Most of my clients don’t come to me to explore their relationship with alcohol but almost all of them eventually bring it up. This makes sense. In every case, the issue that initiates our coaching arrangement is merely the doorway to something deeper. Getting to the topic of alcohol means they’re ready to unleash more of their true self and deepest desires into the world.
Alcohol has a light and dark side as you know. One drink can relax you into a lower level of consciousness where you can escape the external world or get connected with parts of you that want to come out and play. On the other hand, when our minds take a break from being on guard, emotions, memories, and parts of us we can’t face or don’t want to claim get agitated. Soon the warm pleasantness can turn into overwhelm, panic, or even depression. Sometimes, it’s hard to get out of the hole we’re digging.
The popularity of the #cutback journey, Dry January and Sober October reflect a new awareness that alcohol might being holding us back from living life more fully. As a depth psychologist, I wonder about how individual consciousness raising is prompting something new to emerge from the collective unconscious. Exploring our depths does more than improve our lives and those around us. Our individual consciousness raising coalesces with that of millions of others, helping to push new ideas into collective consciousness about how to be human.
A Personal Perspective
Exploring my relationship with alcohol began in 2013, initiated by my first journal entry since fifth grade: “I can’t live this way anymore.” It took six months of journaling to reveal how alcoholism had infected our family in the most sinister of ways. This dramatic new awareness put my life on a trajectory that I never imagined, one full of suffering, growth, and eventual liberation. I thought I had escaped the clutches of alcohol, but it continued showing up in antagonistic ways.
Excerpt from Chapter Twenty-Five of my coming memoir, When Sex Meets God: a midlife story.
“He was insatiable, and I couldn’t resist. I didn’t want to resist. He was craving me, I was craving him, and I had to take it when I could get it, not knowing if it would come again. Then, we slept.
In the morning, we awoke and looked at each other. “I like your version of no-sex sex,” I laughed as I stretched my body and sighed with happiness. He smiled and then hopped out of bed like the Energizer Bunny. “I need to sleep,” I said.
He kissed me on the forehead and left the bedroom. After a minute or two of wondering what exactly had happened, I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke later, I wondered more about the role alcohol played in Phillip’s life, and it occurred to me that rather than use alcohol to escape feeling, as my former husband did, Captain Morgan permitted Phillip to experience emotions that had been expressly forbidden by his father and patriarchal Christianity.
This increased my curiosity about the connection between sexuality and spirituality.”
When that first post-divorce relationship ended, I worried about being doomed to be unconsciously attracted to men who turned out to have a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol. Over the next two years, my focus on finishing my research, moving to a beach town, starting a business, and working on my memoir kept me on the straight and narrow. I did however become a regular at some local joints where the bartenders were friendly, and the white noise distracted my mind so I could be creative. One glass of cabernet was all I needed to connect with my shy inner artist.
But then … another version of me snuck out of my unconscious and grabbed onto a potential victim. I was at one of my favorite places just quietly celebrating the completion of another draft of my memoir. The Puerto Rican man with dreads walked in, said hello to the local musician and sat down next to me. We connected. I was interested in his life as a former rockstar and he was intrigued with my midlife adventures. “Want a shot of Tequila?” I said when the three of us headed to another bar. “Want to kiss me?” I said in the car at the end of the night, not sure I was even attracted to him.
The next eight months surprised me. I unexpectedly delighted in having a boyfriend, although I quickly had to slow down the man’s feelings for me. I just wanted to have fun after being serious for so long.
It was me this time who wanted to party. He would go weeks without drinking, but I always wanted to go chat at a beach bar. Doing shots became a regular occurrence, especially when I slipped into the role of groupie at events where he was performing his DJ magic.
Eight months of companionship ended and so did the shots, but now I had settled into a daily habit of finishing up my day at a bar. My one glass of cabernet now needed a partner Cosmopolitan martini. My drinking peaked in 2023 during my year in Annapolis, MD. As I sought to double down on growing my new business and continue working on my memoir, intense anxiety disrupted my sleep, and the lack of lighting in my new apartment increased my loneliness.
Then came the guilt when I switched up my perspective one day. Sure, two drinks per day didn’t seem like a lot, but 14 per week did, and 728 in a single year was enough to shock me in new awareness that something deeper was going on.
Getting the Reframe app on my phone helped educate me about the devious impact of alcohol on my brain. I felt silly knowing that Annapolis was not for me after living there a mere three months. Sucking it up and following my Soul back to FL broke the alcohol fever. Back in the familiarity of my beach town, my anxiety disappeared, and I have mostly maintained my limit of four drinks per week for nine months.
What is the moral of my story? I haven’t figured it all out yet and I probably never will. I have formed a few conclusions though.
First, vodka is evil! My brain seems to be particularly susceptible to the addictive properties of vodka. From time to time, I will order a Cosmo because it just tastes so good. After a few weeks, I will notice how I’ve gradually added another drink to my weekly quota or how one drink isn’t enough anymore. It’s so sneaky.
Second, I’m starting to believe that alcohol is a distraction from my larger purpose, possibly because I fear what I’m capable of. On the surface, this doesn’t make sense, because I have gone after everything I’ve ever wanted to do. I’m quite courageous as evidenced by my willingness to withstand my fear of looking foolish during my midlife unraveling and reconstruction. The dates with multiple men seventeen years younger, getting swept up in an ironic romance with another one who ended up being on parole and going back to prison all challenged my sense of right and wrong. Yikes! On the other hand, in my more serious endeavors, I always seem to stop short of what I believe is my potential. I’m getting there.
What Does Alcohol Want from You?
Science affirms that up to 90% of you is influenced by unconscious forces, which means you don’t really know who you are. In fact, the more stubborn your ideas about who you are, the more your unconscious will have its way with you. The sooner you come to accept that there is always an unconscious agenda at work in your life, the quicker you’ll see what you couldn’t see before.
During the unraveling of my marriage, I came across this saying about alcohol being the other mistress. Soon after I began my depth psychology education, a fellow student who was a licensed psychotherapist with expertise in addiction offered a perspective that completely changed my thinking. He said to one of his clients, whose booze of choice was Jose Cuervo tequila, “What does Jose Cuervo want from you?” My imagination went crazy at the thought you could engage with this invisible character, and maybe even get an answer.
Research shows that Alcoholics Anonymous is effective for only ten percent of people who try it. That leaves a lot of people who are not able to crack the code and be liberated from its hold on them. There is always a spiritual/psychological aspect to all our patterns of thinking and behaving, but religious doctrine is not the same as spiritual laws that inform doctrine.
A depth psychological approach to exploring your relationship with alcohol can open the door to new insights needed to give yourself permission to fully live. In all cases, when my clients explore their unconscious, they see what they couldn’t see before, which leads to having options they didn’t know they had, and ultimately liberating themselves from suffering.
Further, our unconscious seeks to create and new insights about ourselves translate into new ideas, new ways to be in relationship, new heights of ecstasy and depths of meaning, and other creative expression. My clients have written song lyrics, short stories, left an abusive relationship, became more empowered in their marriage, used AI to produce viral TikTok videos, experienced new levels of intimacy, and even become completely new versions of themselves. The work is always worth it!
So, what does vodka want from me? Perhaps it seeks to keep me safe in some way. Saying no to vodka does not get at the deeper issue, just like an alcoholic abstaining from drinking does not get at the deeper issues of the role alcohol has played in their life. Just like anxiety is now my partner, warning me when I need to make a change even if it might not be the right one, the part of me that seeks vodka is asking something of me too. I just wasn’t listening closely enough.
Try This and Some Resources
You don’t need to wonder whether you have an alcohol problem to explore the role it’s playing in your life. Just be a detective trying to solve a mystery to gain new insights about yourself. Your intuition is already telling you whether you should embark on this journey.
Consider journaling as a version of the detective’s notebook. You can start with the last time you remember drinking. Describe everything about that day, how you were feeling, incidents you remember, how much you drank, what kind of alcohol you consumed, what brands, how it helped and how it hurt, how other people reacted to you, how you felt about their reactions, how you felt the next day physically and emotionally. Just keep going and then go back and read what you wrote and uncover some themes to explore further. These one-sheets from my Resources page on my website share my 5-Step Process to Exploring Your Unconscious and Working with Personal Images. You can also listen to me read from my book, Chapter 4: My Five-Step Process and Chapter 16: Methods: Finding Associations.
Use my guided meditation with active imagination to have a dialogue with your booze of choice. Note where in your body the emotions are felt when you think about alcohol, focus there, notice what image or impression emerges, and ask it to move out of your body. Then have a chat with it. I know that sounds silly, but the image/imagination is the language of your unconscious. It is sneaky, symbolic and metaphorical on purpose, to get around your mind’s habit of trying to pin down a meaning that matches current limited beliefs. Journal about your experience.
Try out the Reframe app, which was developed by Mayo Clinic and Harvard University I believe. It’s fantastic and it was helpful during my first couple of attempts to reduce my alcohol consumption. It’s educational, includes meditations and affirmations, you can track drinks and saved money and calories. The community aspect can provide support when you need it, as well as opportunities to support others who are on the same journey.
Hire me as your depth psychology coach and my expertise and support will get you those new insights faster in a space of safe vulnerability. I work with people in many ways, including single sessions, recurring sessions, and email. My new program, Depth of Wisdom, is a six-month deep dive that not only accelerates the process of exploring your personal unconscious, but integrates the wisdom of the body, brings in an ancestral component to understanding your life journey, and prepares you for the role of arousal and sexual energy in your eventual creative unleashing.
Click here to learn more about my services and schedule a free exploratory chat. What have you got to lose? You’ll learn something new about yourself no matter what.
Cheers to uncovering more of your unknown Self!
Dr. Deborah Lukovich
Depth Psychology Coach, Author & Host of Dose of Depth podcast