Moderation has no key
I am so tired of the media touting that “moderating” your drinking (fill in addiction here) will help you be healthier. I have NEVER seen this work. It might for a while, but in the end, things always spiral out of control, because let’s face it, if you’re spending THAT much time trying to control consumption, then there is an alcohol abuse problem at the very least. I had several patients in the past that succeeded in controlling their addiction until a major trigger happened. Here’s a story.
Diane (name changed to protect identity) was a single, successful white woman in her early 50’s. She owned her home, had a nice car, and all the nice brand name clothes she could dream of…and her problem started innocently enough. Her office had a culture of going to happy hour several times a week to blow off some steam. As time went on, Diane had her own daily happy hour every evening (the evenings she was not at the bar). On one of these evenings, she decided to go to the grocery store to get a few more ingredients for this new recipe she wanted to try. Little did she know, that despite her thinking she was OK to drive, she had a taillight out and she blew a .14 (over the legal limit of .08) when a cop pulled her over. Diane was taken to jail and processed, getting her first DUI.
Diane felt embarrassed and didn’t know what to do so she stopped drinking for a while. Then came the incessant invitations for happy hour. One couldn’t hurt right? Diane vowed to stick to just 1 drink every time she went out. The last thing she needed was another DUI. Diane decided that she would come up with some other rules too. Only 1 drink per night during the week. No more than 3 drinks per night on the weekends, and absolutely no driving when she started drinking. Diane kept up with these rules diligently for a year and thought she finally accomplished MODERATION. Then her dad died.
At the funeral, she got drunk and continued to drink to black out drunk for the following week she took off from work for her father’s funeral. One night, she ended up at a local bar in her hometown and ran into some friends from high school. Next things she knows, Diane wakes up in her car the following morning, covered in vomit, with no recollection of what happened last night. Diane started to realize that she needed to get some help. She called her insurance company the next day and scheduled an appointment with an outpatient addiction treatment center. She had to do a brief stint at the hospital to safely detox and then she did everything her counselor asked - AA meetings, getting a sponsor, and sharing in group therapy in outpatient treatment. A year later, she was still sober and never felt better. She made new friends through AA and went out with them after work instead of her boozy co=workers.
There is hope…and only you really know if drinking is a “problem” or not, but I would bet that if thinking about it, occupies a lot of your mind, you just may need to at the very least, talk to someone about it (like a counselor or doctor that understands addiction). To this day, Diane is the only person I know that successfully stuck to long-term rules and '“moderated” her habit. It just doesn’t work, in the long run.