I'm Drinking Too Much and I Know It

What follows is how I understand and approach this issue in my work with clients.

If you know you’re drinking too much, therapy for dependency doesn’t start with stopping. It starts with understanding what the drinking is solving. A therapist who works with alcohol and self-medication looks at the function, not the substance.

It started as social. A glass of wine at the expat meetup. Drinks with colleagues. The bottle you opened on a Tuesday because Tuesday abroad is lonely and wine makes lonely quieter.

And at some point it stopped being social and started being something else. Something you do every night. Something you notice yourself looking forward to a little too early in the day. Something that's crept from a glass to two to half a bottle to a bottle and you've been pretending you don't count.

You know. You don't need me to tell you. The fact that you're reading this means you've already had the conversation with yourself. The one where you wonder if this is a problem. The one where you say "I'll cut back next week." The one where you compare yourself to the people who drink more than you and decide you're fine.

I'm not here to tell you you're an alcoholic. I don't use that word and I don't find it useful. I'm here to talk about what the drinking is doing for you, because it's doing something, and until you know what that something is, cutting back won't work.

What the drinking is doing

It's managing something you can't manage any other way. Loneliness, probably. Boredom, maybe. Worry about the life you're living and whether it was the right choice. The gap between how your life looks and how it feels. The restlessness of an evening alone in a country that isn't yours.

Alcohol is the most available tool for making hard feelings softer. It's legal. It's socially encouraged, especially in expat culture where drinking is basically a community activity. Nobody questions it. Nobody worries about you. You don't look like you have a problem because everyone around you is doing the same thing.

And it works, temporarily. The edges go soft. The loneliness recedes for an hour. The evening passes faster. You sleep, badly, but you sleep.

Expat drinking culture

This is the part nobody talks about. Expat social life is built around alcohol. The meetups are at bars. The brunches include bottomless mimosas. The networking is over drinks. If you removed alcohol from expat socializing, most of it would collapse, because alcohol is the lubricant that makes strangers feel like friends faster than they actually are.

Which means the environment actively discourages examining your drinking. If everyone's doing it, it's normal. And if it's normal, it's not a problem. And if it's not a problem, why are you lying awake at 3am thinking about it?

Because you know. Your body knows. Your mind knows. And the fact that everyone else is also drinking too much doesn't change what it's doing to you.

What would help

Not willpower, not counting drinks. Not rules about which days you're "allowed."

What would help is addressing the thing the drinking is managing. If you're drinking because you're lonely, the solution isn't less drinking, it's less loneliness. If you're drinking because you're worried, the solution isn't moderation, it's understanding what you're worried about. If you're drinking because the evenings are unbearable, the solution isn't a dry January, it's making the evenings bearable.

The drinking is a sign. It's an effective, available, socially sanctioned sign. But it's still a sign. And the thing it's a sign of is the thing worth paying attention to.