A couple years into examining my relationship with alcohol and I wonder if I just should have just done the Annie Grace 30 day thing :)
By the end of the summer I would have said I reached a perfect balance of booze in my life: a few social drinks on vacation, the occasional margarita on deck with my husband while my kids watched a movie and that was about it. I was going weeks at a time without a drink and without thinking of a drink.
As the cold weather sets in my muscle and joint pain has gotten worse and voila! I find myself wanting a drink before bed. The pain reducing/muscle relaxing/deadening of a drink becomes much more desirable when I hurt more.
This is the start of my third winter of really being conscious of my intake, and it is the first time I've drawn the connection between pain and wanting a drink (I think because I've finally accepted that my pain is chronic and not something that will just get fixed if they could just DX something). Anyways, just thought it was interesting and worth mentioning in case anyone else finds it useful.
Congrats to everyone who has gone so long!!!
As someone who specializes in treating chronic pain, this is the toughest hurdle I needed to get patients over. Answers don't equal relief. If anything l, getting answers tends to correlate with getting worse, because when things get worse, that can sometimes reveal the pattern that couldn't be seen before.
Alcohol as a painkiller though is a dangerous approach because it 100% worsens the pain overall.
I can't remember whether it was Allen Carr or Annie Grace who gave this analogy, but they said drinking was like having a rash and applying an ointment that have instant relief from the rash, but when the relief wore off, the rash was even worse. So the more you use the ointment, the worse the rash gets over time, but the more you feel the urgent need for the relief of the ointment.
Eventually you're overwhelmed by this horrific, itchy, painful rash all over your body and feeling the need nightly to slather yourself in tubes of the ointment just to get to sleep.
But you're convinced that the ointment is helping you because when you apply it, it makes the rash that it worsened feel a lot better.
Here's a fun fact as well:
If your brain identifies pain as a reliable trigger to get you to drink, your brain will actually amplify your perception of that pain, and lower your capacity to tolerate it so that you will be more likely to drink.
Remember, if your brain wants alcohol, it will gaslight the fuck out of you to make you think that *you* want alcohol.
