Kick the Drink Easily!

by Jason Vale

  Whole nations have suffered from passive drinking, including our own. England taught the world how to play football but was then banned from Europe for years because of the alcohol fuelled behaviour of its supporters. The 1998 World Cup in France erupted in violence by many different nations but mainly England and Germany. Every single person arrested had been drinking. Was this a coincidence? Of course not. Alcohol is an evil drug that removes people’s fear and causes death and destruction. A whole nation is suffering the effects of passive drinking. It cost English footballer Paul Gascoigne his life’s dream, a chance to play in the final of a World Cup, as he didn’t get to play in any of the games because of his drinking. The rest of the team were also the victims – they were being deprived of one of the greatest football talents of all time. It cost football legend, George Best, his life even after he had a liver transplant.

  If you are a non-smoker, you no longer have to suffer the effects of passive smoking at 30,000 feet as smoking is now banned on every major airline. However, even at 30,000 feet you can still be affected by passive drinking. It is now widely referred to as ‘air rage.’ British Airways have even had to incorporate a ‘yellow card’ policy for drunk and disruptive passengers after an air rage incident in 1998. Many passengers were in fear as a passenger went into a drunken rage. During one hour of mid-air mayhem he threatened to kill the pilot and headbutt a passenger, then he smashed a seat and indecently assaulted a stewardess. Staff and passengers had to wrestle him to a seat where he was handcuffed and strapped in by his ankles. Maybe they should have given him a drink to calm him down.

  There are so many people who have been disfigured for life due to passive drinking. I was standing in a pub once when one man accidentally stepped on the foot of another customer. It’s easily done but the next time I saw that man, he was lying outside the pub with his right eye resting on the pavement next to him. The other man had shoved a glass into his face for treading on his toe. The effects of passive smoking can take years to materialise but the effects of passive drinking are often instantaneous.

  Every good night out on alcohol has a happy ending, doesn’t it? When you think about it, you can usually look back at most events where alcohol is involved and laugh about them, can’t you? After all, everybody knows that most nights on alcohol are just a …

  Barrel of Laughs

  I always used to think that alcohol was a bit of a laugh. You can look back and laugh at some of the ridiculous situations that have occurred due to alcohol and, to be fair, some do seem quite funny. But are they? Is this just another way of covering up our stupid and destructive behaviour when drinking alcohol? Well, make up your own mind.

  Alcohol stories tend to involve people making complete fools of themselves which turn into funny stories to be told over and over and over again. Over their drinking years people may only have about half a dozen alcohol stories anyway. The problem is that you hear them repeated again and again. Nearly all drinkers have at least one alcohol story up their sleeves; very rarely do they have more than half a dozen. It doesn’t really occur to drinkers that they have told the same stories for years, that they have drunk alcohol for years and can still only think of a few ‘funny’ alcohol related stories. Actually, they are alcohol bores. I know that I used to do this but then alcohol does destroy brain cells, so maybe I just forgot that I had told the same stories a thousand times before. But were they ever funny in the first place?

  I woke up one morning when I was just seventeen to discover that the night before I had run stark naked through my mother’s house which was full of my friends. I then went out into the middle of the road and tried to spin on my head. This was when break-dancing was all the rage. It was midnight and I was totally starkers. Funny? Well no, not really. I could easily have broken my neck and been confined to a wheelchair for life. Now that really would have made a funny story, wouldn’t it? I have told that story for years with the usual ‘Oh yeah, but guess what I did?’ beginning. The truth is that I didn’t remember a thing as I had a blackout. I have never forgotten the story simply because of the embarrassment that it caused me for years. Nearly, perhaps, as much embarrassment as the poor young man who woke up in the middle of the night to find himself halfway through urinating over his parents feet as they slept in their bed. He was only awoken by his mother’s screams and saw the look of sheer horror on his father’s face. He was just sixteen at the time and ran away from home because of the humiliation. Funny though, isn’t it?

  For years I have told a ‘funny’ story about the night I stole (actually, borrowed for a little while) my uncle’s van and was too drunk to remember that I hadn’t yet learned to drive. I was in first gear all the way home. When I woke up, I remembered what had happened but couldn’t get the van back as I remembered that I couldn’t actually drive. When I looked at the van I could see that the front was smashed up and, as soon as I saw this, I began to experience flashbacks of the drive home. I remembered driving down a hill when a policeman tried to stop me by standing in the middle of the road. I swerved to avoid him and hit a bollard. How I actually managed to get home is still a mystery.

  ‘Do you remember when I was so drunk that I fell asleep on the train and ended up in the middle of nowhere at seven o’clock in the morning with no money, cold and hungover? It took me all day to get home.’ Funny? ‘Do you remember when Peter drove the wrong way down a one way street and was too drunk to realise?’ Funny? ‘Yeah, but what about when Jill vomited in Nick’s lap at that dinner party?’ Hysterical? ‘Yeah, but I’ve got a better one. What about when Tom was handcuffed to a lamp post stark naked and left out in the freezing cold for hours?’ Hilarious?

  There seems to be a real competition amongst drinkers to see who has the funniest alcohol story. I mean, you are just not a drinker until you have at least once forgotten where the toilet was and urinated in some outrageous place or vomited over your spouse’s parents. Or until you have fallen off a balcony and cracked a rib, dropped off to sleep on a bus or train that was meant to take you home and ended up in a field lying face down in a cow pat. What about the time you slept with somebody who you thought was the picture of beauty, only to realise the next morning that you have in fact just slept with the creature from The Hound of the Baskervilles! Ever got the boot from work because you were too hungover to go in, or because one too many at lunch meant fluffing your work or being rude to a colleague or client? Remember the times when you called everyone in your phone book at 3 a.m. in your drunken and lonely state or fell asleep in the middle of having sex? Unless you have done at least one or maybe all of these you are just not a drinker. You see, drinkers try to justify their antics by turning it into a laugh whenever possible.

  It’s funny how drinkers don’t sit around laughing about the arguments, the beatings, the violence, the abuse, etc. Frequently even the stories that were made into jokes were never funny in the first place as all too often there are consequences. The man who slept with the ‘dog’ from The Hound of the Baskervilles suddenly gets a phone call to say she is pregnant. The person who lost their way and ended up in a cow pat suddenly realises they have missed work again and have now lost their job.

  Am I suggesting that I don’t find some of these alcohol stories funny or that I have lost my sense of humour? No. Of course some are funny but seeing somebody trip over is amusing too. I once watched a friend of mine go to look out of a window but, because it was so clean, he put his head straight through the pane of glass. This isn’t really funny but I can’t tell the story with a straight face. (He wasn’t hurt, in case you were wondering.) The point is that alcohol addiction is anything but a barrel of laughs. We laugh at some things that occur as a result of alcohol simply because they are about somebody who is out of control. The stories are simply part of the facade to justify drug taking. No doubt heroin addicts joke about how they once missed a vein and hit an artery. Funny? Or how they were so ‘out of it’ they nearly choked on their own vomit. Funny? The thing about alcohol sto
ries is that they are told by people who can barely recall the event themselves and are simply telling you what happened afterwards or what others have described.

  One of the biggest advantages to being free is the ability to remember everything, every part, every second of this very precious life and always to be in full control with the knowledge that you are seeing everything with a …

  Clear Head

  Of all the joys of being truly free, one of the greatest is having a clear head at all times. When I have good time, I know it’s genuine. I am able to remember the nights out, all of them. I can remember every conversation, every event, every minute of every day. I wake up and feel awake and alive. What a thought. I have found my true confidence and true courage. I no longer wake up wondering what I did the night before. I never ever have a hangover. Let me just emphasise that: I never ever have a hangover!

  I am always refreshed, alert and energised in the morning. I have the genuine choice of fully utilising every single one of the precious days that we have while we are on this planet. I am able to drive my car whenever I want. I now have the freedom to go out every night without the worry of having to exercise control over my drug intake. I can go dancing until the early hours and still feel good the next day. I no longer have to spend my hard-earned money pouring poison down my own throat; a poison that controlled so many aspects of my life. I never have to take alcohol to enjoy or cope with my life. I no longer have to say sorry to people for my outrageous behaviour when I was ‘out of it,’ most of which I could never remember anyway. I suddenly have tremendous amounts of that most precious commodity – time. I never lose time because of the effects of either being on the drug or the mental and physical effects of trying to eliminate it. To me, every day is now as precious as the next. I have more money, much, much better health, more peace of mind, more self-respect, more courage, more confidence and tons more freedom. All of these are the benefits of a life free from alcohol addiction. The biggest gain of all is being mentally and physically free forever.

  Someone in one of my sessions once asked me, ‘If alcohol was free of charge and didn’t do any harm to you or others, would you drink again?’ The answer was without hesitation, ‘No way, never, not in a million years.’ They had to ask again, ‘Did you mishear? I said if alcohol was free of charge and there were no health risks involved, would you drink again?’ Again I repeated, ‘No way, never, not in a million years.’ The reason is because the difference is like night and day. It’s the fact of the daily mental and physical slavery that never really occurs to drinkers. It’s the having to drink in order to enjoy or cope with your life. It’s the having to work your life around the time when can you have the next fix. It’s the very lack of genuine freedom and real choice that never really dawns on drinkers.

  I always said that I chose to drink and I believed that to be true but what genuine choice is there when you have to do something in order to cope or enjoy your life? It is freedom from this dependency that is the greatest gain. Most drinkers delude themselves into thinking that only those that society labels alcoholics have an alcohol dependency and have lost control. My point is that if you have to exercise control, you are dependent and are never really in control anyway. Why would you want to have this constant battle to exercise control over something that does absolutely nothing for you at all? That is why I will never drink again even if alcohol was free.

  In the bad old days, every time I went to a party after a few in the pub, my first thought was not who would be there but to wonder whether there would be any drink left. If there wasn’t, I would not enjoy myself. I couldn’t, not without my drug. Before I spoke to anyone at a social gathering, I would have a drink. On many occasions I would not go out because I knew that I would drink. So I stayed in to avoid the temptation. If I didn’t want to drink, why couldn’t I just go out and not drink? It was because I was not in control and the drug dictated where I went and whether I enjoyed myself. That is dependency.

  No longer to be dependent is one of the best feelings in the world. I relied on a substance that, in real terms, did absolutely nothing for me at all. I just couldn’t see it as I was locked in a world that appeared real. If you see things from the outside it becomes incredibly obvious but if you are locked in a world that you are convinced is real, how will you ever know? The Hollywood actor Jim Carrey starred in a film that fooled his perception too. Let me explain a bit about the anything but …

  Truman Show

  If you haven’t seen this film, I will explain. I’m no Claudia Winkleman but please bear with me. Hollywood created the ultimate soap opera. The difference is that one of the characters in the film, Truman, played by Jim Carrey, has no idea that his whole life is being watched by the rest of the world, twenty-four hours a day. They call it The Truman Show. There are cameras in his house, his car, in fact everywhere he goes. Nothing is real in his world, not even the sea or the sky. All his family members are actors, including his wife. His workplace and home are just part of the biggest film set ever created. It is the ultimate voyeur’s dream, a twenty-four hour live ‘fly on the wall’ insight into someone’s life. It is the most watched television programme of all time and the makers are keen to keep it going for as long as possible. They are making millions out of controlling his existence and, if they manage to keep the illusion going until he dies, he will be none the wiser. Just like a real soap opera, there are scriptwriters planning what should happen next. Truman himself believes that the world he inhabits is real and every decision he makes is of his own choice and doing. Why shouldn’t he? He has no idea that his life is being controlled and his very destiny is in the hands of a scriptwriter.

  However, the makers of The Truman Show didn’t take into account one eventuality. He wants to explore the world. The show is thirty years old and so is Truman. There is a part of him that knows there is more to life than this and he wants to expand his horizons. This is a major problem as there is nowhere to travel and he lives in a world within a world but has no idea of this. The sea only goes so far and eventually hits the edge of the film set but how is Truman to know? The makers of the show do everything in their power to stop him even to the extent that Truman’s father was killed in a fishing accident when he was a boy causing Truman to blame himself and be afraid of water ever since. In fact, his father was, like everybody else, just an actor who is really alive and well. The creator of The Truman Show had to think of something to stop him travelling so killing off his father this way seemed like a good plot device.

  The next option for Truman was plane travel. However, when he went to the travel agents there were pictures of planes crashing to deter him. His actress wife is constantly telling him not to go travelling but to start a family. To cut a long story short, several events happen to make him sense that something is not quite all it seems in his world. He finally decides to cross the sea by boat, as there is just no other alternative. The director panics and creates a storm (literally) where Truman nearly dies. They cannot let him leave or let him die on live television. In the end his boat ends up hitting the sky which, after all, is just a large piece of heavy canvas. At this moment his perception begins to change. He climbs out of the boat and puts his hand on the sky. He then finds some stairs leading to a door in the middle of the sky. He opens it and realises he has discovered a whole new world he never knew existed. However, there is still fear.

  Truman had only known his world and did not know what was out there. The illusions had been removed but there was a voice telling him that there was nothing out there that was not already here. The voice was that of the creator of the show making one last attempt to save his precious programme. Although Truman felt a little fearful, what was his alternative? Stay in a world where everything is false for the rest of his life? What kind of life is that? There really was no decision to make so he thought for a second and then, in a truly confident manner, he voiced his catchphrase, ‘Farewell and if I don’t see ya again, good afternoon, good evening and
goooodnight!’

  His life and destiny changed at that point and he became his own scriptwriter. For thirty long years everything he had believed was false. Just because he had firmly believed it to be real, did not make it so. Everyone on the outside knew it was all false but to one person in this artificial world it appeared very real. When the creator of the show is asked in an interview afterwards why he thought it took Truman so long to realise what was really happening, he replies, ‘We accept the world with which we are presented.’ How true is that?

  For many years I firmly believed that everything alcohol appeared to do was real. I thought that it was all true. However, I was simply deceived but I was not the only one. I was accepting a world which I was being presented. In the film, Truman was the only person who was being deceived and controlled. He was just one person who was suffering from a delusion. When it comes to alcohol, there are millions being deluded around the world. I realised when I escaped that there is a whole new world out there. If you were Truman (let’s say that you were not the only one being fooled but your whole family was being deluded), would you just watch from the outside once you discovered this whole new world, or would you do everything in your power to make everyone see that they also could be set free? You would want to do everything in your power to help them realise that they were deluded and trapped, wouldn’t you? That is exactly how I feel. I can see it so clearly now and this book is about helping you to see something that is obvious when you look beyond the accepted perception.