The Dark Side of Social Drinking – Jekyll and Hyde

According to Jen…….

Drinking to put it simply is a topic and a phenomenon that has intrigued me for years. Social drinking is everywhere you turn and most adult interactions seem to involve the need to have a drink or share a drink.  Growing up in a household where drinking was an ‘issue’ taught me from a young age that consuming alcohol equalled ‘being unpredictable’.  This ‘unpredictable’ behaviour was also experienced regularly as I became an adult, in and around family circles. Sometimes those around me who were drinking alcohol would seem to have fun, laugh and their company was joyous and funny.  Then there were other times where it was fraught with fighting, crying, hostility and unmanageable behaviour.

As a therapist, I am acutely aware of how the consumption of alcohol is still very much the topic of conversation within relationships and I still see and hear the dynamics that drinking brings within a family, within a couple and the impact that it has on children. For the purpose of this blog I am not talking about alcoholism or alcohol dependence, I am talking about the dark side of social drinking.

For a long time, I didn’t really understand why I didn’t really like drinking. I never seemed to morph into one of those teenagers that thought it was cool to drink and when I met my husband this trait continued and I was happy being the designated driver. I was often challenged over the years about why I didn’t drink, but these comments seemed (to me) that my choice not to drink was more of an issue for other people than for me. For some reason not drinking implied that I was antisocial or unable to relax or unable to have fun. It just seemed to be the Australian way.  BBQ’s, dinners, gatherings and even catch up with girlfriends included some element of alcohol.  Now let’s not sugar coat things, I have had drinks and I do enjoy a drink at times but it was never part of who I was. I didn’t want or need the vice of alcohol to relax or feel part of some social norm – and it be frank it scared me to think that I could become one of ‘those’ people that needed alcohol as soon as I walked in the door from work.

After years of soul searching, researching, working with couples and conversations with my supervisor (my mentor), I was able to see that social drinking affects people in different ways. As a constant bystander to years of ‘social drinking’ that went wrong, I became hypervigilant to any drinking and was in a constant state of “oh god what is going to happen?”

So it is with that understanding that I actually get it. I understand now why sometimes it feels okay to drink socially or be with someone drinking socially and sometimes it just isn’t. The process in moving forward and understanding this was also about being comfortable enough to sit with this curiosity, sit with these feelings and emotions and name the real issue – alcohol can still be an issue when it is under the guise of ‘social drinking’. This is especially true when this has happened to you one too many times.

When people drink, they are often unaware of the hurtful things they do and say. They are unaware of how their actions and statements impact on and sit with people. They are unaware of how their unpredictable behaviour profoundly impacts on their relationships with others, their relationships with their loved ones and on the developing brain of children. Often people who consume alcohol lose control of their impulses and forget the hurt they leave behind.  Trust is broken and relationships change.  Social drinking becomes a hidden subject because it doesn’t quite meet the threshold of alcohol addiction, but the bystanders, partners and children live with this uncertainty on a daily or weekly basis. Children learn to listen to the sounds of the wine being poured or the beer being opened, partners watch as their loved one walks through the door with yet another carton of beer and years of previous hurt flood to the forefront of your mind. The innocent bystander is caught in yet another roller coaster of uncertainty involving drinking.

I am not anti-drinking at all. I appreciate that social drinking can be fun and can involve laughter and great times. However, there is a dark side of drinking socially that contributes to the roller coaster of unpredictability and broken trust. Drinking is becoming an increasing issue within everyday homes and is affecting relationships.

Consider the following:

  • If you need alcohol in order to relax or have a good time, then there may be underlying layers that need to be explored.
  • If your partner comments on your drinking and how much you are consuming, are you listening to their concerns? What are they really trying to tell you?
  • Are your children counting your beer bottles or making comments about your drinking and changes in your behaviour?
  • Are you finding instances where you don’t remember what you did or said, but your loved ones are the ones standing by watching and remembering these events?
  • Are you Jekyll and Hyde when you are drinking? Do you change?  Does your personality alter?
  • Do you like the person you are when you are drinking? Is pretending easier than your reality?

 

The dark side of social drinking is destroying relationships every day. Consider doing something about it before everything you once loved and cherish no longer tolerate the Jekyll and Hyde.

 

Affirmation: Self awareness doesn’t stop you from making mistakes, it allows you to learn from them.

– Jen

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The Past is the Past – What a CROCK!!!!

According to Jen

God if I had a dollar for every time I heard this statement, I would be a freakin millionaire!!!!!

The fact remains that our past shapes us. Our past life experiences shape our brains – the engine of our body and our sense of self. Our past shapes our personality and helps shapes our future. To say to someone that they should “stop living in the past” is dismissive and hurtful. Like it or not, the past exists. What needs to happen to accept the past is to acknowledge that it exists. A person’s past just is……

As a therapist it is not my style to ask someone to lay on my couch and start talking about their childhood issues from when they were three years old (don’t get me wrong, for some people this therapy is needed and warranted). Whilst the foundation of my practice is based on attachment based therapy, my style is more about helping people to understand that you, me, your loved ones, colleagues and friends all come with TRIGGERS. These triggers sit in the big fat memory banks in our brains and they rear their ugly heads when we feel uncomfortable or are triggered by past memories. Our past exists, but there is a fine line between living in the past and acknowledging your past.

Having coffee with a friend the other week, she was talking about how her step mother-in-law was critiquing the adult children in her life with comments such as “these kids keep living in the past. They need to get over it and move on, stop living in the past and stop blaming their father”.   Whilst I nod and sit with this ‘listening moment’, my brain is on overdrive with thoughts that such comments by people are narrow minded and simplistic, because it really isn’t that easy. Halt the judgement people…… it is true. It takes many variables to fall into place before one can process what they need to. Simply telling someone to get over it won’t work!

Some ways to process could be:

  • Start talking about your past (consider your audience though. Not everyone in your trusted circle can hold your feelings or even know what to do with them).
  • Acknowledge that your past exists and that you have feelings (validation is key here).
  • Realise that you, me, the man next door, the woman at the shop, we all have triggers. Learn what they are and then take control of them. Some triggers will never go away, but you can become more aware of them and thus able to control them or just accept them.
  • Understand that you can’t change your past but you can make decisions about learning from it, becoming stronger and finding strength in it. (For example, consider the following statement – “I never felt like my step father excepted me”. This could be modified into, “I learnt from my experience what kind of father I wanted to be”).
  • Try and focus on the notion that the past is not your destiny. Your past does not have to define you. It exists, but it doesn’t have to define you.
  • Remember that everyone has a story.
  • If you are held back by past events or stories, think about the language and thoughts you attribute to it. What is your recollection of these events and what is the meaning that you give to it? Are you emotionally stuck? Do you replay the stories in your head? Thoughts trigger feelings and feelings trigger behaviour.

 

Perhaps the comment to the old step mother- in-law should have been, “sounds like the adult children haven’t been heard or validated about how they are feeling”. There is a lot to be said in just listening.

Simply telling someone to “let go” or “that was so long ago” is unfair, unempathetic and simply not okay. A lot of people out there seem to go to counsellors, read a book or attend self-help seminars and think they have the answers. It seems so easy to say ‘just to let it go’ or ‘let’s wake up and feel like a whole new you’. Or other comments that make me cringe include, ‘you need to make a choice’ and here’s another ‘you are choosing to stay in this position’. Well this is all good in theory, but unfortunately feelings, behaviours and the transmitters in your subconscious mind didn’t get that memo and it is tricky to be told how to feel or how to be. It is all a process and if challenged gently and in a supportive way, then yes people’s past can be something that becomes part of who they are, not all of who they are.

 

The past is the past – when it is processed properly. Triggers exist and that is okay……. but the past is not your destiny.

 

 

Affirmation – “the kindest thing you can do for someone else is listen without forming an opinion”

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The Hollywood Movie

Some years ago my life went through a real transition. Everything changed for me as a person. And although I am going to share with you some of my story, my goal in sharing is not about pity or wanting to be victim. It is about how sharing how going through adversity isn’t the end and that through adversity you can become stronger, you can see things clearer, you can learn and you can be more mindful.

I called this blog a ‘Hollywood Movie’ because when I finally shared my story with a friend one day, she said “OMG that shit just sounds like a Hollywood Movie”. She was right, but it wasn’t a movie it was my life and a struggle we had to go through to get to the other side. And I probably need to point out that I have worked hard at processing all this stuff but I am very mindful of my sensitivities and triggers to some things. Yes, my past does rear its ugly head sometimes.

So in the space of two years the following happened:

  • In our quest to have another baby, I suffered five miscarriages. Absolutely devastating for me as a woman. I hardly spoke about it and after every procedure or loss, I got up the next day and went back to work. I suffered alone mostly and didn’t really talk to other people about how I felt. The inability to control my fertility and our desire to have another baby when we couldn’t, was just awful.
  • We finally fell pregnant, the pregnancy was very tricky and I had a premature baby. Okay, we hear that people have premmie babies all the time but no one prepared me as to how hard this road would be and the emotional toll it would take on me and our family. For the first two years of our daughters’ life she was in and out of hospital due to breathing issues and viruses and there were days on end that I wouldn’t sleep because I felt I needed to watch over her so she could breathe. There were days I wouldn’t sleep at all and then get ready to go to work the next day and would pay someone else to watch her.
  • We had previously bought an investment property as we were so keen to ‘be smart’ with our money and plan for the future. That plan didn’t go to plan as we hadn’t thought of variables such as having a sick infant. So as the financial pressure built up within our household and I was having so much time off on parental leave, I pushed my husband into selling the investment property. It had made a significant equity and my thought was that it would ease financial pressure. Oh how wrong I was……… The property had a fixed interest rate and although the house sold within a week, I wasn’t aware that I had to pay the bank back the fixed rate. So we sold the property and gave the bank $80,000 and walked away with stuff all. Lesson learnt – not a good idea to sell the investment property without advice. The financial pressure did not ease and my husband was definitely not happy.
  • A close family member with a significant mental illness decided that I was the target of their rage. And despite my genuine attempts to help and support, I became the physical punching bag and emotional punching bag. Police and solicitors and psychiatrists were involved and it was messy! Having been physically attacked several times was pretty scary, but I never talked about it and kept going. I went to work every day and covered the bruises as best I could.
  • My parents got divorced and that was really messy. I fought with my siblings and became passionate about my own views and values as I wanted them to be more involved than they were, in supporting our parents. That quest didn’t work. And as a therapist, some people leaned on me more than others and I felt it was my role to support them and hold their feelings.
  • My husband’s parents got divorced too. And that was messy. Years of tensions built up and different family members took sides. We also fought with the family and my husband’s siblings. There was conflict all around us. We were so angry at everyone that it was hard to see the forest through the trees. My therapy skills were not so helpful during this phase as emotions take over and it is difficult to be impartial.
  • My husband had a work accident and required months of physical rehabilitation and then was made redundant. Talk about stressful. No job and no income and no one wanted to hire him cause he had been on work cover. He did eventually get work, but the weeks in between seemed to go on forever and the financial emotional stress was definitely taking its toll.
  • Then the big one……. a client at work tried to kill me and then threatened to kill my children. Yes, sad and confronting but true. I can’t say too much about it for legal reasons, but this event single handedly changed my life. Police and detectives and politicians and commissioners were all involved. It was a long process to go through the court system and get a crash course in how the system works. What I didn’t know was the lack of empathy and lack of understanding that those around me had about our situation (not entirely their fault though as I always greeted everyone with a smile and put one foot in front of the other). They never talk about it in movies, but the effect that this kind of thing has on you mentally and physically is underestimated and rarely talked about.   But in my true fashion, I waited for the dust to settle and in a few short weeks I went back to work. I kept saying to myself ‘I need to get back on the horse’. So the days began again working 8-5pm five days a week. No one ever asked me how I was doing (I sometimes think people don’t know what to say or aren’t able to handle what you say) and with all the family drama that was in the background, no one really understood what I was going though personally. My husband was angry at what happened to me and his perceived inability to protect his family. I was trying to support him and I cried in silence.
  • Then a few weeks after going back to work, I get a phone call from my son’s school. They were having issues with his behaviour and he was apparently very emotional and teary (out of character for him). So I went to the school with the notion in my head that someone must be picking on him or hurting him in some way (definitely not my finest moment in reflection). I sat with my son in his teacher’s room and I asked him what was happening and why he was so sad. His words have stuck with me forever and it was a defining moment that changed everything……………. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “You look so sad mummy. I know that you nearly died and everything, and I would have missed you if you had of died. But I would have always remembered you as the mum that was always working” (I can’t even type that statement without crying). I began to sob, I hugged him and told him I was sorry and I promised that things would change. I promised him I would be more present and I would be a better mum.

What all this taught me was that although I felt I had to be strong and stay focussed for the family, my children had suffered too. I was so busy wrapped up in the business of my life, sweeping shit under the carpet and trying to move forward that I forgot that the children would have felt these tensions too. My whole family went through all this stuff in two years. Nothing by drama and stress. I didn’t need to be strong, I needed to show them that it was okay to cry and okay to have bad days. I needed to give them space to talk and share how they were feeling. And now more than ever I was determined to teach them that adversity doesn’t last forever.

So I made a decision to change everything. I found a therapist and I talked and talked and talked (okay I mostly cried). I had spent so long bottling all this up inside that I was hurting those around me that I loved the most. I was so focused on working and setting up our future that I forgot to live in the now and appreciate what I had and how lucky I was. I was actually very good at helping other people, but I forgot about the people I came home to every day.

Despite everything that happened and everything I felt I had endured, I became a better mum, a better wife, a better friend, a better sister and a better therapist. I grew to like and accept the new mindful me and I am okay with my past, my life and who I am. I began to see the world differently and I understood empathy at a deeper level. I changed my work hours, I changed the way I thought about things and spent more time with my children. I don’t regret my past because it taught me so much. I became stronger, more resilient and more focussed on what was important. There were times when I got angry and felt that the world was unfair, I remember thinking that I must have pissed someone off in my past life because I felt like I was being punished. But the skill was to focus on changing my language and thoughts about my past….. I could either get angry and think about ‘poor me’ or I could learn from it and change the language when I talked about it or thought it. By changing my language about these events, I was able to change the way I felt about it and thus change the way I behaved about it all. It was process……. And that is my favourite word (so my clients tell me). Everything about change takes time. Yes, you can decide to make changes, but to truly feel it and embrace it takes time. It is a process. A process worth going through.

– Jen

 

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Emotions – When you will get hit with the emotion stick!

‘Emotions’ is a topic that I remember was challenging for me as I approached by thirties. But now, I hear it and see it all the time and often this little bird pops in my brain and says, ‘oh yes I remember feeling this too and I have some understanding of exactly what you are saying’.

Looking back in my teens and twenties, I remember thinking that getting older meant a degree in ‘craziness’. There used to be all these older people around me with big feelings of anger, sadness and trauma and it used to make no sense to me at all as to why people struggled to deal with their emotions. Such intense feelings and people’s inability to cope with them often fascinated me and I used to think ‘that will never be me’ or ‘god shoot me now if I become like that’. And then it happened….. I hit late twenties, early thirties and it felt like I got hit with an “emotion stick”. I began to experience huge feelings and didn’t feel like I had the tools to manage them at times. And then as I watched and paid more attention, it was happening to all my friends around us, all my friends’ friend’s and my clients and I could see similar patterns emerging everywhere. After time I was able to recognise that having emotions is okay and that we all need to go through them to make it to the other side … whatever that looks like for you.

So with these with these big emotions comes another big word – REFLECTION. Some people have it and some people don’t. Some people can continue to grow, reflect, learn, challenge themselves and embrace mistakes and other people just can’t. Some people I have met can’t change at all. They have no reflective capacity, can’t deal with big emotions and stay stale (there are labelled and diagnosed mental health conditions that make it impossible for people to have reflection, but there are also people who just choose not to as well).

I have often thought my degree has saved me in some ways. When my big emotions came, they came like a tornado and everyone in my way had to watch out! I wonder whether I would have been carted off to the looney bin if I hadn’t have worked in the social welfare field??? Hmmmmm. I am sure my husband thought so many, many, many times. I have learnt that emotions aren’t there to be feared. As human beings it is really okay to have different emotions at different times and it is really okay to own it, label it and accept it. We have many emotions but is the feelings of guilt, anger, sadness and frustration that people seem to struggle with the most (makes sense, cause we all tend to be pretty good in dealing with joy and happiness). To be brutally honest I have learnt a lot from working with people. Their raw emotions and big intense feelings, how they deal with them and how some can move forward and how some are simply just stuck.

The thirty something years is an interesting stage and by pure default brings many emotions and life stages. In your teens, you focus on self, friends, experimenting with love and lust and finishing school. In your twenties many people have a partner, a career path, often people get married, perhaps buy your first house and even have children. Then comes your thirties and the word….. wait for it….. REFLECTION. Many start looking at their lives and thinking “is this it?” “is this who I am and what my life looks like?”. The tricky part is that you are young enough to start over (if that is what you feel you need to do) and young enough to see if the grass is greener elsewhere. Within my inner circle of my early thirties many of my friends had either left their partners, had affairs or had dreams of starting over. I still see and hear these sentiments every day and wander whether there should be a course on ”life circumstances” or an adult ‘top-up’ class that helps to define all this stuff and compartmentalise that it is all very normal. I think it is all very normal for people to start questioning their lives, their decisions and whether they need to do things differently. Reflection doesn’t always mean starting over. Reflection can mean looking how you respond to certain things or how you feel about certain things. And it is this time of self-reflection that brings with it the journey of big emotions. Repressed memories, feelings around childhood and just seeing the world differently.

Whilst people seem to experience life and circumstances in similar patterns, no two people are ever the same. Everyone’s thoughts and feelings are individual. Although people may have similar childhoods, their experience of their situation and how they felt about it are never the same. So I have learnt not to judge, not to comment negatively and just to listen. I work with people to talk about their feelings, their emotions and sit with them. Even if they are uncomfortable you can still sit with them and accept that you are an individual made up of many complex emotions that are just part of who you are. (there was recently a great kids movie called ‘Inside Out’, that depicted a story in a beautiful way of the need to have all emotions). Although sometimes the sea of emotions feels as though they are coming thick and fast, you can choose how you deal with them. Do you let those huge emotions swollen you up and feel helpless? Or can you decide to except that they exist learn from them?

– Jen

 

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