Play The Tape Forward

Hey, I'm Barti Arez and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. Welcome to my podcast where I teach you how to stop drinking, how to quit craving, and how to begin the journey back to yourself so that you can transform your life. After a 14-year binge drinking career, starting and stopping dozens of times and trying everything in the book from AA to therapy, I finally discovered the key to sustainable sobriety. And on this podcast, you're going to learn practical tips, tools, and strategies to help you quit drinking alcohol the easy way so you can finally step into the next chapter of your life and begin fulfilling your potential. For private one-on-one or group coaching, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. Hey, welcome back to another episode. I'm your host, The Stop Drinking Coach. My name is Barti Arez and I'm super excited to be jumping into another episode with you guys today. I've been thinking about the episode topic and one that I thought about just landed so perfectly. And what that topic is, what we're going to be talking about today is playing the tape forward. Now, playing the tape forward is like a terminology that's used a lot in like the recovery, or like the AA space, but regardless of any of that, playing the tape forward is a super super powerful strategy that applies to not only the domain of alcohol and working to overcome addiction, but in other aspects of your life as well. And as if you've been listening to my content, whether it's on my TikTok or on my podcast, you've heard me say this before, that quitting drinking is like 1% alcohol and 99% all the other stuff that comes along with your mental, emotional, and spiritual evolution as a human being. Again, not to be, when I say spiritual, not to be confused with religious or having to turn yourself over to a higher power or any of that. I don't think that's necessary. But more so spiritual evolution, just like your own personal relationship to yourself in the world and the environment and things like that. So, you know, side note there. Playing the tape forward is a very, very powerful and useful strategy that we should aim to do in every aspect of our life. But first, let's talk about how it relates to alcohol. So playing the tape forward refers to, in the moment, if you are struggling with alcohol right now listening to this and you start to get a craving for alcohol. And there's this part of you that like, you know, really wants to drink because you're frustrated or stressed out or you're just craving that dopamine, right? But then there's this other part that has become super aware of the fact that alcohol is really problematic and is causing all this harm and destruction to your life and to your family, your kids, your partner, your work and everything else. So there's your kind of torn, right? So playing the tape forward refers to, okay, sure, let's acknowledge and accept the fact that you want to drink, right? Playing the tape forward refers to pausing in that moment before you make a decision and literally playing the tape forward in your mind. So, okay, right? Like, something that we all do when we struggle with alcohol is we keep telling ourselves this time is going to be different and it's never different, right? It's never different. But we say like, oh, I'm only going to have a couple of this time. It's only just going to start with, you know, one or two and then inevitably it always ends up going overboard. So playing the tape forward is like pausing and imagining yourself having a drink, right? And imagine yourself having one and then play the tape forward comparing it to basically the other 90% of times where it doesn't end up going the way that you wanted it to. So you have one and then you have a second and then you're probably going to want a third. You're probably going to want a fourth and then what's going to happen? Either you keep drinking until you get sick or you pass out or you get to that limit that you normally, you know, stop at or, you know, you block out something like something happens, right? And then you wake up the next morning or first of all, you wake up in the middle of the night, super, you know, hungover dehydrated anxious. It's hard to fall back to sleep. And then you end up waking up in the morning full of shame, full of guilt, full of regret, full of frustration, full of all this overwhelm, full of this anxiety, wondering like, God damn it, like, why did this happen again, right? So playing the tape forward is a process to help you begin to map out what is going to happen. It's the process of helping you connect the dots between your inputs and your outputs. And I know in the cycle of addiction, especially when you're in the dopamine feeding cycle, when we're just talking about drugs in general, the way that it affects your brain is so profound in terms of the imbalance of neurochemistry alongside with the other parts of your brain that it affects, the parts of your brain responsible for decision making, planning, organization, critical thinking, consequences, habitual behavior, right? That in the moment, it's just like you don't care. You know the consequences, but you just do it anyways because you're feigning for that emotional release, for that for that shift in energy, that feigning behavior, all has to do with your neurochemistry, as well as the activation of your nervous system, right? How stressed out you are, how overwhelmed you are, and the amount of tools you have on your tool belt to cope with that distressful emotional state. So also when we're in a neurochemical feeding cycle, which is what I believe, you know, people in the 12-step recovery community refer to as a mental illness, right? When you're just a feign for the alcohol, you can't stop no matter what, despite all the negative consequences. When you're in those extremely imbalanced states, when you're gaba super low, when you're dopamine is super low, right? When you're super anxious, when like you're getting all these super overwhelming feelings, like you're not thinking rationally, right? You are not operating in alignment with who you truly are. At that point, who you think you are has become totally warped because our neurochemistry and, you know, the state of our nervous system basically produces our experience of reality, right? Like who you think you are is nothing more than a conscious witness to a super computer running the show. So like once you better understand this super computer, once you better begin to understand this human operating system, things start to make more sense. So playing the tape forward is the process of, okay, you're about to drink, you really want to drink, play the tape forward, see what's going to happen, right? If you think it's going to be different this time, you're lying to yourself, right? Maybe one out of ten times, sure, you drink, you go out with a friend, you say you're just going to have two, you stop at two and you come home and you only had two that day. Your brain holds on to that and thinks, oh, well, I can keep doing that. But the thing is, is you have to look at the trend, man. You have to look at the trend. You can't just say, okay, one out of five times I drink and, you know, I didn't overdo it. I didn't black out. I didn't get sick. I didn't, whatever. But four out of five times, like the trend shows, like, do, imagine you're placing bets. Like imagine you're in a casino, right? And the game that you're playing against is yourself. And just take your track record with alcohol. Look at all the time. Look at your general behavior with alcohol. Those are your odds. Would you, would you bet money on yourself and say, okay, if 90% of the time it's a losing battle, you have a 10% chance to win, would you put hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars into that thing? It's like, I don't know if it was me, I probably wouldn't. And that's what life kind of is. It's basically a series of probabilities and bets. So you have to begin looking at the trend and playing the tape forward is a powerful way to help you deter that action, right? Because playing the tape forward ultimately helps you connect your present-make, your present decisions to the outcome of the pain. And that's the thing that we're all intimately familiar with. If we've gotten to this place in our life where alcohol has become problematic, it's causing a lot of pain. And we have to recognize that pain, the anxiety, the hangover, the, the, the destruction that does to our confidence in our self-image, the damage it's doing to our relationship, the damage that's going to be caused as a result of, you know, you drinking in front of your kids all the time and then learning to model that behavior and you not being fully present to them, giving them your attention to help them develop, right? Like there's a massive damage being caused and playing the tape forward not only helps you acutely in the moment when you want to drink to actually connect, okay, what's drinking alcohol going to do? Think about the pain, think about the consequences, think of the let down to the people around you, think of the let down to yourself, right? Is all of that pain worth the 15, 20, 30, 45 minutes of discomfort that you would have to feel by breathing through and moving through that craving or learning to self-regulate the stress or the frustration or whatever else is that you're feeling? Is all of that downstream pain worth it? Obviously not, right? But we can't make that connection unless we think about it and this is why playing the tape forward is so powerful. Okay. Now, the second way that I want to encourage you to begin thinking about playing the tape forward is in your broader understanding of your life and reality, right? The trajectory of your life. See, the thing about alcohol is that in drugs in general is that if there was no consequence, If there was no pain, right? If there was no pain. If there was no pain, if there was no damage to self, no harm to self, to our brain, to our energy, to our organs, to our family, to potentially getting a DUI, to killing somebody, to hurting ourselves, we would just keep doing it. Of course, you're saying you could just hack your neurochemistry and make yourself feel super good and relieve stress, just pay two, three bucks at a store and being a bank, it's done. Neurochemistry is what is driven our evolution. This is why it's so important to expand your map of reality, better understand the human operating system, better understand our history, biology, how all these things tie together. Neurochemistry is what drives us forward, moving forward. Dopamine is what's tied to motivation and acquisition of pleasure and resources. We have to think about this in terms of like, what is the broader scale and impact of my actions? Playing the tape forward is a helpful strategy in helping you not drink in the moment when you think you might want to drink by helping you consciously connect, having a drink to all the downstream consequences that you're going to experience as a result. But let's play the tape forward. Let's zoom out a little bit. Let's take a higher vantage point and then let's play the tape forward. What's going to happen in the next 12 months in the next five years, 10 years or 20 years if you don't stop drinking alcohol? So think about all the pain that you feel right now with regard to your health, your organs, your energy, your mental clarity, your relationship with your spouse or your partner, your relationship with your kids, the way that you're showing up at work, your health in terms of how much weight you have on your body, your energy levels and how motivated you feel to actually stay on top of the things that are really genuinely important to you. We know that this thing is progressively going to get worse because you're dealing with a substance that you can't win against. Your organic matter, you have a sensitive balance in your neurochemistry, your organs aren't going to last forever. Every day is you age, everything in your body is getting weaker. That's the aging process. What do you think is going to happen in the timeline between 12 months from now and 20 years from now? Play that tape forward and let whatever comes up for you scare the shit out of you because it should. Because going back to what I was saying, if there were no consequences, we wouldn't stop. So you have to get honest with yourself about the consequences, the pain and the damage that alcohol is causing you and the people around you. You have to let that scare the shit out of you. You have to. That's a critical component to this process. You have to get clear on the pain of what's going to happen if you don't stop. Play that tape forward. What's going to happen to your health? What's going to happen to your organs? What's going to happen to your brain? What's going to happen to your relationship? What's going to happen to your kids in the way they grow up? What's going to happen to your income? What's going to happen to all of that? And let the fear of that scare you silly. Scare you straight. Let that pain, let that fear get so big that you're willing to do anything to not go near that. What's going to happen to your potential? That's the thing that scared the living shit out of me is like, you know, I quit at 29 and share whatever. I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to go to bars and clubs again or whatever. But what actually scared me is, dude, for going the person talking to you right now. This, me, this stop drinking coach, all the ways I've helped you would not have been possible unless I made the commitment personally to myself to stop drinking. So all this value I've been able to deliver to you and to everybody in my community and all the people I've worked with and the tens of thousands of people I've helped inspire to stop drinking and to get their act together and figure all the stuff out. None of that would have been possible had I not made the commitment to myself. And that's the power. That's the power. That's the power of one. One decision, one commitment. Look at the ripple effect it's had. And I guarantee that whoever you are listening to this, that if you make that personal decision to yourself, you can have the same ripple effect. Maybe you're not going to be stop drinking coach, but in your own way, in your own reality, in your own life, in all the people that are around you and that you're connected to and all of the different responsibilities and things that you have in your life. Maybe it's not going to happen overnight. This is a long-term game. I mean, it took me a couple years to kind of figure this stuff out, you know, or at least to start the stop drinking coach, but like, dude, the ripple effect is insane. But it started in that moment when I knew that alcohol was destroying me and I hit that rock bottom. It took me playing the tape forward and getting fucking insanely fearful of what it would look like if I reintroduced alcohol into my life. I knew that my potential would not be possible. I knew that alcohol was the only thing that was holding me back from expressing the highest version of myself. Now, of course, did I also need to heal? Did I also need to rebuild confidence and, you know, rebuild myself a steam and learn new skills and improve my communication and do all these other things that would optimize me as a human being? Absolutely. But none of those things would have been possible if I was still drinking alcohol multiple days per week. Dude, you just can't be the greatest version of yourself if you're drinking alcohol consistently. It's not possible. The damage that it does to your energy levels, to your mental clarity, to your motivation, for your ability to think and process, to be on top of your game, to be super proactive. And if you are kind of surviving or getting by or you happen to be a high-functioning drinker where, you know, you've got a business and, you know, or multiple six-figure job, whatever it might be, right? And you're, quote-unquote, already successful while drinking. Dude, if you remove the alcohol, you don't even know what you're capable of. Skies, the fucking limit. You want to double, triple, start a foundation, get into entirely a new echelon of life. Like, you have no idea what's available to you. It's absolutely insane. Like, it's all within us. We're all capable of it. But you have to take the first step and you have to develop the courage to move through the discomfort once you remove the alcohol to allow your mind, body, and spirit and energy system, your neurochemistry to begin to rebalance out. You have to develop the courage to go through that process in period. Dude, I was drinking four to six bottles of wine a day. And now I'm here on the other side with no cravings. I don't think about alcohol personally. I think about it being the stop-drinking coach. This is what I do full-time. Always sharing content with you guys. But me personally, me going out and drinking never on my mind. It never even crosses it. You know, and like, dude, before I was obsessed with it, it was 95% of my reality. So you have to play the tape forward, right? So assume it's going to get worse because it will. Again, going back, your finite piece of meat, your neurochemistry, your cells are dying every time you drink alcohol, you're doing damage to your brain. You're restructuring, reshaping the way that your brain works every time you take a drug, that augments its functioning. So play the tape forward and let that scare you. What's going to happen to your wife? What's going to happen to your kids? What's going to happen to your work? What's going to happen to your own personal health? What's going to happen with your potential? I guarantee that when you were 15 or 19 or 20 or 17 or 10 years old and you were thinking about life and what it could be and how you could evolve and what job you're going to-- it probably didn't involved drinking multiple days per week, or getting to this place. I know for me it didn't. But alcohol was something that I'd found to deal with things internally, which I didn't have the tools to figure out. And that's what you have to understand about alcohol. A lot of my content maybe seems like it's very aggressive in the way that I communicate. But I'm looking at this from such a higher vantage point. When you begin looking at your experience of reality through A-- and again, I don't want to deter you by saying spiritual. More so like an ascended level of consciousness where you take in the totality of our evolution and our role here on Earth, our purpose, our destiny, our capability to evolve. Our individual unique contribution to move the light of consciousness forward to help us as a species rather than thinking so egoically and individualistically focused on ourself, placing our energetic attention, focus natural talents, gifts, and abilities to evolve consciousness collectively forward to make other people's lives better. Dude, alcohol is a deterrent. It is a deterrent. It is the thing that disconnects you from yourself. It is the thing that disconnects you from your environment, from your relationships. and it's a two. tool that people use when they don't have anything better. When they haven't learned anything else, they don't know how to cope, they don't know how to manage the emotional or psychological turmoil that exists within side them. And again, it's not anybody's fault, right? Number one, we have a culture that promotes this, numbing out in the face of being rich and being sophisticated and having fun and relaxing after a hard day's work. Like, dude, it's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense. It is a distraction against your personal evolution, against your personal growth. We do not need anything outside of ourselves to manage our internal state, especially not alcohol. Shit is literally poison. Like, you hear that all the time. It's not like a metaphor or like an inout, like, oh, it just sounds good. Like, yeah, it's just really bad for you. You know, it's actual poison when ethanol gets converted to acid aldehyde. Acid aldehyde is a Class I carcinogen. It's tied to over 200 different diseases, multiple different types of cancer. It damages your DNA. Like, the very substrate, which produces like everything, it damages that at the very core of your cells. It damages the fundamental basis of who you are. So when you say that you're drinking poison, you're literally poisoning yourself. That feeling of being drunk and kind of like, you know, you can't balance well and like your speeches slurred like you're poisoned. That is the state of being poisoned. Now, where all this gets fucked up and keeps people trapped is that along with that poison, it just happens to increase dopamine and GABA, giving you an effect to escape the day-to-day aspects of life, which you haven't learned how to manage and process. Like your stress, your frustration, you know, the dysregulated nervous system that's always keeping you on edge and hyper-vigilant, right? The process of quitting drinking, I hope it's all starting to, the map is coming together, has nothing to do with alcohol and it's your personal journey back home to yourself to begin addressing all of the things that you have been denying, rejecting and locking away about your past, about your relationships, about the parts of yourself that you are not willing to confront. And that is why it is such a profound and powerful journey. It is the most consciousness-expanding journey you can go on. Overcoming an addiction is your personal hero's journey. This is a major aspect of your personal evolution. You look at your life, you've got 70, 80, 90, 100 years. Overcoming this thing is like, it's the hero's journey. If there was a book written about your life, this would be like the main chapter. It would be the main part before the climax. Without a doubt, like no question, it would be a major, major chapter in your life. Because you ask anybody who's really gotten sober, who's done it like, you know, has been sober for a while, is getting sober is the turning point, man. There's no question about it. Learning how to live alcohol-free, there is no argument. There is no question. It is the turning point. It is the fork in the road where you ascend and evolve as a human being in so many different ways. But you have to get honest with yourself and you have to be willing to play that tape forward. Play the tape forward on where, what's gonna happen with alcohol if you don't stop? And then play the tape forward in a broader perspective. So first we played the tape forward acutely with regard to, okay, I wanna have a drink, and I, but I don't want to, and I don't wanna deal with that shit again. So play the tape forward and watch what happens. You're gonna end up in the same spot you always do, okay? They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result. Addiction creates a sense of emotional insanity because we're driven by neurochemistry. We're hooked into the dopamine and GABA feeding cycle. Yeah, and getting out of that is rough for everybody. And that's why I say it's an even playing field. The first five days, 10 days, 15 days for everybody is rough. It's brutal. But dude, you get through it. You get through it. You can breathe through it. You can work out. You can go on walks. I've got a whole system for my clients. Whole deal to optimize your neurochemistry. But understand that like, you have to be willing to take that first step and trust that by working a good program, having accountability, having a coach like myself, having community, having resources that expand your map of reality, new tools to learn how to cope and move stress and stuff out of your body, learning how to regulate that. It can be different this time. A lot of people, when it comes to this thing, they don't ask for help or they don't reach out because they failed so many times that they think, oh, it's gonna be the same. I've talked to so many people on the phone and I know I felt that way. Do you know how many thousands of times I pulled myself I'm never gonna drink again? Pretty much every time. From the time I started drinking consistently when I was like 14 or 15 years old, I always overdid it. Every time I overdid it. There was never like, I can literally count on one hand. 15 years of drinking, I probably had less than six beers or six drinks less than five times. Every time I would destroy myself, I would binge, I would tax myself and every time I woke up the next day, I felt like absolute death. And every time in the morning, I told myself, fuck that dude, I'm never doing that again. Dude, I probably told myself that thousands of times. Do you know how bad that destroys your internal sense of self, your confidence, your self worth, your self esteem when you've got this dark, dirty little secret that only you secretly knows how bad it is? Sure, you put on a front with your family, you put on a front in front of your kids and the people you work with, but deep down when you hold the mirror up and you're sitting there alone reflecting, you know how fucked up that is. And dude, it destroys you. So you have to work a program. That's like super key. There's no way I would have been able to do this thing without it, but I mean, I was pretty severe case. You know, I was an animal, an absolute animal. So play the tape forward acutely when you want to drink. Okay, what's gonna happen? Imagine play that negative visualization in scenario. Imagine yourself waking up, feel that anxiety, feel that pain, feel that shame, feel that guilt, feel that disorientation that, you know, and let that deter you, say fuck that. I'll, whatever I'm going through right now for an hour, I'll deal with it. I'll breathe through it. I'll go for a run, I'll go for a walk, I'll call a friend, I'll watch a movie, I'll go eat some food, you know. Like then play the tape forward in the broader capacity of you not getting this thing figured out for another 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Think about the wasted time, the wasted potential, the wasted possibility of earnings, the damage to your relationships with your spouse or your kid, or the damage to your health, the damage to your liver, the damage to your brain. And imagine, okay, safe, you said fuck it. And you went another 5, 10, 20 years. Eventually you're probably gonna stop unless it kills you. You know, if you end up like my dad, I hope not. God forbid, you die, you know, dying asleep at the young age of 57. But you're gonna have to figure out eventually. And that's why if you listen to my last podcast, I said alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution. 'Cause we're not willing to fuel the discomfort, we're not willing to get the help that we need to learn how to manage our mind, to learn how to manage our emotional state, to learn new coping mechanisms, to let go of toxic friends, of toxic social environments, which all they do is get around and fucking drink. Like dude, life is so much bigger than alcohol, but when you're in it, you think it's God, you think alcohol is everything. You look at reality through the lens of alcohol. Is there gonna be alcohol there? Yes or no? Oh, are they serving alcohol? Yes or no? Oh, we're going out here, we're going on a vacation. We're doing this, we're doing that. Is there alcohols or not? Dude, that's the slavery of addiction. I'm like, dude, fuck alcohol. Like, I don't even think about it besides the context of doing what I do. Like, I live my life, I do my chores. Like, I got my routines, I do my things. I don't filter it through alcohol anymore, but I used to filter everything through alcohol. But when you work a good program and reharmonize the system, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, it's just not a thing anymore. Do I still crave dopamine? Sure. I'm a dopamine fiend. That's why I have great routines and I stay on top of everything and I'm proactive. 'Cause I understand the system. I'm a conscious witness inside of a body that is driven by neurochemistry. Addict or not, everybody wants dopamine. Why do you think everybody is hooked on their phones? Why do you think porn is the most trafficked search on the internet above everything? Right? Like, dude, we're driven by dopamine. That's what it is. We want to feel good, we want to feel pleasurable. When people say, oh, I want to be happy, you want a feeling of a lot of dopamine in your brain Serotonin. You know, Now, you have to look at this through a neuroscientific and trauma-informed lens. And then it all just starts to make sense. That's why I don't subscribe to the AA stuff. Sure, does it work? Is it helped a million people over the last hundred years? Sure, yeah. It's been the only solution. The addiction space is like outdated. It's very complex stuff in which not many people are truly equipped to handle. And because of the fact that you're dealing with really complex problems and mental health issues and challenges that dig their roots deep into so many aspects of one's life, their consciousness, their character, their family, their work, their confidence, their self-esteem. Like, it's no wonder this space is behind. You look at it through a neuroscientific and trauma-informed lens, and it all starts to make sense. So the last thing-- I keep getting sidetracked. So playing the tape forward acutely, playing the tape forward within your drinking, and then lastly, playing the tape forward within your life. OK, I don't know how old you are listening to this. But realistically, how many years do you have left? Do you have 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, 60 years? If you're 20, do you have 70 years left? Let's just assume we'll live 200. We know that most of us won't, because that's just the reality. But let's just assume. Be honest with yourself. How many years do you have left? I'm 32. I don't know. I would love to live to 100. But I don't know. So realistically, let's say, I've got 60 years. 60 years. I've got another 30 years of good, vibrant energy. Into my 60s, probably, where I'm healthy, I'm strong. I can still move. I'm still active. I've got 30 years left. When I break it down that way, everything that I want to accomplish, the mark I want to leave on this planet, I've got 30 years. We're hardy three months into 2023. Times move in, man. Times fly in. So who are you? What do you want to do? What's the impact that you want to leave? What's the music inside you that's bottled up that you've wanted to express? That's where we need to start placing our attention and focus, man. Alcohol's a fucking-- it's a sidetrack. It's a distraction. It's nonsense. It's the devil's piss. You don't need it. So figure out what you need to do to get to a place where you can stabilize, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, so that you can get on track and begin doing the things that are deep in your soul that are part of your purpose and your destiny. That's the approach I take to this. When you look at this through a neuroscientific and trauma informed perspective, and then you combined potential base coaching into the thing, dude, this is where you need to be. This is exactly what you need to do to hit the next level in your life, to hit the next experience, to hit the next evolution of whatever your name is. That's how you have to look at it. To really do the thing. Maybe I have more. Maybe I have 40. I can keep going into my 70s. But like, dude, clock's ticking. Clock's ticking. All the things that you want, that you want to experience the aspects of yourself, your goals, your dreams, whatever it is, you have to let the fear of not accomplishing those things light a fire under your ass so that you can get work, get to work now. And one of the things that you need to begin doing is healing your relationship to the present moment. When I was newly sober, the quote that changed my life was, my coach told me this. He said, "Bardia, life is one long experience of the present moment. From the moment you're born to the moment you die, it's always now. Life is one long experience of the present moment. So if you want to live a good life, you better learn how to make peace with the present moment because you're never going to be able to escape it. In that fucking quote, hit me like a truck. My entire reality shook. Because I ran through my entire 29 years of existence or from whenever I became really conscious." Now it's like, dude, I've always had a fucked up relationship to the present moment. I was always trying to change it or escape it or make it more fun or make it less fun or try to reduce the stress or make it more exciting or less exciting. I couldn't just be with myself. I couldn't just love myself. I couldn't just appreciate where I was. I was always trying to fuck with it. And that was because my mental and emotional patterns were dysregulated from all the trauma from my past, from not feeling like I was enough or feeling like I was neglected emotionally or feeling like my parents didn't care about me or all of the instability in my family environment. That shaped my perceptual filters to always be on edge, to be either hyper-vigilant or to be disassociated or to think that life is so hard because I just didn't have the skills. Nobody helped me develop my consciousness, my personality, to be like, "Barty, let me get to know you. Let me believe in you. Let me support you." It just felt like I was doing this whole thing alone. It's always felt that way. And maybe you can relate. Maybe you feel that way, too. But I'm telling you, I'm kind of on the other side now. And it's like, I've worked through all those things. And life is incredible. Life is beautiful. I've gotten to a place where I've developed so much self-confidence, so much self-worth, so much self-esteem. I've expanded my map of reality 100x, a thousand x. I've been able to make connections around everything that's ever happened from the point I was born to the moment I am right now talking to you. And I've been able to work through my past and reprocess it and reinterpret it and forgive myself and forgive my parents and forgive anybody who I ever held resentment towards or I thought wronged me. It was all divinely perfectly planned and orchestrated for me to be here now transmitting my voice to you, sharing it with you so that you can begin this process. It was all divinely planned, divinely ordered. I just, that's how I've accepted it. I was born on this planet to go through these painful, challenging experiences. I was gifted with the ability to synthesize them and communicate them and articulate them in such a way so that other people, so that I could speed up other people's learning process and give it back to them so that I can move the light of consciousness forward. All past has led me to become the stop drinking coach. And in your own life, as you go through this process, you will get there too with enough personal growth, with enough commitment, with enough mindfulness, with enough healing, with enough of expanding your map of what it, what this is, what this three-dimensional experience of reality is, what consciousness is. When you dive deep enough into this stuff, and you work this process, committedly, you will get to a pass where everything will just kind of make sense. And as you do that, you start to develop a sense of love for yourself and a love for this experience of being alive, of having five senses, of being able to smell, taste, touch, hear, listen to music, eat delicious food, smell it in incredible fragrance, to be present and to look into somebody else's eyes, to experience a good hug, a good cuddle, like, dude, not that long ago, universe is existing, and we were in the void unconscious, and then we were blessed this gift to be alive, to experience. To be alive is such a gift, to be here present, seeing, listening, eating, smelling, interfacing is such a gift, and then it disappears again forever as far as we know. We go back into the void for another trillion years, I don't know, but the universe was around 13 and a half billion years, and then I popped up, I didn't ask to be born, but I'm here now, and from the moment I can remember where I started to really become conscious at five, six, seven years old, I've just been so fascinated with this thing. I was like, I didn't fucking ask to be here, what is this? What is this matter? What is this material? Why do I have a body? I remember I would sit there and I would just open and close my fists and move my fingers and look at them, and be so shocked. Like, what is this? Why am I here? For what? Why is it this way? Why do I have five senses? Why do humans, why do we have, like, like, I was just so, you can sense it. I'm still so profoundly bewildered by this experience of being alive, that we're just floating on a rock in what seems like infinite space in every direction, and nobody has any idea. idea how this came to be? Dude, it's, it's, and then we get like, and then we get side tracked with, with alcohol, and then we just start systematically committing a slow suicide because we don't know how to manage the voice inside of our head, and the body that that we inhabit gets too overwhelmed like it's, it red lines, and we don't know how to breathe through it and process through it, so we just go pour poison down the system to, to, to hack it. Like, dude, why? What, what is this thing? And I encourage you to, to, to get just as curious and be wildered as I am, because there's nothing normal about just waking up and doing this thing called being a human. Every moment is absolutely insane. It is such a gift. And it's finite, man. It's not going to be here forever. So whatever you have inside of you that you need to figure out how to process, heal, work through, get proactive, get fucking super proactive about it. You have to live proactively. If you want more than you've always gotten, you have to do more than you've always done. You have to get proactive. Not, not just roll with the punches, because that's going to be average and you're going to get what, what is average in everything in your life, in your health, your weight, your income, your confidence, how much you earn. If you act averagely and you think averagely, if you do what everybody else does, you're going to, you're just going to get what the energy exchange of average, average relationships, everything else, it's all going to be average. So you have to get proactive, meaning you have to ignite a flame of curiosity within yourself to start getting fucking answers. You have to start getting answers. You have to get proactive about your operating system. You have to get proactive about your mind and your energy body. You are a conscious witness observing the unfolding of your life. You are not your mind. Okay. Your mind is a tool that you can sit back and observe. Okay. And you inhabit a vehicle, a body, which has fluctuations of energy. These are called feelings and emotions. And rather than getting tied up in those feelings and emotions and creating these narratives and stories about what they mean, understand that it's just your nervous system activating. And as a result, it creates a cascade of effects in your brain. But you can observe all that. You can notice that. But you have to want more. You have to want something different. I can't go inside of you and light a flame. You have to want it. That's why you can't force anybody to quit drinking. You know, I can't force my clients to quit drinking. I can show you the way. I can give you the map. I can give you all the tools, all the strategies, help you learn how to navigate some of these things going on inside you. But you're the one that has to do the work. You have to be the one that takes the first step. So play the tape forward. OK, play the tape forward all the time. You should. That's how you should like play the tape forward in constructive ways, not all the time and like just constantly getting anxious about your future, you know, and creating these internal representations that aren't going to serve you. But play the tape forward with regard to like. Regarding the pain of you not changing and allow the pain to drive you to change because humans are more motivated to avoid pain than to pursue pleasure. OK, that's why quote unquote, they say people need to hit a rock bottom to wake up. You don't have to. But when you hit that rock bottom in the pain is so great, you will do anything to not go back to that. So if you haven't hit a rock bottom and destroyed your life and family and you're not out living on the street or whatever else, that's where you have to get honest. You have to visually allow yourself to connect energetically connect with the pain. And that's what playing the tape forward helps you a lot helps you to do. Not only acutely in the moment where you want to drink. So you can see your input first into output to make the connection to see the consequences of your decisions. OK, and to help your brain learn to evolve and develop a sense of wisdom and maturity to be able to begin to see that. As well as the consequences playing the tape forward, if you don't stop drinking and then on a broader scale, what do you want to do here? Why are you alive? And understand that you overcoming alcohol is the bridge to you fulfilling that those dreams and that destiny. So I'm going to leave it there. I appreciate you listening. Playing the tape forward is a very, very powerful strategy and can be used, very effectively in multiple areas of our life. OK, if you play the tape forward when you're trying to quit drinking, it is going to be super, super helpful. OK, but just be mindful, you know, playing the tape forward when your newly sober is different than future tripping. OK, how am I going to get through next month? Next month's vacation. How am I going to be able to, you know, go to that wedding? How am I going to get through summer sober? Right? Like that's different. That's future tripping. We take things one day at a time, always. But when it comes to specifically your drinking, you play the tape forward in the moment when you want to drink and then you play the tape forward in the broader perspective of your life as it relates to alcohol and as it relates to the mark that you want to leave on this planet, the legacy you want to leave behind, the things that you want to express, the way that you want to impact and serve other human beings. Play the tape forward in that and remind yourself that this time is finite. And so the fear, the pain of that not happening of you not expressing that potential of tapping that potential, allow that to fuel your present moment decision to take the next right step to get the help that you need. So I hope this episode was helpful for you and share this with somebody you know who you think it could help. And if you're ready for a new relationship with alcohol, if you really want to step into that next chapter and you want to work with me personally, one on one, go ahead and fill out an application. www.thestobdrinkingcoach.com. I appreciate all of you. I appreciate all of your support. And yeah, I look forward to connecting with you. I will see you in the next video. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star review and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.thestobdrinkingcoach.com and book a call with me. I offer private one on one and group coaching to make letting go of alcohol easier and more sustainable than you ever thought possible. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.