Who Taught you that Drinking Alcohol is Normal?
I spent years questioning my drinking before I thought to question who taught me to drink.
Beliefs are instilled over time.
Drip-fed and absorbed from childhood through adulthood until it’s hard to distinguish between your own beliefs and the ones you were taught to believe.
Growing up, there's wasn't a lot of drinking in my household.
A few times a month my mom would buy MGD and have a couple beers, but I don't remember ever seeing my parents drunk.
In fact, the messages I received were mostly warnings.
That alcohol addiction runs in our family and I should avoid it.
My dad quit drinking when my mom was pregnant with me. I always admired my father for this ability to quit something cold turkey. He also quit smoking when my mom was pregnant with my brother.
I mythologized these stories as examples of my father's strength and never questioned why he would choose to quit in the first place, or how bad things must’ve gotten before he did.
It was only after I quit drinking that I seriously thought about it.
And then I understood.
He also told me about his parents drunk fights after coming home from the bar. About his mother’s death from alcohol. And how when they were cleaning out her place they found the empty bottles hidden everywhere.
I never met her. She died before I was born.
But felt like I knew her.
I felt her presence all the time especially when I would hide my own bottles.
Still, these stories and warnings didn’t dissuade from me believing I’d be immune to addiction. I thought I was smart and special enough to avoid the traps that had befallen my family before me.
My ego was a stubborn bitch and I chose to learn things the hard way for myself.
I’m an Aquarius after all.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
C.G. Jung
Family was the first place where I learned about alcohol, but it wasn’t the only influence on my drinking.
College was a green light to drink. Sneaking drinks in the dorm and pre-funking before every party was routine.
It taught me that a couple of drinks relaxed me and helped me talk to people I was too afraid to speak to before.
I could finally make friends I thought. I could finally be myself.
I was attractive and fun when I was drinking.
My 21-run was a mad dash to down as many drinks as I could between midnight and bar close. I had friends there to usher me into the blackout lifestyle with glee and drag my ass back home when I could barely walk.
The next day I was so hungover I couldn't even enjoy my actual 21st birthday because of how much I drank in just 2 hours the night before.
It was a right of passage I thought.
This is fun I thought.
Getting into my career I learned that drinking after a hard day was a fun treat adults get to do. From there, my drinking habit seemed to grow at the same speed as my career.
I remember going on a ride-along with a wine sales rep when I was working at Coca-Cola and thinking that job looked like so much fun.
So I set my target on joining the wine and spirits industry.
About a year later, I did.
I fully embraced drinking in my life and pulled it even closer to my identity.
This was easy to do working in the industry. The normalization of drinking I experienced over the 10 years I spent there cannot be overstated.
I was never in a sorority or fraternity culture in college, but my industry onboarding experience felt like rushing. It seemed like a social test to see if I could “hang” with my other drinking colleagues.
Oh boy could I.
We bonded over our shared habit and desire to have fun.
It was great for a while.
I made friends.
Something I always wanted.
Day drinking and slinging wine and spirits transitioned into happy hour at the bar “supporting our accounts” and “working on depletions” from the champagne bottle.
The stress increased and so did the drinking.
Drinking alcohol and succeeding at work made it even harder to quit.
On paper I was living the dream. Work hard and play harder.
I really loved the lifestyle until I couldn’t untangle myself from it.
It felt like I was the spider who built the web and the fly trapped in it at the same time.
I had no one to blame for my situation but me.
I was warned, after all.
But it wasn’t just work that reinforced my beliefs about alcohol.
I had a steady supply of Bravo TV content with countless examples of messy drunks in stilettos showing me the way to adult and be a mom. It seemed glamorous and aspirational at the time.
I received messages everywhere reminding me to "wine down" and drink "rosé all day" and that it was "5 o'clock somewhere."
You don't have to look far for encouragement to drink in this culture.
I absorbed it all and used it to justify the normalcy of my behavior.
It paired nicely with an ego that prided itself on how much I could function like a rock star while falling apart inside.
Eventually, drinking wasn’t fun.
It was just a habit to keep the shakes and shame away.
But by then my identify was so entangled with alcohol, I didn't know who I was without it.
I didn't want to know.
Removing alcohol forced me to find out.
It also enabled me to examine the layers of influence that brought me to the bottle in the first place and kept me in a loop of destructive behavior.
Family.
Culture.
Media.
Work.
My own experiences.
Messages absorbed and repeated over time until they felt like me.
The path there is different for everyone who develops a problem with alcohol.
This was my path.
My beliefs about alcohol had been instilled over time.
They could be distilled too.
For me, that process started with getting honest about the experience.
I didn’t develop alcohol beliefs in a vacuum.
I learned through family. I absorbed it through media and culture. I lived my own experiences, and was rewarded or punished by a society that offered alcohol as the acceptable drug to deal with the stress of everything else.
It didn’t feel like an accident. It felt like a program I had been trained to run.
We're told to “drink responsibly” placing ownership for alcohol-related problems on individual consumption.
That messaging is convenient for an industry which relies on the normalization of drinking, while many of the other influences that perpetuate our societal problems with alcohol remain largely unexamined.
As long as the other influences and reinforcement mechanisms stay invisible, the problem stays isolated with individuals and with families who pick up the tab.
Seeing the influences doesn't take away my personal responsibility.
It expands it.
Sobriety has strengthened my ability to respond fully as myself, to question what I absorbed, and to see things more clearly.
If we learned our beliefs about alcohol, then we can unlearn them too.
Alcohol is just the beginning.
Removing it gave me the opportunity to examine why I believed I needed it in the first place.
The truth is I never needed it as much as I believed I did.
What really needed examining were the beliefs I held about who I was.
That's a question I'm still exploring.
What happens when we put down the glass long enough to see what's underneath it?
We might be surprised by what we discover.
Diana Slack, Writer & Founder of Distillness
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