolerance - whereby more and more alcohol has to be consumed before you get drunk. However, there are many other changes that occur in the brain in response to drinking heavily for a number of years.
When you stop drinking, the brain is unable to get used to this new world free of alcohol in a matter of days - after all its taken it years to adapt to a world full of alcohol, and so its likely to take a long time before it gets used to a world without alcohol. At first, your brain will tell you to carry on drinking because it thinks (incorrectly) this is the best way to keep things stable. Messages from the brain are sent to your consciousness in the form of thoughts and feelings and result in the experience of craving for alcohol. This is the brain's way of trying to make you drink again.
If you continue to resist these cravings and do not relapse to drinking, the brain will slowly start to adapt to this 'new' world without alcohol; over the months it slowly gets used to the fact of the matter that it no longer has to deal with excessive alcohol use, and that the world is quite stable now without it. Slowly, the changes that occurred in its structure and function in the past start to reverse, and as this occurs the experience of craving diminishes in intensity and frequency.
However, if at any time within these early months you drink again, your brain receives urgent messages that it must readjust immediately back to its old state, the one which it became used to for so many years. Because of this, to have just one drink does not relax the craving you have felt, it intensifies it, and having had the one drink you will almost definitely progress to the next and to the next...
Secondly, from the psychological point-of-view the tendency to return to drinking heavily can be understood in terms of habits. To develop the habit of drinking heavily on a regular basis probably took you a matter of years. The person who has their first taste of alcohol at the age of 10 or 11, very rarely continues to drink in increasing quantities from that day on. More usually, the habit of drinking develops over a number of months and years, until it starts to cause problems in all areas of your life. Equally, when you cease drinking, there is a new habit to learn - the habit of staying off alcohol. After one week of detox, there is no way that you will have developed the habit of NOT drinking; but you will easily recall the habit of drinking. After a matter of months, this new habit of not drinking will slowly start to become established. To start drinking before this time will almost definitely re-awaken the old pattern of drinking daily. Thinking about things from this perspective, for the habit of not drinking to become the predominant way of behaving, you will probably have to stay dry for as long as you were drinking heavily - how long were you drinking heavily for? I will wager with you that it has been at least five years. Are you prepared to stay completely abstinent for at least five years?
Thirdly, from a social point-of-view the longer you remain abstinent from drinking, the more likely you are to have replaced your drinking with an increasing number of other activities. If you persevere and choose the right kind of activities for you (something I discuss in Part II), you will eventually start to experience pleasure and satisfaction from these. Equally, other things will improve in time. Relationships may improve, finances may improve and your work situation may improve. None of these things will happen over night - the positive results of a cessation of drinking will only slowly become clear over a matter of months and years. When you have reestablished the social side of your life, the benefits you experience from this will act to protect you from a return to drinking - you are more likely to think twice about what you have to lose, and if your time is full, you will tend to dwell less on the temptation of a return to drinking. Equally, the longer you stay dry the more situations you will have encountered where you have been tempted to drink but have succeeded in not doing so - you will learn from these situations and hopefully will be able to implement the same or improved tactics in the future when faced with a similar situation. Psychologists refer to these learned tactics of avoiding relapse as 'coping skills' - more on this later.
So, in short, the longer you stay dry, the better your chances of avoiding a return to alcoholic levels of drinking.
Next page .. Chapter Three - Question Two
How To Enjoy Life Without Alcohol index
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