Stop Drinking Podcast by Soberclear

The Sad Reality of “Alcoholics” and Recovery…

• Leon Sylvester

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol-free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. So let's talk about recovery, alcoholism and sobriety. I've not drank for seven years, but I actually only spent 90 days in recovery. Now that might sound contradictory, but I'm going to give you a totally different worldview today. I'm going to show you an alternative method to looking at this idea of recovering, and I'm going to get hate for this video. A lot of people are going to disagree with it People that go to AA, 12-step people. They're not going to like this video, but I don't care. All I'm doing on this channel is showing what's worked for me for the past seven years, what's worked for the tens of thousands of people who have helped on this channel, who have messaged me, emailed me, left comments, and the hundreds of private clients who have helped stop drinking. All I'm doing is sharing what's worked for me and them. This isn't for everybody. If you go to 12 Steps, you're probably not going to like this video. In fact, my mum's been to AA for over 20 years and if I sent her this video, she's going to disagree, and that's okay. Different strokes for different folks. My way's not perfect for everybody, the same way that AA is not perfect for everybody. But I want to give you a totally different way to view this topic of recovering.

Speaker 1:

So I struggled with alcohol for around about 10 years and there was a period of my life where I went to Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm not going to lie I stopped drinking. For those 90 days that I attended, I didn't drink and I did the step work. I did the 12 steps. I said that I was powerless over alcohol. I gave myself up to a higher power. I've got no problem with doing that. If I think it'll help, I'll do anything. When I was drinking alcohol, I was desperate. So if there's people that are doing something that's working, I'll give it a go. But I stopped going to meetings because I hated this idea that I had this disease with no known cure. This is what I got told Alcoholism, being an alcoholic, is a disease with no known cure and the only solution to this was to have to go to these meetings for the best of my life. I'm a logical person. I like science. I also believe in God and, believe it or not, those two things can exist at the same time. So when I saw the only solution to stopping drinking was to beg God to help me and do this moral inventory and then go to these meetings forever, I just couldn't buy into it. So I don't drink. But I believed I was recovering and I was in recovery. And now I don't believe this at all. In fact, I don't believe in this idea of being a recovering alcoholic and I'm going to break it down. So what's the problem here? Why do people say that they are in recovery? What do we recover from Diseases?

Speaker 1:

A few years ago I was in Koh Samui in Thailand, beautiful, beautiful island, and we were staying in a villa that was in a rural part, beautiful villa. We had some friends with us and we went to a CrossFit gym. Now this CrossFit gym was in the jungle right. It was right next to this thick, dense forest and luckily for me is I trained with no top on and I must have had 15 mosquito bites on my back. I got home and I didn't feel great and I remember texting my friend I think those mosquito bites got me and he said yeah, shut up, nothing wrong with you. Turns out, this friend of mine wasn't right.

Speaker 1:

I got dengue fever and this is a pretty nasty illness. Like it can kill you. If it develops into severe dengue, there's a pretty high chance that you die. It may be five or 10%, but I got this dengue fever. Luckily it wasn't severe and I recovered. What I am no longer doing is recovering from dengue fever. I have recovered, my body is repaired and it is finished. I don't think that I am a recovering dengue feveraholic for the rest of my life. No, I recovered from this disease and that was it.

Speaker 1:

Now, when we meet people and they say that I'm in recovery, we know what they're talking about. We know that they're recovering from some alcohol addiction or drug addiction. But how many times have you met somebody that has gone through this recovery approach to then tell you that they are recovered? So what does this mean? You're recovering for the rest of your life. You never fully recover. In fact, you die without recovering.

Speaker 1:

And this is the thing is, if you're in recovery, you're buying into this disease model of addiction. It's a disease, it's a problem with you and there's no known cure. And if that works for you and you believe this and you go to 12 steps and you don't drink, then just turn off this video. I promise you it's not for you. But if that just makes no sense to you, if you feel like that's just insanity, then that's how I felt. And the real problem is, the only solution to being in recovery is to continue going to meetings and it's fine. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. If it's working for people, it's working for them. Who am I to judge? But, as somebody who has spoken with probably 3,000 people who have got a drinking problem and whose message has been viewed now by over 21 million people, in fact, even more. If I include Instagram, there's probably another 10 million people that have viewed my stuff there.

Speaker 1:

If you ask me, this idea of recovering for the rest of your life is probably time for it to go. In 2025 and beyond, people are waking up. See, when you believe that you are the problem, not alcohol, you can never truly be fixed, whereas what I recommend doing, what I did, what I help people do is we separate the two. They're not interlinked. You got addicted. If you drink alcohol, you are drinking something that dehydrates you, that lowers your inhibitions and you've been conditioned to see it a very specific way. That's got nothing to do with you as a person If you drink one of the most addictive drugs known to mankind. It has got nothing to do with the way that you're designed. It's the way alcohol is designed. So this idea that you're in recovery for the rest of your life I don't want to discourage people if they're finding success with that approach, but there has to be a better way and in fact there is a better way.

Speaker 1:

See, technically you are recovering in some fashion when you do stop drinking. But the term recovery, it's too much of a blanket statement that we just throw out. What your body is doing is healing. There's no doubt about this. I can see where the phrase came from recovery. Your organs do recover. Your brain does recover. Your dopamine levels do recover. But hear what I'm saying here they recover. Your organs don't stay in recovery for the rest of your life. Well, technically they may do in some very small fashion. But if you're able to decide to stop drinking and you've built a paradigm where you see alcohol for what it is, with no benefit whatsoever, the problem's solved. I say this to people If you make a true decision to stop drinking alcohol, benefit whatsoever, the problem's solved. I say this to people If you make a true decision to stop drinking alcohol, it makes no difference if you're on day zero or day 10,000. It doesn't matter. And the people who I work with, when they make that decision, when they've built that paradigm where they see alcohol for what it is, I explain to them that, wow, you're on day 14, but it makes no difference. We're the same, we've just made the same decision and that's it. We're moving on with our life.

Speaker 1:

Think about cigarettes, right? People that stop smoking cigarettes. I used to smoke cigarettes. They stop smoking cigarettes. They don't think of themselves as a recovering smoker for the rest of their life. They don't go and say, oh, I'm in recovery from my cigarette addiction. It never happens. They make a decision to stop consuming a drug and move on. But alcohol is in its own camp. Think about people that have an addiction to internet pornography. Are they walking around, going, oh, I'm recovering from my porn addiction? No, they move past it.

Speaker 1:

And the big problem with this recovery idea is that it's past focused. It's all focused on the past. And sure, your body needs to heal, which will happen in the present moment. But then, instead of recovering, what we need to do instead is rebuild. Imagine that. Imagine, rather than somebody say, yeah, I'm in recovery, no, I'm rebuilding my life. I'm future focused, I'm focusing on what's in front of me. Yeah, sure, what happened happened. It's in the past. Now I'm moving on. I've made a decision. It's out of my life. It's 10 times more powerful.

Speaker 1:

Listen, at the end of the day, my mum is in recovery. She has not drank for over 20 years. The way I'm talking is very black and white because I'm trying to share what worked for me and worked for the people who I've helped. But I do believe, over the next 10 to 20 years, that this paradigm will slowly start changing and what I hope will happen is it evolves from recovery to rebuilding. Because when you start rebuilding your life, you're not sitting in a circle talking about how much you used to drink and trying to recover forever. No, you're present for your family, you're getting back to the gym, you're working on your fitness, your career, your business, you're making more money, you're more spiritual. All good things happen. When we rebuild, when we're recovering for the rest of our life, then we're never really focused on what's next. Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by Sober Clear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.

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Leon Sylvester

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