Lying Minds: An Insiders guide to alcoholism


Alcoholics are not damaged, faulty or broken, and we aren't bad or weak people: we are deceived: deceived by our own minds.
Most people that drink heavily in their youth will mature out of it, and those that drink to relieve some distress will moderate their drinking if that distress is removed, but we do not. Our minds do not spontaneously curb excessive drinking, they encourage it. Drinking appears to us that it brings relief from our problems but in fact it amplifies them. Alcohol changes the way that we think, it lowers our emotions, and it distorts our memory. Our minds compel us to drink more and we become increasingly anxious, depressed, fearful, alone and hopeless... all of which are relieved by drinking. Our minds trap us into a self-reinforcing pursuit of alcohol, and that does not happen to others.
We are not broken or faulty but we are different. All people are different in some way. Some are tall, some are short, but we all also have unseen differences within us. Some are bolder that others, some more timid, some artistic and some more analytical. But we have differences that make us susceptible to addiction, and once that susceptibility is engaged then it forms into an ever strengthening force that propels us towards our own destruction. This book explains the mechanisms that drive our addiction, how they grow, why we can never safely drink again, and the deeper truth: that we never could in the first place, we just didn't know it.
This book takes the mystery out of alcoholism and the guesswork out of recovery by describing the ways in which we are deceived by addiction. When we understand the ways in which our mind deceives us then we can anticipate its actions. The deceptions appear real, but they are false and once we know them to be false then we can recognise, intercept and defeat them. And defeat them we must, because if allowed to run its course uninterrupted, alcoholism is fatal.