I have a drinking problem. It's not the alcohol per se: I don't fall down in a drunken stupor. It's more the behaviour the drinking leads to: my guilty secrets involve the "ch" words.
It goes like this: start with champagne (preferably French), stuff face with chips (any variety), continue onto cheese (only the gooey stuff), end with chocolate (not fussy/most likely the brand that's on special at the local servo on the way home from social event). If like Alcoholics Anonymous, there were a "ch" words Anonymous – "CH A" – I would be its poster child.
I came face to face with these bad habits a few weeks back, when after a difficult day at work I turned on the television and went to pour a glass of wine. Fortunately, the former prevented me from doing the latter as Ask the Doctor was on the ABC. It was the episode about alcohol, and the takeaway message was that the only people who get a health benefit from wine are those stomping on the grapes to make it.
Which made me think about my own habitual responses to stress, and the broader issue of our nation's relationship with alcohol. From the Rum Rebellion through to the lockout laws, we have had a rocky relationship with grog.
A sobering statistic to contemplate came last month from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Studies. In 2015-2016 134,000 Australians sought treatment for alcohol dependency: that's an 11 per cent increase on two years earlier; and that's only those seeking help – it doesn't touch on those living in denial.
Binge drinking – a classic response to stress – is almost as Australian as Vegemite. It wasn't an issue for me when I worked in the wine industry in California because my response to stress there more likely involved yoga, meditation or mindfulness. It wasn't an issue either when I worked in France, where alcohol was served in the staff canteen, consumed always with food – including a cheese plate – but you only got one crack at it: no binge cheesing there and never any chips as entree.
I started to think about stress and my responses to it, Sydneysider single mother that I am, which lead me back to one of my favourite books Man's Search for Meaning by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. This Austrian Jew lost his wife, parents and brother in concentration camps in World War II. His premise is that it is not what happens to you in life, it's how you respond.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space," he wrote. "In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Frankl, a neurologist and psychotherapist, was a pioneer of logotherapy – a belief that human nature is motivated by a search for meaning. Before the war he worked in Austria's "suicide pavilions" which treated thousands of patients with suicidal tendencies. He found co-dependency and habitual behaviours often presented in people who felt their life had no meaning; and aggression, depression and addiction often filled that abyss. He wrote a book on it but the manuscript was confiscated when he went to Auschwitz. In the camp, he rewrote it in his head and on bits of scrap paper – not just based on his research but his own life experience.
His book taught me even suffering can have meaning but you won't find it at the bottom of a bottle or any empty chip packet. So why do I sometimes go there? I've come to see addiction to anything self-destructive – but especially alcohol – as a form of slow suicide. It's the opposite of having a life-threatening illness – where there is a will to live – or knowing the real suffering inside a place like a concentration camp.
I'm reminded of my experience with group therapy. During my husband's decade-long battle with cancer, we caregivers would be in a room – wringing our hands with worry about our dying loved ones; while next door those like my husband, facing up to their frailties because of their terminal illnesses, were often laughing loudly. There was meaning in almost every moment – because they didn't know how many more they would have.
I saw this again after my husband's death, when I became a hospice volunteer, going into the homes of dying people. So often addictive behaviours fell away in the face of death; for both the dying and their loved ones. Sometimes it was the first chance they had to live authentically; because facing up to your fears – whatever they are – never hurts as much as you think it will. In my experience it hurts less than a hangover or getting on the scales when you've over indulged.
Which leads me to Dry July – where you can sponsor someone to stop drinking for a month and raise money for cancer research. It is essentially a form of group therapy for those brave souls contemplating that space between stress stimulus and response. I'm trying these days to think before I drink. Hope you are too.
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