How to wean a person from drinking alcohol. Part I. Introduction

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

I am opening a series of articles in which I share my experience on weaning people from "cultural drinking" on an individual basis. What does it mean? This means that we will only talk about how to help a person overcome the social stereotype about the need to “culturally” drink alcohol on the occasion of various events or even just “for the soul”. However, the issue of combating the last stages of alcoholism, biological dependence on alcohol and extremely neglected cases of militant drunkenness will not be discussed here - medical institutions are engaged in this. My task is to re-educate cultured drinkers of young and middle age (up to 25-30 years old) by explaining to them the correct teetotal beliefs and criticism of the wrong beliefs of moderate drinkers, to do this from the standpoint of the morality and culture of our society. This series of articles is devoted only to this. Why is that? Because all the other questions, the simplest ones, in my opinion, have already been resolved and resolved quite well.

Indeed, see for yourself: all refutations to the typical arguments of culture drinkers were fully formulated already about 9-10 years ago, they are well known. Popular articles on the biological harm of alcohol, good videos, and other useful material abound. There are a lot of different teetotal movements in Russia, so there should be no questions of psychological support for teetotalers-newcomers either. In other words, to defeat a moderate drinker with pure logic, if he had it, it would be possible in a few minutes … however, in our society everything is not so simple. The culture of moderate drinking is so firmly entrenched in the minds of ordinary people that it practically does not break through with pure logic, stories about the dangers of alcohol, references to research and other iron arguments. It is a mistake to believe that one banal presentation of simple truths, the demonstration of photographs of children with birth defects and the monstrous statistics of mortality from alcohol will be enough to convince some young talent to give up a pleasant pastime in a cozy company over a glass of elite wine. No, they all think that this does not concern them, that they know when to stop, that “a little is possible,” especially since “the doctor advised,” and so on in the same spirit. It would seem that everything is simple and clear, but no … pulling a person out of mass culture (it does not matter if we are talking about cultural drinking or some other mass insanity) is very difficult, because to defend his position, a moderate drinker lets in the most sophisticated logical gimmicks and emotional attacks. Everything is used that allows you to protect your emotional comfort. And my task is to describe the methods of dealing with these manifestations of stupidity and unreasonableness. These methods are complicated, but if someone is looking for easy ways, then there are none, just close the article and don't come here again - you are not suitable for working in Social Forestry.

Despite the seeming simplicity of choice for a teetotaler in the eternal question “to drink or not to drink?”, The answer to it is actually very difficult for other people. For many years I have been dealing with the issues of correct argumentation against the use of alcohol and I can confidently name the most difficult obstacle to overcome, which is difficult to break through even in individual conversations with a person. This obstacle is based on the very ability of a person to think independently: a reasonable enough person will not drink because he is intelligent enough and is able to understand the harmfulness of alcohol in any dose, having considered only the classic arguments on sobriety, so there is no need to explain anything to such a person. Not a reasonable enough person, if he drinks, then due to his unreasonableness, he cannot accept criticism of alcohol, that is why it is extremely difficult to convince him of logic, since he does not possess it sufficiently. In other words, it is impossible to explain to a fool that he is a fool, since he, due to his stupidity, simply does not understand your arguments … To stop being a fool, you must first stop being a fool … this is such a logical closure - a vicious circle. It contains all the complexity of argumentation, but you can still break it.

I will try to describe, step by step, the shortcomings of the classical methods of arguing teetotalers and the reasons why they cannot be applied to people who do not have sufficient command of logic, then I will set out a part of my experience, following which, in principle, even a convinced culture drinker can be re-educated, but under the condition of very and a very serious investment of their forces in it. My experience gives almost 100% result in a time from 3 hours (my personal record for the speed of weaning) to 5 years (my longest experience), provided you have patience, a desire to help a person and if he himself has at least the rudiments of logical thinking and at least drops of doubt in his position as a culture drinker. The material will consist of several parts, and they will be gradually published on the website of the Social Forestry "Clear in the forest". I’ll only mention three points right away. Firstly, this is my personal experience and I cannot guarantee the success of its copying by you, since my personality and my ability to convince people exactly one by one, or, at most, when there are three of them, can play an important role in my method. Secondly, my experience is practically useless when dealing with masses of people. Learn to work with the masses on this issue from relevant public figures, for example, from the Union for the Struggle for Popular Sobriety. Why is that? I don’t know, but when I tried to apply these techniques in public lectures, the result was almost always the following: 1-3 people came over to my side, the rest 97-99 tried to splash me with saliva. Therefore, I do not take more than 2-3 people into the discussion. Thirdly, the presentation will not obey any pre-formed plan, I will share my experience, observations and thoughts in the order in which I will remember all this.

So, you read the introduction, in which I explained my motivation and the essence of the problem in the form in which I see it: if people possessed logic and independent thinking, they would not drink, and if these properties and skills are poorly developed and the person drinks, then it is very difficult to persuade him with iron logical arguments or scientific research. This requires an integrated approach from various sides, in the hope that one of these sides will hook him.