"Alcohol numbs your emotions and to be honest, everything else as well. Time passes. Alcohol has replaced your brain's natural ability to deal with the pressures you encounter on a daily basis. It has allowed you to avoid real situations with confronting emotions and feelings. It had been my coping mechanism. It was actually doing a seemingly awesome job at avoiding discomfort, uncertainty and my true emotions. The octopus represents your relationship with alcohol and the GRIP it has on you. At some time in the future, your mind and body simply won't cope with the effects of alcohol any more. Your brain has finally woken up to the trick it had been playing on you the whole time. Like a master magician, the octopus has revealed its inner secrets. The result: Maybe your rock bottom, mental, physical illness or whatever else it represents to you. When you decide to change your relationship with alcohol, it will be confronting and sometimes uneasy. Feelings you experience will bring discomfort and maybe even fear. That's because life is real again. In my case, for the first time in 27 years. Having to deal with real emotion is the price of being connected. Time will pass. You will notice that these feelings will not kill you, they are in fact a normal part of life that you probably don't remember experiencing. You will develop experience, resilience and thrive in your brain and mental health. This book represents my true and authentic experience of how I changed my relationship with alcohol and explored the GRIP it had on me. It is as much of a conversation about mental health as it is about alcohol and illustrates the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle that I had been missing the whole time. I guess you could say, it is a kind of manual of how I got stuck and unstuck to the point at where I am today. I want you to enjoy the journey, the humour involved and maybe consider your next step. When you Change Your Relationship with Alcohol, you start to reawaken. It's time to reconnect to yourself, others, your natural environment and real time again, just like how you started life when you were first born. Good things just seem to happen. There is not one thing that goes untouched by alcohol!"