How many times have you seen someone firmly resolve to do something that’s very good for them and not long after do the exact opposite?

We make up our minds to confront a lover, ask the boss for a raise, or just clean the apartment and write some bills, and at the end of the day the lover stays unconfronted, the bills are unwritten, and the boss still hasn’t noticed we were there.

And of course it’s the same with drinking. You stare at the 6-pack in your hand, wondering how exactly it got there after all your pious resolutions, or by the sixth or seventh drink in a bar, you remember you had said it wasn’t going to be that kind of night this time.

We like to explain this away as laziness, fear, self-indulgence, or any other human shortcoming, but really we don’t know why we do what we do. As anyone who has been on a diet can attest, we can no more predict our future behaviors than we can the weather.

Our inner dynamics appear to play out their dramas without having to ask our permission or even show us their rule book. We can influence our moods and behaviors, but strange to say, they often have an uncomfortably independent life of their own.

When it comes to drinking, the popular explanation in our culture is that heavy drinkers suffer from the disease of alcoholism, and that a feature of this disease is a loss of control. But that only begs the question why?

It’s very hard to believe that millions of people have a mystery behavioral disease for which there is no cure, and the only treatment is lifelong abstinence. Common sense and a great deal of research tell us that plenty of people move from problem drinking to moderate drinking all the time .

So when our own weird behaviors confound us, it’s good if we can get interested in the inner dynamics that are presumably connected with the cause. Our problem behaviors are not just warts that need eliminating, they are barometers of how much attention we need to give to our inside lives.

If you are involved in moderation management, or are exploring it, you probably share some of this skepticism about our culture’s disease model and insistence on abstinence. Probably this theory says more about the particular assumptions and values of our time and place culture than it does about how a human actually work.

But even if you are a skeptic, it is hard to get the basic template of received ideas out of your head if there’s nothing to replace it with. That’s very bad if, as in this case, the received ideas are in serious conflict with the course that you want to pursue. If you are not content with society’s standard issue of ideas, you will need an alternative model to work with.

    As Thoreau said:
    If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The ideas in this essay offer a different kind of music and a different drum. I believe these ideas are more humane and more practical than disease model precepts, and that they are also a valuable guide to that rulebook of how we work inside. I’ll begin by looking at drinking as a coping mechanism for bad feelings; then I’ll go to the inner dynamics that make us want to drink, and finally there are some exercises you may find useful in working on problem drinking.

    A Coping Mechanism
    I’m gonna drink away
    The part of the day I cannot think away.

The coping mechanism model almost explains itself: Problem drinkers drink because they have problems. Bad things happen to us in life, and those bad events generate bad feelings, like fear, rage, a sense of worthlessness and so on.

Our first and most automatic line of defense against bad feelings is to try to block them out.

This works the same way as taking an aspirin when you have a toothache – the aspirin will not cure the toothache, but you do hope it will make it more bearable.

Aspirin is the coping mechanism for toothache, but the cure is to go to the dentist.

Drinking is the coping mechanism for emotional pain -- it gets us through the night. The cure, we will talk about later.

So behaviors that the conventional model calls addiction are seen by this harm reduction-based model as a coping mechanism for bad feelings. We do a stunning variety of activities in our culture just to manage bad feelings: we drink, do drugs, over-eat, spend hours in front of the TV, or computer, or the game boy, gamble, do a little retail therapy and so on, all in an effort to not feel something.

I’m not saying that every time we drink or watch the TV we do this, but when an activity has a compulsive quality to it, a coping mechanism is probably involved.

Alcohol is an especially good coping mechanism because it alters your awareness and your mood. But anything that successfully distracts you, or numbs you, or focuses your attention elsewhere, will work. It is as instinctive as flinching from a blow. Pain comes, and the system responds.

Don’t Take Away my Coping Mechanism!

Imagine someone who lives in a house that has a dark basement with poisonous snakes in it. A violent storm is approaching the house, spawning tornadoes as it comes. The person has to decide, should I go down in the unlit basement where I am safest from the storm, or should I take my chances upstairs?

If you think of the storm as bad feelings, then the basement is the coping mechanism. It can function as a place of safety, but it also carries its own serious dangers.

People make their judgement calls based on their best guess of where the greatest danger lies. Your crazy may be my safety first, depending on what is going on inside of us.

An example: A person I worked with in therapy has been in AA for many years, and totally subscribed to the addiction theory. But she once surprised me by saying that drinking had saved her life. At the time when she drank heavily she was so consumed by depression and a sense of worthlessness that she would easily have killed herself had the drink not been there to give her relief once in a while.

She was under no illusions about the value of alcohol as a long-term mood stabilizer, but like the person with the unlit basement, she made her best call in a difficult situation. She then gave up drinking when she could, as best she could.

Another woman I worked with drank every night after she put the children to bed, and although she felt very frustrated with the fact that she was putting her life on hold, she wasn’t able to change this pattern. As she looked more closely at her inner dynamic, it turned out that her drinking represented a compromise between two deeply polarized parts of herself.

One part felt shackled by her domestic life. It wanted to socialize, go to school, and possibly pursue an artistic career. The other part was invested totally in her being a good mother, and saw these desires as something that could ruin her marriage and compromise her life as a parent.

Better, this part reasoned, to drink every night until she was unable to properly function, stifle her longings, and be a decent parent again in the morning. When she looked at this polarization, she became ready to negotiate these parts away from their extremity, so that she could go to classes, socialize, and reach beyond the either/or dichotomy between family and fulfillment.

Our culture’s current popular view is that since problem drinking is bad, the only way to deal with it is to have the drinker abstain. Countless examples like the ones above tell us that it is not so simple. I am not saying that problem drinking is safe or desirable, but I am saying that if we want to get a handle on this or any other ‘addiction,’ we need to get interested in its context.

Our coping mechanisms are there for a reason, and we need to know about those reasons if we are going to deal with ourselves humanely and effectively. I am told there is a Chinese saying which goes, never wrestle with pigs – you will just get dirty, and the pigs will love it.

How many of us have fruitlessly wriggled in the dirt with our coping mechanisms and come away from the battle with nothing more than mud in our eye? Until the part of us that needs to drink gets truly convinced that there is a better way, it will cling to its habits with all the tenacity a human being can muster.

And if, by chance we do wrestle that pig to the ground, we may regret facing the storm of emotion that results from our coping mechanism being taken away before its time.

Does this mean we are in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ kind of situation with drinking? Not at all, and this is why the moderation approach can be such a Godsend. When I get interested in the way my drinking functions as part of an emotional system I can start to have more influence over the what, the where and the how of it.

And when I better understand my drinking I can make a more informed decision about how I want to moderate or if I chose to take it to zero for a while. It’s better than floundering, or becoming a 12-step fanatic, and it’s also good to learn more about the world’s most fascinating and engaging subject – me.

What to do? The techniques of moderation management offer a common sense way to make your coping mechanism of drinking as non-intrusive and low-risk as possible. In the image of the house in the storm, these methods are about making that basement as safe and secure as possible.

There are several excellent books about this, and they are all mentioned at this site, but I would single out Over the Influence by Pat Denning, Jeannie Little and Adina Glickman, and Responsible Drinking by Fred Rotgers, Marc Kern and Rudy Hoeltzel.

These books help you make smart and effective negotiations with your coping mechanisms. Keeping logs, drinking on a full stomach, planning to limit your number of drinks and so on, are all ways to let the coping mechanism of drinking do its work at the least possible cost to yourself and those around you.

This work is extremely important, and nothing could be better recommended, but if you have tried these cognitive/behavioral techniques for a while and the success has been limited, you may want to supplement your moderation techniques with some healing work. To use the house in a storm metaphor again – if you’ve fixed up the basement as best you can and the problem is still there, it may be time to address the emotional storm.

Internal Family Systems Therapy.

The coping mechanism model takes a systems approach towards the behavior of heavy drinking. Internal family systems therapy (IFS) looks at that system in terms of our internal ‘family,’ of parts. This model comes out of conventional family therapy, where attention is focused on making sure that the individuals within a family communicate clearly with one another, and without interruption from other family members.

In IFS we get interested in the same process within an individual. We do not just look at ‘emotional pain’ or ‘bad feelings,’ but at the parts of ourselves that have to carry that burden of pain. And instead of ‘coping mechanisms’ we look at the parts of ourselves that take on the role of protecting the pain-carrying parts.

An example – Charles grew up in a working class suburban where his gay lifestyle and artistic nature were not appreciated or understood. Not only that, his family came from conservative religious roots that saw his sexual orientation as literally the route to the fires of Hell.

From this came painful and humiliating experiences that generated a number of pain-bearing parts which, in IFS language are called exiles. Exiles are usually young parts that get frozen at the point where painful experiences happens. I am, say, five years old, I get hurt or rejected or humiliated, I’m not given an opportunity to recover from that experience, and a part of me gets frozen in time, living in that same psychological space, until I am able to release it later in life.

As I suggested above, the system tends to stuff these parts deep inside ourselves, not just in order to keep them safe from further onslaughts, but also to keep their highly charged and scary energy isolated from the rest of the system.

People often feel the exiles’ energy as frightening and overwhelming, and stay away from it, not knowing that behind the eruptions of rage or despair are little child-like parts that need our concern, comforting, and kind attention.

So Charles, like the rest of us in humanity, evolved other parts to step in and protect the wounds of these exiled parts. We tend to create recognizable protective types that bear common characteristics from person to person.

For instance, there are parts that like to manage the outside world and get all their ducks in a row, so that nothing bad will happen.

Anything less than that and they will feel jittery and unsafe. Critical parts lambaste others, or oneself, for imperfections, in an effort to put the situation above all criticism from others, and once again make things safe.

Continued in original article.