Alcohol-Free 3 Years — He Didn't See the Danger

First, three years, brilliant, right? You've done so much good in your life, just not having alcohol in your system.

And that's a great win, right? Not only in terms of the physical health, and mental benefits, many of those are also there because the habit is gone.

You know, the changes in your life because you've changed that identity.

You've either radically changed the alcohol identity or you've got rid of it altogether.

And hopefully you've got rid of it altogether.

And one of the biggest parts of my job is to look at the stories that are underlying, whether it's in the short term that people find it very difficult to stop drinking alcohol, why they find it difficult, what they're saying to themselves, but also in the long term, especially when you get into the long term.

I think those stories that you're telling yourself can really affect how you move forwards, how you think, how you do things, the direction that you're taking.

And a lot of the times it's the stories that you are telling yourself internally that you're not telling me about, but it's the words that you use, the phrases that you use that can be a big hint to the kind of thinking that is going on underneath the surface.

So I think this comment was a really good one in order to highlight three different things that I think a lot of people think about themselves when they stop drinking alcohol.

The first one was the word sacrificed.

Sacrifice assumes that the friendships were the price of stopping, that in some way you had to deliberately sacrifice the friendships in order to stop drinking alcohol, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to do that, right? You know, this is a choice that everyone has to make.

You either stop drinking or you don't.

And it's a choice that you can only do on your own, right? You're the only one who can not put the alcohol into your mouth or who can continue to put the alcohol into your mouth, right? So I'd like to give you one alternative.

There's a lot of different alternatives, but an alternative reading of this is that these weren't friendships.

They were drinking arrangements.

And what ended them was the removal of the only thing that was holding them together, right? The booze, the bar, the habit, all of that stuff.

It's the same facts, but a very different way of looking at things.