I didn’t understand why I believed all these things so deeply when I knew they didn’t use to be true. I barely drank in college and it was one of the most enjoyable times of my life.” - Was this how The Naked Mind came to pass? Exactly. This Naked Mind came about because I had been trying to stop or moderate my drinking and I could do it for a period of time, but it always came with a huge sense of deprivation or missing out. So, then I would drink again and it would create this cycle of making and breaking promises to myself. This created so much internal pain for me. The internal pain quickly turned into self-loathing. And that self-loathing turned in to me drinking even more. In my experience, it was when I decided to try to stop drinking as much that the cycle kicked in and then I was drinking more than ever before. So, there was a moment in 2013 when I decided I was going to look at things in a completely different way. Instead of asking what was wrong with me and whether I was an alcoholic, I decided to ask why I used to be able to take it or leave it and now it felt like drinking was the duct tape that was holding everything together and why even a day alcohol-free made me feel sad and miserable. So, I stopped trying to stop drinking. I let myself drink as much as I wanted, but I set out on a quest to do two things. One was to find the answer to the question ‘why?’ and two was to have self-compassion. And through those things, about a year later, I remember walking out of my office and telling my husband that I didn’t think I was ever going to drink again and that if he wanted to get drunk with me, tonight is the night.
So, we shared a bottle of wine, got drunk, and that was it for me. I think that the interesting thing about my experience was that it was through really learning everything about what alcohol is and what it does to the body biologically, neuro-chemically, and emotionally that I completely lost the want and desire for a drink. And the thing about want and desire is that it is actually really easy to stop doing something you no longer want to do. So, it was just very easy for me. And all that research became the book, This Naked Mind. You describe the book as reprogramming your unconscious, using Liminal Thinking, and allowing you to break free from alcohol, through the deconstruction of that thinking. Tell me about how alcohol changes us mentally. And how that provides freedom? It changes us mentally in so many ways. It robs us of our ability to feel joy at the moment. It creates a constant internal withdrawal if we are regular drinkers. Meaning that if we are always experiencing withdrawal from the last drink, that feels very uncomfortable. And then the next drink provides relief, so we perceive that relief as though the drink is providing a good experience. But it is really just scratching an itch that the drink created in the first place. The irony is that it doesn’t feel good to scratch if you aren’t itchy. So, alcohol only feels good because of the discomfort it created. And it robs us of the ability to feel our senses. And our senses are the ways in which we experience the entire world.
HOLA SOBER | MADRID
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