Up until a couple of years ago, I was very attached to my habit of nightly glasses of wine with my husband. It dawned on me one day that I was asking those glasses of wine to do a lot for me. To entertain, to relax, to unwind to help manage uncomfortable feelings like many, many people in this world.
One day I decided to change my relationship with wine. So the first thing I did was take a four-day break from it. I wanted to get perspective. That break was more than two years ago now. What I committed to is not drinking wine to manage feeling either to celebrate or commiserate and then I just came to not want to have any wine.
I recently traveled to my childhood home. The home that I grew up in with two alcoholic parents, with a huge wine cellar. I was there to help my Mum who is in rehab recovering or maybe not from Congestive heart failure. I noticed that I was feeling overwhelmed with uncomfortable emotions. Grief, loneliness, memories from days gone by and so much more. my brain said, “Hmm, a glass of wine would be nice wouldn’t it”? Sitting on my bed in the bedroom that I shared with my baby sister I was kind of surprised. My next thought was ” We don’t drink wine anymore I know this is hard but we handle icky emotions another way. And I called my daughter and cried and settled into Season 2 of Fireside lane.
The point is our brains offer up all kinds of suggestions. Kind of like when we are clothes shopping. How about this you might say, or what about that skirt, not this shirt. But we get to choose, don’t we? If we get to choose our clothes we sure get to choose which thoughts serve us and which thoughts do not. In my case, I really don’t want to drink wine from a place of numbing. So I get to choose how I will handle the thoughts that suggest it.
This is how the work of change works. it really, really works.
I hope as always this has served anyone who needs to hear this today.