How to wean a person from drinking alcohol. Part III. Where to start from

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the case of mass lectures, the conversation traditionally begins with some bad facts about alcohol: from harm to health to mortality statistics, additional emphasis is often placed on emotions with the help of heartbreaking stories like a boy locked in a garage in Novosibirsk in a frost of -30 (the father locked up and forgot about this, while drinking with friends, even a short film was later filmed on this incident) or pictures with defects in newborns. This is correct, because mass lectures are designed for a certain number of people to think, study the material carefully, grow wiser and stop drinking. Drinking people themselves, as I said, are very weak in independent thinking, but the competent pressure of the lecturer, carried out through facts and emotions, can force a person to reconsider their views. Many people with an everyday consciousness, of course, will ignore all this, finding their own rationalization in favor of cultural drinking (for example, everyone will say that he will not lock a child in the garage for sure), but in every large audience there will always be several people, which will "hook". This is what the mass lectures are counting on: they have low efficiency, but due to their large coverage, quite a lot of people sober up.

In the case of one-to-one conversations or small group communication, start the conversation about alcohol from the same positions Absolutely forbidden … This practically puts an end to whatever small chance of success you have. You need a 100% guarantee of the result, so you will have to get close to a person from afar. Individual weaning is when you need not to sober up as many people as possible (it does not matter who), but this is when you care about one specific person (the reason is not important now) and here the efficiency should be 100%, no less. My methodology, as you remember, is designed specifically for this case, so this particular person must mean something to you in order to try so hard, as I will show later.

If you start with the traditional coverage of the question, then your interlocutor will simply crush you with a reciprocal pseudo-argumentation, which absolutely does not break through at the level of logic. I do not even see the point of listing typical excuses, because they are all ridiculous: from "my grandfather drank 70 years" to "combat 50 grams", or "scientists have proven that there are useful elements in wine." The harm to health, which you can tell about, will be ignored - I guarantee you, do not go to your grandmother.

All these excuses are designed to somehow protect the attacks on the existing habit, they have no logic and common sense, and therefore the only way to overcome them in an argument is to force a person to do it himself. This is a difficult job and direct pressure is useless here: if you feel that a person is losing to you in an argument, he will sooner run away and hide under an “IMHO” cloak and having some “own choice” that he does not impose on anyone. At this moment, you most likely lost, because this argument can only be broken through after special “processing” of the person, and if you did not have time to do this “processing”, you increased the complexity of your work tenfold, which is practically tantamount to defeat (although I managed to get out of such situations).

The second reason why you cannot start from typical positions is that your interlocutor has already heard all these stories and arguments against alcohol 100 times, you will not surprise him with them, he is already internally used to them and with your repetition you will only once again show that what you are not original. It’s even good for the interlocutor if you cannot tell him anything new, he will simply sigh with relief that he hasn’t learned new facts and there’s nothing wrong with cultural drinking, because he’s still alive and in his life is good. And since scientists have not discovered any new harm, then there is nothing to be afraid of.

The third reason is that you still won't prove your position to the interlocutor. He will shower with arguments that scientists have proved something without giving evidence, and will just demand accurate scientific research from you with all the evidence (this logical error is called the "burden of proof"). At the same time, simply giving a link, for example, to an article by Tanya Chikritzhs or Kaye Fillmore, will not work, since there it is "multi-bucket" and "naburzhui". In short, if you go directly, you will also have to directly prove everything, but in the end the interlocutor will endure the “battle” or the personal field, on which, as you know, only his personal subjective rules work, so you have no chance there. Even if you understand these rules, they will immediately change.

Remember, any duel based on facts and logic is very beneficial for your pupil, because he knows that by doing this you will never prove anything to him personally. This battlefield is notoriously losing (if it were winning, a person would not drink, having figured everything out on their own).

"So what to do?" - You ask. Patience, my dears. In one of the following parts, you will learn what to do, but this method, as I said, is not available to everyone, you yourself need to be a fairly developed person in order to teach others.