Amber Hollingsworth addresses the conflict between wanting to quit drinking and fearing what you'll lose. She suggests a weighted pros-and-cons exercise: list reasons for and against drinking, rate each 1-10, and sum them up. Most people find the reasons to keep drinking weigh less than they thought.
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So part of you wants to stop drinking, but there's another part of you that really doesn't. You've probably spent way too much time trying to figure out which part is the real you. That inner conflict you're feeling, it's got a fancy name. It's called ambivalence, and that's just fancy for mixed feelings. So that means both sides are the real you. Like, for example, the part of you that wants to stop is probably thinking something like, I'm tired of waking up feeling like this. I keep promising myself I'll cut back, but it never lasts. I don't even enjoy it anymore. My drinking or using is hurting the people around me. I'm not who I want to be right now. But then there's that other part that doesn't want to stop. And it might be thinking thoughts like, will life just suck and be totally boring without it? It's the only thing that shuts my brain off. If I quit, people are going to ask questions and that's awkward. What if I can't? What if I try and fail again? I'm not ready to give up the one thing that's mine. You may have actually already taken some steps like talking to someone who's in recovery or gone to a meeting, or you heard someone else share their story. But instead of feeling inspired, you walked away thinking, I'm not that bad. They lost everything. I'm still working. They drank a fifth a day and I don't even drink like that. Their family left them. And so you see someone else's rock bottom as proof that you don't have a problem. But I want you to notice what's happening here. You didn't measure yourself against your best self. You measured yourself against someone else's worst. And that gap in between, the I'm not as bad as them gap, is exactly what keeps people stuck for years. They go around and around trying to figure out, am I an alcoholic? Am I a real alcoholic? And most of the time, the reason we're asking ourselves that is because in our minds, if we're not a real alcoholic, then we don't have to quit completely. We can probably just cut it back. But that's really the wrong question. Instead, you should be asking yourself, is this serving me? And hey, maybe it used to. So maybe we should say, is this serving me now? Right? Because it changes over time. There's no judgment here. And there's another part of you that doesn't want to stop. The substance is doing something for you. Maybe it's turning down the volume on anxiety. Maybe it's the only way you know how to sleep. Maybe it's how you connect with people or how you disconnect from them. Maybe it's the only 30 minutes of the day where you feel like yourself. I'm not telling you those reasons are good enough to keep drinking, but I am saying that they're real. And until you acknowledge them, you're going to keep fighting with yourself. It's all about figuring out what alcohol was solving and finding a more productive way to solve that problem because it's not the substance isn't helpful at all. It does help in some ways, but it's just not a very effective way to solve the problem because it tends to make a lot more problems in the background. Now let's talk a little bit more about the, am I a real alcoholic thing? Because I'm constantly hearing this, you know, the, I still have my job. I've never had a DUI or my family doesn't even know half the time. That line of thinking, that constant measuring yourself against some amount imaginary worse version of you, it's not good logic. It's your brain trying to convince you that it's okay to keep going. But if you're watching this video, it means you've typed something into the search bar that led you here. And that's probably a sign. You don't have to lose your marriage, your health, your career to decide that's enough. The question was never, am I a real alcoholic? The question is, is this working for me? Does this serve me? And if you're struggling with the idea of talking to someone else about it, those mixed feelings are totally normal. And it's normal to struggle with whether or not you want to talk to someone about it because sometimes you're not sure you want to stop. So you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're going to be pushed to do something that you're not ready to do. A lot of people actually use Amber AI. This is where a tool like Amber AI comes in handy. Now, Amber AI is different from just a regular AI because it's built specifically around addiction and recovery. It's not going to give you generic advice. It actually understands the push and pull that you're feeling right now. Plus, it's private, it's available anytime, and there's no pressure to have any anything figured out before you show up. Sometimes you just need a place to weigh things out without it becoming a whole big thing. I actually have clients that tell me that they tell Amber AI things that they don't tell me because they don't have any worry about judgment and they know they can change their mind anytime they want to. Now, the link to Amber AI is in the description if you're curious about that. Now, I want to give you something concrete to do to help you sort this out. Not drink more water or try meditating. Something that will actually cut through all the noise. I want you to do a pros and cons list, but not a regular one. I want you to put a number from 1 to 10 to weigh every item because not every pro and con has the same weight. So get a piece of paper out and on one side, write down every reason why you want to stop. And then on the other side, write down every reason why you don't want to. And then this is the part that matters. Next to each item, I want you to write a number from 1 to 10. How much does this actually matter to you? For example, I want to stop because I'm scared about my health. Maybe that's a 9. Or I don't want to stop because I like drinking with my friends on the weekend. Maybe that's a 4. When you add up the weight on each side, you stop arguing with your feelings. It's just a little harder to argue with math, right? Because we're going to add those up. Now, when most people do this exercise, they're kind of surprised by what they find out because the part of you that wants to keep drinking is usually a lot louder than it is actually heavy when you weigh that column down, when you add those numbers up. So if you're in that not sure place, I hope this gives you something to really hold onto, a different way to think about it. You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to be ready. You just have to get honest with yourself. And if you want More support on this issue, whether it's coaching or Amber AI or a community, you can check out our website, which is familyrecoveryacademy.online. There are tons of resources there, even a ton of free resources that'll help you sort through this thing for yourself. And if this video helped you, then hit subscribe or share it with someone. Those are things that send YouTube a signal that this video is helpful, and then they'll show it to more people because there are a lot more people out there who are exactly where you are, and they think that they're all alone. They think that they're strange and there's something wrong. But there's not. I'll see you guys in the next one.
