Triggers, Cravings...AKA "The Gap" - Understanding this is KEY

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, it's D.C. fam, it's Barti Arez. I'm going to stop drinking coach, we're back with another episode. And today I want to talk about the gap. If you listen to the last episode I just recorded called "Quitting Drinking is an Initiation," I talk about the gap kind of towards the middle or end of that episode. And I wanted to dig deeper. In fact, when I started recording that one in my car, it was supposed to be about the gap but I found a pocket of flow space and it ended up unfolding into kind of a different, I don't know, different message. But in this one I want to talk about the gap and how the gap is like, it's everything. It's everything. It is the, it is the womb. It's the fertile space, it's the nutrient dense soil in which all of your healing, your transformation, your evolution, your growth into new experiences, into becoming, into embodying the version of yourself that you've always wanted and have inspired towards and have dreamed of. It is all contained within the gap. And so when we go to quit drinking, we're extremely fearful of the concept of quitting drinking. It's unimaginable, it's hard, it's terrifying, it's anxiety provoking, it's all the things, right? It's like, alcohol has been our best friend. It's been there with us since we were a kid through our breakups and through our grief and through our loss and through our stress and through this part of ourself that we haven't wanted to accept and that we've have guilt and shame over. It's been this really fucked up toxic relationship where the sex is great but everything else is a steaming pile of shit. Yet, we go back because of this micro moment of pleasure, right? And so we're afraid to give that up because we think that we won't be able to find that elsewhere in the world and that obviously we know simply just is not true, right? We've all had partners where sex has been great and we've, at some point, have been able to find a way to re-experience and replicate great sex across the board, maybe with somebody else. Maybe it's not 100% the same but it's great. It's a shading, right? And our relationship to our internal environment are thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, our pains, our stressors, our triggers, our life contemplations and all of the different roles that alcohol plays to come in and manage and mitigate those experiences for us, either remove its pain or discomfort or to increase its pleasure around is similar, right? Like we can go into the world and we will be able to find pleasure and experience and social connection and confidence and all of these things again. Is it going to be 100% packaged in the same box and shiny bow as alcohol? No, it's not. And that's okay and it doesn't need to and it doesn't have to, right? And when you begin to look at alcohol and understand alcohol and see alcohol, not just as the first 15 minutes, the first 30 minutes, the first hour of experience where you get the hit of dopamine and you get that sense of relief, but you play the tape forward far enough and if you haven't listened to play the tape forward, it's one of my most popular episodes, scroll down and find it. If you play the tape forward far enough every time you have a drink, it's also packaged with a bunch of dog shit, with a bunch of manure, with a bunch of like pain and damage and loss and tragedy and like feeling like crap and shame and guilt and everything in between. So it's really important to remember that like the program that your brain runs when it comes to alcohol or sort of any substance or behavior where you are caught in the cycle of short term pain relief is that it's like a tape. It's like a, I don't know, it's like a movie. It plays the first 10% of the movie and it's like, oh yeah, nice sunny day out. I keep saying that because it's nice sunny day out here in Austin. I'm like, oh nice sunny day out. Perfect day to go day drinking, right? Perfect time to go day drinking. And it plays the tape forward the first 10%. And it's like, oh, okay, yeah. So now I've got the dopamine. I've got this like feeling of anticipation of like, okay, I can start to feel it in my body. I've got this like kind of craving coming through viscerally in my mind. I'm like imagining how it's going to go. And then I sit down and I have that drink and then I just, I have this inkling that those first two drinks are going to be really nice. But then after that second drink, I know what happens. That second drink really starts to wear off. And because I'm an alcoholic and I have alcohol use disorder or I was and I used to, I'm not presently drinking so I don't. I know that as soon as that second drink starts to wear off in a few minutes, I'm going to get this really like uncomfortable feeling of anxiety and compulsion to have a third and then a fourth and then I'm six drinks in and I'm like, pretty buzzed. And then I'm probably going to have two to six more and I'm going to end up spending, you know, $140 and yeah. And then I'm going to drive home. I'm probably going to drive drunk. And then when I get home, I'm going to eat a bunch of dog shit food. I'm going to gorge myself. I'm not going to be conscious of what I'm putting into my body. And if somebody's home, they're going to see me stumbling in, looking like a bit of a fune. And so that's like not a good look either way. That's not good for like respect and admiration from other people. And then I'm going to pass out and I'm going to wake up at 3 a.m. and I'm going to be fucking so dehydrated and thirsty that I'm going to drink whatever is next to me. And then I'm going to not be able to fall asleep probably for 45 minutes because I've had a neurochemical glutamate rebound in my brain that got suppressed while I was drinking. And then I'm going to be anxious and I'm going to wake up with a pounding headache, parched, tired, exhausted, lethargic, full of brain fog wondering why the fuck did I go out and have eight to 12 drinks on a fucking taco Tuesday? Like was that necessary? Right. I get to work, feel like shit, my eyes are puffy, people can probably tell. Now I'm looking through the fucking CRM on all these leads that I had to follow up on. And the whole thing is just a moment to moment disaster waiting until lunch so I can go get some food and hopefully start feeling better. It's the same game, right? Now people who drink love to compare themselves. So you might be listening to this and say, you know, well, you know what, Barty, I'm actually, you know, yeah. I'm not drinking eight to 12 drinks. I have two to three classes of wine a night and my hangovers aren't nearly as bad as yours. And but I'm gaining a little bit of weight and I noticed that like my attitude with my partner isn't how I want it to be. And so am I really the same? Are we the same person? Are you, is this program going to work for me? Like what do I do here? And it's like, yes, it's all the same. It's all the same. It doesn't matter if you're having two drinks a day. Like I just neurochemically build a really high tolerance faster than most people. My capacity to handle and manage poisonous substances in my body, whether it was alcohol or cocaine or anything else, just for me, had a high limit. For some people, it's like two or three, right? You might be, you know, 80 pounds less than I am. You might, you know, be smaller and stature and fray. You have a different capacity that your consciousness can handle and enjoys being out of its mind or out of control or disconnected. Like, there's a lot of variables that affect all these things, right? Like it's, it's not, it's not apples for apples. There's like several probably dozen or at least a dozen variables that's going to affect these things. So yes, it's, it's kind of all the same, right? It doesn't matter if like you're having 12 drinks a day or if you're having four drinks a day and you can't stop. Same thing. You have an unhealthy dysfunctional relationship with alcohol and it's causing more harm than it is good and you have an inability to manage your consumption or moderate your consumption or control your consumption or stay consistent and with what you say you're going to consume despite harmful consequences appearing over and over again in your life. So now that we've got that out of the way, we've built a little bit of context here. Let's really talk about the gap. What is the gap? So the gap is the space between like when you either get a trigger for a craving or you experience this point of discomfort, call it overwhelm or stress or disconnection or grief or sadness or boredom or loneliness, right? The gap is that space in which you experience it before something changes and transforms. So that space might last a few minutes, it might last a couple hours, but who you are and how you be and how you show up and what you choose to do and how you decide to apply meaning to meaning like what's the story you tell yourself about what's happening? What's the actual like language that you use? Is it positive and resourceful or is it disempowering and negative, right? The story that you tell yourself about the experience you're having, colors and creates the experience, right? I don't know how in tune you are with what I'm about to share with you, but this is very important for you to like understand and accept as a human being. But experiences themselves aren't necessarily like they don't contain full substance until you apply a story to them and the story is made up and it's influenced by a lot of other things, right? You learn this in like landmark forum if you guys have ever heard of that. Some of you have, it was like one of the kind of the older kind of well-known kind of deep intensive personal development workshops that you would go through like over a three-day weekend where if you've got trauma and limiting beliefs and all these different things that are like causing confusion and chaos and self-sapotage in your life, like you're just like dude I want to figure out my life and like start moving towards my goals, but I can't and I like you go to landmark. And one of the first things they teach you and a lot of landmark is based in NLP, NERL Linguistic Programming which a lot of my program contains because I found it to be one of the most potent, powerful and effective frameworks for creating transformation and lasting change. One of the things they teach you there is that as human beings we are meaning making machines. That is what we do, right? The baseline of being a human is having and using language, right? But what is language? Language is a series of symbols that we all use, let's say in a defined culture. It's a series of sounds and symbols that help us understand something, right? But what's really interesting about language is that it's made up and it's not like super real, like language can be changed. And the story that we tell ourselves about and experience can also be changed. And that in of itself is where freedom and liberation occurs. Because what happens in our life is that we go through life and we go through these experiences and in that point of moment, in that experience, we apply a meaning to that experience. This person hurt me. This person didn't care about me. This person is mean. This person is. I'm not lovable. I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy. I'm not likable. People don't accept me. It is not safe to reveal my creativity. It is not safe to tell people how I actually feel. It's not safe to share and express my emotion, right? So we create a story around an experience. We have a singular experience in our life where sometimes that singular experience becomes like multiple similar experiences that we might have with a parent or like a partner, right? And we get caught in this like pattern or program or loop or like behavioral sort of relation. And then we apply a story to it and we're like, oh, this is what it means about them. This is what it means about the world. This is what it means about God or the universe. And this is what it means about me, right? It shapes our perception of ourself and our identity. And then these stories literally become these like blockages and guardrails and filters for the rest of the information that comes through our five senses as we continue to move forward into the world. Long after that experience is totally done, totally over, we're not hanging out with the same people anymore. We're not having the same types of relationships anymore. But like that whole thing is still stuck in our architecture psychologically in terms of our self perception and our thoughts and the way those things are influenced as well as our emotional body and our nervous system. And they're both linked, right? So the way that you choose to interpret and story tell what's happening will define the experience. But the good news is is you can change the story of what's happening. So when we find yourself, for example, in a triggered state and we're super fucking overwhelmed and we're like, damn, cigarette sounds really good. Alcohol sounds really good. And then we get that craving in our body and we play the movie around how every time we've been stressed out, we drink and then felt good and it was fine and we got to disconnect and find relief, right? Like the story is, I'm overwhelmed, fuck these people, I'm tired of this shit, whatever it is. Let me get a drink. That's going to make me feel better. And then your body is in this state of like fire and chaos psychologically and emotionally as you do that. But then, right, why don't we change the story as we meet that gap? How can we change the story? Can the story be? Hmm. Okay. So right now, my mind and my body is presenting an old residual pattern in coping strategy that I consciously and intelligently know is actually causing harm, shame, guilt, destruction to my life and to the life of those around me. Okay. And that the reason my body and my mind is on fire and is telling me to have a drink is because I've done that before and it helped, but I consciously know that that actually would not help. And that if eventually I want to get to a place where I can manage all forms of stress, fear, anxiety, doubt, whatever it is, grief, right? And that I eventually want to be strong and resilient enough to handle it without drinking and destroying myself and poisoning my life and poisoning my family and my lineage that I just have to sit here and pause and recognize what's happening. Play the tape forward, imagine having a drink and then play the tape all the way through to imagine exactly what's going to happen and realize that that's not the route that I want to go. Remember that this craving is actually temporary, even though my mind and body is telling me this intensity will amplify until I get a drink. It's actually not true. My brain is just going into a survival-based state because it's trying to escape pain, but I know I'm actually safe. I know I'm actually just at my work or at my house or whatever. Like there's no gun to my head. Objectively, I am totally safe. There's no harm happening to me right now. Besides raw sensation that I would just deem as uncomfortable that I don't want to meet. Okay. And that, if I stay present through this and learn how to cope through this, which simply means to bear, there's no magic formula for coping. Everybody has different coping strategies for some people walking or running or listening to a podcast or doing breath work or there's a hundred of them that we could apply. Find the one that works best for you. Find the two to three to four that you know, just really you enjoy. If I can learn how to cope, aka, bear this for the next 30 minutes or an hour and I don't have to do it alone. I can do it with a battle buddy like inside the SDC program. I can FaceTime a friend or a trusted, you know, somebody in my network who I could just be here with through this process, drink some water, you know, take a shower, whatever it is. If I can get through this one, this intensity will dissipate and I will go back to a more neutral neutral state. This is fact. This is how human physiology works is how our brain or nervous system like you will go through an arc of intensity in this gap and you will meet a point where you are like holy shit, what am I supposed to do? This is like really intense or crazy and you will bear through it. You will continue to breathe through it. You will continue to hold the weight. You will continue to pay back the residual debt and the money that you've borrowed from the alcohol banks to numb yourself rather than regulating in the moment. You outsourced your regulation, your happiness, your grief, your sadness, your happiness, your connection to alcohol, but you did it with an interest rate. And so now what's happening is the collector is coming to the door through that trigger and saying, "Hey, it's time for you to pay up." And you're like, "Listen, I'm actually not going to keep borrowing from you. I'm going to pay back the interest." And the way that I pay back this interest is by bearing it psychologically and emotionally and recognizing that I did this to myself, not always my fault because I may have been tricked and influenced and marketed too and I didn't was not educated on alcohol, but hey, nobody forced the alcohol down my throat. I did this to myself and now it is time for me to go through an initiation process of my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual evolution where I learn how to bear the pain of my life rather than running from it and numbing from it and avoiding it. And I don't care what it is. Insert the blank for you. Somebody passed away. They divorced you. They died. They made fun of you. You don't feel like you're good enough. You don't feel like if you put the work in and put everything in, you could still make it. And so you carry shame and guilt. You compare yourself. Whatever it is, insert the blank of pins and needles and the language that's attached to it. All of it can be processed through your system. All of it can be repaturned. All of it can be reprogrammed. It can be forgiven. It could be let go. Maybe you can't change the experience in the exact way that it happened, but you can change your memory and interpretation of how it went down and what it meant from the party who may have done it to you as the victim or have been perceived to be the victim in that moment. The story you told yourself about that other person, the story you told yourself about what it meant for you to be the experience of that and all of the layers of outcome that comes from those things. All of it can be changed and healed and reprocessed. But it's like, do you have the courage to recognize that you have been living your life and your consciousness in a finite frequency for the last X amount of years? You've been living in a way where your lifestyle is a certain way. You wake up, you put pants on the same way, you brush your teeth the same way, you have the same routine, you hang out with the same people, you talk about the same sports, you talk about the same conversations, you get lost in the same drama, you talk about the same people, you've got the same set of perspectives and opinions about the world and the like you've been living a repeatable predictable program. We all have I do too in my own ways, like we all do, right? So I'm not like putting you down here. I'm saying like you have been living in a frequency and in a set of patterns and programs in autopilot. And this is where the autopilot got you experiencing the things that you're experiencing while listening to my voice and my podcast. So if you want change, if you want transformation, if you are at point A and you're like, you know what? I think I want point B and point B represents an elevation, a healing, a freedom, an expansion, greater success, greater whatever. Then that means you're going to have to move through the gap. The gap is going to be a path that you're going to walk where everything that you want on point B, when it meets your current frequency of point A, it's going to cause friction and resistance and create discomfort. And so how you handle the discomfort in that moment will determine the life that you live and becomes your karmic infinite life cycle of like what you do. I don't know if that's real or not, but it's like it's interesting to think about it that way. If you came to Earth to learn a bunch of lessons and to not make the same mistake over and over and over again, that's kind of the interesting thing about mistakes in life or like different levels of experience. Is that when you keep running into like a similar problem, that problem will keep fucking representing itself until you learn the inherent spiritual wisdom of that problem. And then you integrate it, become wiser, more mature, have a greater vision and vantage point and your brain has a better ability to connect point it like connect the dots like one plus one equals two. So don't fucking keep doing that because it it's not going to equal two. It's going to equal something else like right? That's what wisdom is. That's what maturity and growth and evolution is. Isn't it interesting how you will continue to relive the same bullshit problems and complain about it when you're making the choice and not making better choices to figure it out until you learn the lesson. All pain is a teacher for your benefit. But when we're living in the 3D, not connected to a grander spiritual understanding of our self in life and like the symbiotic relationship of 8 billion people in life and nature and planet and weather and like just how the whole thing turns and you think like you're the most self like you're the most important person on the world like you're self-serving your own selfish needs like it's not about anyone else. It's about my pain. It's about getting high. It's about my relief. It's about what I want. It's about what I need like fuck everybody else like you got a show open a way that feels good for my nervous system. Like when you're living in this lower dimensional frequency which many of us are until we begin to heal and wake up and expand our consciousness. I used to be there too. Maybe some of this resonates. You're like fuck holy shit. Like I'm recognizing parts of kind of how I've been thinking and living and I haven't been able to put words to it but I've known I meant for more and there's got to be more than this. Like yeah, I know because I've walked the exact evolutionary conscious path that you're on. Right? Like you begin to recognize that in order to change you have to just basically develop courage. That's all it is. You have to have courage to go through the gap of uncertainty. You have to go and you have to expose yourself to different types of information that like you're not mastered in yet. You have to put yourself in different environments that might feel uncomfortable. Right? You might have to say no to things that you really want to say yes to. But guess what? It's all just discomfort. It's all just pins and needles in your body. That's kind of like you know when you think like when you really think about evolution when you think about like the apex predator when you think about the most let's say successful human being and I'm not just talking money here. I'm talking athlete. I'm talking the most successful relationship therapist in the world. I'm talking the greatest poet. I'm talking the world most renowned painter whether they're the best or not is objective but let's say the most well known. The greatest author. I don't know film the blank. Right? The most successful. They're the ones who have learned and who have committed to bearing the most discomfort through the process. Now here's the good news. The discomfort that you bear through the process isn't infinitely uncomfortable forever. The cosmic joke that God gives us, the cosmic secret is he says what I require from you is a level of clarity and commitment and an initial pursuit of the discomfort even though every cell and fiber of your being wants to run the other way. But if you do that, I have inhabited your consciousness into a body that has the capacity to get stronger, to increase its resilience and to expand its load bearing capacity of that discomfort. So as you step forward in faith and in surrender and meet me to the parts of yourself that are uncomfortable, I too will match and mirror and meet you by having the innate capacity to heal, by offering you a spiritual lesson of forgiveness and the ability to let go and the capacity and sovereignty to change the meaning and the story that you had applied to that discomfort and pain so that you can develop the sovereignty and self-respect to know that you chose something new for yourself, where you can feel more empowered. Right? Like, dude, it's going to meet you. When you walk the gap, the gap will meet you. You're not going to be going in and just walking through fire infinitely forever. Right? And you already know this. I'm just here to remind you. I'm here to remind you. When you decide that you want to go from being a totally normal person who maybe works out once a week or something, let's say, to running, doing an iron man, and you start out being able to run half a mile before you get super-winded, if you train every day when you don't want to. If every day you wake up and you're like, "I fucking really don't want to go outside and run right now," and the thought and idea of running and imagining yourself running for 10 minutes is just pure discomfort. But then you go do it. Well guess what's going to happen? You're going to become more resilient and it's going to become easier and that half a mile is going to become a breeze eventually and then you're going to run a mile faster than you were running the half a mile. Like, do you get that? Do you get that alcohol recovery and addiction recovery is the same? You forgot because we all forget because that's what we're doing here. That's what the universe is doing is it's forgetting and remembering. That's the only game that it could play. Is it forgets? And then it remembers. Everything is the great equalizer. It's the clearer. If you knew everything, right? Like, the shit would be fucking boring. There would be no stakes. There would be no experience. There would be no contrast. Contrast is the zest and value and nectar of life. The only reason you ever get to experience happy is because you feel sad. The only reason you get to really appreciate when you have a lot of love and connection in your life is because you know what it felt like to be disconnected and lonely. The reason and part of the reason you enjoy drinking so much and what it does for you is because you know the contrast of the absence of alcohol. Disconnection, fear, lack of confidence, anxiety, not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy. So when you finally do from the alcohol, you really value it and you really appreciate it and you're afraid to let it go. But what I'm telling you, my friend, is that as a human being, you are whole and complete. It doesn't matter if you've made mistakes. It doesn't matter if you fucked up. It doesn't matter if you got the short end of the stick and everyone fucked you over the first 15 years of your life. Whatever is inside of you can be resolved in due time. And that is why you're here on earth. Not just to fucking work, not just to watch Netflix, not just to fuck around and waste your time. But to honor this vehicle, this consciousness, this gift of being alive. And I know it doesn't feel like a gift all the time when you're in pain. And I know it doesn't feel like this universe actually loves you and wants to give you everything that you want when you've just experienced a lot of let down and heartache and abuse and everything in between. But it's like, can we find the spiritual medicine in it all? And can we find the deeper lessons that we're here to learn such as courage, such as personal sovereignty, such as self-reliance instead of dependence? These spiritual lessons are hard, right? The lesson of poverty is painful. But then when you find and experience abundance, the abundance is beautiful because you know poverty, you've been without, you felt what comes from that experience, whether it's longing or shame or discomfort or sacrifice or feeling not good enough or feeling like because you don't have resources, it means x, y or z about your character. You know, that in of itself is part of the conscious evolution of our reality. As we get to experience these different layers of dimension of experience and it's all there to teach you something. But when you take the pain and you take the discomfort and you say, fuck it, I'm throwing in the towel, it's too much, I just can't handle it, then your life becomes stuck and that pain will never resolve. It's like a thorn in your fucking side and you're like, no, the thorn is just here now. Like it's too big. It's in too deep. It's like, no, pull the fucking thorn out. You're not the only one with a thorn. 10 million people at least right now in this very moment you are taking a breath have the same fucking thorn and have pulled it out one way or another. So it's like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? And I know it's scary to pull the thorn out. I know when you touch the thorn, the thorn starts to hurt. I know in a way you've lived your life where having that thorn for the last 10 years has become part of who you are and what's safe and known and familiar and comfortable and people get to feel bad about you because of your thorn and certain people look at you with a certain set of, I don't know, feelings or, you know, they walk a certain way around you or they say certain things or don't say certain things because of that thorn. That feels good for you and that fills you up and that satiates you and that makes you feel comfortable. So it's like, who are you without the thorn? I don't know. That's what you're fucking anyone you want to be. But do you have the balls and the courage to claim that for yourself? And if you don't, I'll tell you why you don't because at some point throughout your development somebody told you, you can't or you're not good enough or you're not cut out for it or you're not worthy or that fucking, who the hell are you to have the courage to stand up for what you believe in and express your thoughts or your emotions or your world view? We don't fucking do that. That's unsafe. You're going to get cracked with a fucking belt if you ever do that again. It was a program. It was a facade. It was a story from some other person. It was an imperfect lesson from an imperfect teacher that you took on as fact that you unconsciously unknowingly as a kid and as a teenager and as an adult. You allowed to direct an influence your entire life. And that's fucking sobering. If you're in your 30s, 40s or 50s or even 60s and can think back to a moment or a memory or an experience with somebody whom you loved or trusted or were surrendered or vulnerable to in a moment where you were had your guard down and just beied who you were being and was met with a radical, energetic experience or repression or shutdown or whatever. Shame guilt and embarrassment, fill in the blank. And that sticks with you and that sticks with you. And because that sticks with you and you push it down and you suppress it and you repress it because it's too painful to bear. You don't want to relive that memory, you don't want to relive that experience. You don't know how the fuck to make sense of it. You don't want to acknowledge that it somehow means something about other people or about yourself. And so you forget about it. But guess what? Now you've got a major fucking distortion in the energetic plumbing of your consciousness and your heart and your nervous system. So what do you think is going to happen? I'll tell you what's going to happen. More and more experiences are going to start to get filtered through that energetic distortion which lays more layers of belief and perception and experience and reactivity towards yourself and towards the world through that lens. And then your truth is going to be blocked. Your authentic expression, your creativity, your potential is going to be blocked because of that distortion. And guess what happens when your truth is blocked? Your life suppresses. Your energy suppresses. Your confidence lowers. Your self-esteem lowers. Your self-worth lowers. Your. The available energetic resources that you have to be productive and to push forward lowers. Your courage lowers. You become more sensitive to risk. You become more sensitive to pain. Your threat detection center is hyperactive. You see things, you hear things and you interpret things in a way that aren't necessarily reflective of objective truth because everything is being filtered through these energetic blockages and distortions of your past. Guess what? As a kid in high school and then you're exposed to alcohol and get a fucking master's degree in drinking and parting and socializing with alcohol for four years. Then you get out of college and find your first job that you're not particularly stoked about and so you keep drinking and you keep doing the thing. Then you're always slightly a little hungover and you're always unclear and you're always looking forward to the next best thing. Nothing in life is a drug that fucking floods your brain with dopamine the way alcohol does. You can begin to see the distortion that you've created for yourself. Now you're like, "Well, I'm trying to quit drinking and I go two weeks and I keep drinking. What's going on? Why? What's wrong with me?" I'm really listening to all my episodes and I'm hoping that it's starting to become really clear. You're a conscious witness to an operating system that has lots of bells and whistles and mechanics that nobody ever taught you. We're never taught the flow and how consciousness builds. You never deeply examined your beliefs and your values and your thoughts and the stories and the meanings that you apply. Like, "We've just been doing enough to get by because that's what we do as human beings. We do enough to get by until whatever we're doing really doesn't work and then we're like, "Alright, I guess I've changed." That's what humans do. We're like Neanderthals. We're hunter-gatherers just because we have iPhones and paved roads and buildings and grocery stores and high rises and fucking dude. We are very primitive animals like that kind of do enough to get by and we try to figure out our point of contribution to our community and then like, "That's it." We eat, we overeat, we fucking chill, we manage our energy until we have to go hunt or eat or gather again. So, like, if you've been living that way and it's not working and you're like, "There's gotta be fucking more to this than I encourage you to invest in a program that lays it all out for you and helps you understand it." Because if you don't know what you're trying to figure out, it's like trying to climb Mount Everest and there's 35,000 routes up that mountain. Imagine that. Maybe not 35,000. Let's say there's 100 paths up Mount Everest. Say there's 50 of them. One of them will get you there in six days. One of them will take 35 days, at least 50 of them will never get you there because they just meet certain parts that there's walls that you have to scale and climb. It's just like, "I don't know. I'm just like throwing out ideas here, right?" So if you don't know what you're searching for, if you don't have a map around how you got here and why it is the way that it is and why you keep struggling the way that you're struggling, I encourage you to work a program because I needed a program. I tried for 15 years to quit drinking by just raw-dogging my way through a couple months here and there and it worked for a couple months here and there, but I always went back because who I was as a person, consciously, energetically, my nervous system, my internal architecture, myself, belief, how I lived, how I managed my social life, how I managed my time, my values and everything in between my friend was a totally different version of Bardia. And I'm quite a bit different now. You know? Quite a bit different now. Better in every which way. I'm better at socializing. I've got more confidence. I'm way better at managing and regulating my thoughts and my emotions. I'm way more resourceful. If there's any part of my life where I have to move from point A to point B, I can do it faster, more effectively, more enjoyably now than ever before. Life is just infinitely better. And so I was living in a paradigm where I thought making myself feel good and escaping the fact that I didn't like my job or like wasn't sure about life or what to do or how to heal from my crazy childhood. And I just thought and believed that alcohol was it like when I was living in that paradigm, I thought that that's what it was. Like that was it. Like, okay, dude, I'm 30 years old. I've seen all of life. Like what do you want from me? You know, okay, no, I haven't gotten married or had kids, but like, do you have seen it all? I've met all the different styles of people and I've done some traveling. It's like, okay, I got this thing. What are you going to show me and tell me and help me experience that I haven't already experienced myself? It's like, dude, I had no idea. I had no idea. You know what's interesting about experience is that experience is inward, right? Experience is something that we have on the inside. It's not on the outside. It doesn't matter how many places I travel to, how many cities I go to. My experience is infinite on the inside. Does that make sense? Like there's a finite of places you can travel to, but there's an infinite level of depth of experience that you can have when you go inward to exploring versus outward to exploring. Right? Every spiritual and religious doctrine, esoteric doctrines, has the same thing. It's a stop going for things outside of yourself and begin your personal journey inward. And quitting drinking is your initiation process to learning that. It's almost like, dude, it's like a ride a passage quitting drinking, you know? Look at it. Look at it. Zoom out for a second. Look at life through a 50,000-foot view. Look at how there's like 8 billion little ants on this earth. Call them humans, little ants like, "Pff, everyone's running around. They're saying, 'Go on a work, caring stuff on their back, contributing, going on the grocery store, getting gas.'" Like, everyone's just like moving around. Right? And then look at how, like, as you go through this experience for 100 years, there's this thing that comes in that fucking claws into your side that hooks its fucking tentacles into your mind and into your body. It's called alcohol. And then look at how, like, the huge majority of the population once they discovered in their teens or 20s, like, totally. Look at how it totally alters their consciousness and influences their decision-making and how they spend their free time and what they pay attention to and how they predictably feel through the pursuit of it and through the post-output of it after the alcohol wears off. Look at that. Look at how it just controls as, like, an entity, as an energetic entity, what it represents. And look at its mass influence by our society and through the system and how the ones who are extracting money, the ones at the top who are extracting money from the bottom, further creating divide and imbalance through greed and through power and through all of the, like, the dark forces of reality. Look. Right? Look at how those who are constantly consumed by alcohol are having their life force, their energy, their creativity, their motivation, their potential, their actual financial, like, dollars siphoned from them, their health, their lifespan. Right? Like, dude, this is like an entity. I don't know. I don't know these things. Like, but if you look at it through this lens, dude, it's siphoning. And then look at this spiritual development that comes from waking up to this process to recognizing, oh, the spiritual principles of outsourcing my internal management to a substance that I have to pay for that destroys me, that siphons that ruins my neurochemistry, that makes me a slave that turns me into a fucking fiend where I filter every goddamn thought around when my next drink is going to be, ah, I should not live this way. This is a trap. This is the forbidden fruit. I was lied to. I was tricked by Hollywood and movies and marketing. and the fucking industrial social complex of fun and the illusions that come from that, which is make money, have sex, beautiful woman, party, this, that, like these distractions that are all built around money and filling clubs and making money for people who own bars and fucking the whole entertainment complex. Not to say that entertainment isn't good and having fun isn't super enjoyable. I love to do all these things. Love it. But look at it for what it is. Look at it, look at how it is constantly extracting of you. You can't sit here and say that people who are constantly drinking like are in full control of their life, they're just not. Now is anybody in full control? No, because everyone's got some addiction to something, whether it's your phone or whatever, right? But it's like at least like let's try to eliminate the ones that are clearly obviously siphoning, extracting, ruining, damaging, right? So getting back to the thing, like look at the, right? And so you look at alcohol as like this, this initiation, this quitting of alcohol is this right of passage, right? Look at the, look at the positive, look at the values, look at the innate inborn spiritual growth and development and maturation that comes from this initiation process, right? Look at the awareness that comes from it. So like one, okay, see this objectively from 50,000 foot view and like this insidious energetic nature, right? The Arabs, they call it alcohol. It's like the demonic energy, right? The insidious nature of this thing. But then when the individual wakes up and recognizes the toxicity of this relationship, look at what comes, right? The reclamation of personal sovereignty, the reclamation of personal agency, the capacity to learn mental and emotional regulation which is like the two core skills that influence all of life and reality, who you are, your health, how much money you make, like your capacity for love and the relationships that you have, like your whole quality of life is predicated upon how you manage your mind and your emotions, right? So the seed is contained within this incredibly harmful, nefarious toxic substance that is like the fucking forbidden fruit, right? That everybody gets caught up into, right? That you're afraid to let go. You're afraid to let go of the forbidden fruit, not recognizing that contained within the spiritual development, the spiritual archetype, that this chapter of alcohol in your life actually contains the seeds, the seeds that will help you get and experience everything that you want, that you're trying to get through the alcohol, but will never fully satisfy. You see that? See how like God or universe or whatever, like how this super intelligent biological thing that like gifted you the ability to wake up and like communicate and be here in this moment, like do you see how intelligent it is? Do you see how you, I know I, but maybe you have a hard time putting IKEA furniture together, but look at the like insane beauty of what I just shared. That contained within the most difficult aspects of our life and our evolution and the things that we feel like we have to let go of is actually contained within it, power, reclamation, freedom, abundance, sovereignty, love, presence, like what we came here to learn, right, like a big part of life is like these big like archetypes, right? You don't like life isn't just good for the raw sensation of eating a burger. Life isn't just good for the raw sensation of sex. Life isn't good just for the raw sensation of the momentary excitement during an action scene in a movie, right? What gives your life substance and meaning and depth and a rhythm and a path to follow are all of these bigger archetypes of life. Learning what connection really means. Learning what love really means in all of its dimensions, in all of its forms, not just the airy, fairy bliss and the intoxication when you first meet somebody, but it's depth, it's resilience, it's like longing, it's losing of, it's anticipation of, it's presence, it's respect in all of its dimensions. That is what gives our life the meaning and substance and experience that we get to have for a hundred years. And so it's like ask yourself at what point through who I am and who I be and what my beliefs and thoughts and experiences are, have I become fucking single dimensional? Or it's like, all right, wake up with a hangover, fucking muscle my way through this job, get home and drink because I'm annoyed, I'm hurt and I'm lonely. And then now things are tolerable. Do it again. Do it. You've gotten lost. Please allow me the privilege to help walk you back home. That's what we're all doing here. With every friend that we have, with every boss that we have at our job that we get, with every lover that we fall into a portal with, we're learning to walk each other back home. When you go to the bar and you shoot the shit with your friends, you're having a conversation and through that conversation, there's gonna be a thread and a reminder of like the truth. So quitting drinking is about finally coming back home to yourself. You got lost, my friend. You had a ton of fucking experiences that were wild and crazy. Maybe you weren't paying very close attention throughout the entire process and you were just kind of rolling with the punches. You were doing what everybody else was doing and things were okay and things were right, but then things started to fucking get off track. And now things to really seem to really be off track and you're like, what are we doing? It's time to walk back home to who you are. Your truth, your humanity, it's time to begin discovering and remembering your divinity and all of the things in between. And how is this done? It's done by developing the courage to move through the gap of uncertainty, of a little bit of discomfort, of things that are just new, that's it. For you, it's new. For me, it's not new. When it comes to alcohol and cravings and triggers and fear of missing out and the social aspect, it's not new for me anymore. I'm five years in. There's no gap for me anymore when it comes to alcohol, but there's definitely gaps in other aspects of life. For sure. Never ends. It's a constant evolution and it's beautiful. There's something that happened very recently for me where it feels like I've cracked open in a way that I was unconscious too. Didn't even know, it was right there. The whole time, didn't even know. I had no idea. And I wasn't asking for it. I wasn't expecting it. The timing of it just fucking happened. I'm like, oh, wow, that's insane and that's a beautiful. But it's hard and it seems fucking terrifying and scary and this and that. It's just a gap. It's the same thing with when I was an alcoholic. I was like, oh, but the dopamine, oh, but this part, oh, but this part in that part and trips and socializing and drinking and getting fucked up every night and what about day drinking? I was like, oh, just all the fucking things. But what about managing this part of my pain or what if I quit and then I have to step up and then I put all my effort in and I still fail and then, oh, I'm really a failure. All the fucking things, all the bullshit. - Games that we play yourself to keep ourself busy or alive because that's what we're doing. It's really important to remember to fucking laugh at yourself for taking everything so seriously and having such a big stick up your ass all the time. It's like, yeah, I know. It's real and it's super valid and fucking painful, but also like, it's also, we're all silly a little, really important to remember that. So it's the same thing, right? like as I'm- presented with like this new gap, I'm like, oh, it's like the alcohol inside my brain is speaking. It's like, oh, but it's always been like this. This feels the best. This is the most known and familiar. This is how it's always been. I can't imagine ever letting this part go. Dutton, others in that, boom, boom, boom, like same thing. But it's just a gap of repotterning and programming and then investigating where that started and how you can change it and how you can change the story and how you can let it go and how you can forgive it and how you can look at something differently and how you can begin to embrace something new and how you can recognize that process might not be the exact same and that's okay. Like it's part of the initiation. Every gap offers an initiation, a growth in evolution to something bigger, deeper, more abundant, more successful, more unified, more all of it. Good goodness, goodness, by the way. And it's all a sovereign choice. You've got, I don't know how many years left, you get to choose. How do you want to play it out with your wife and your kids or by yourself for, you know, when you're laying on your deathbed 50 years from now or 20 years from now or 30 years from now, if you get that blessing and you know, you and I don't die in some more tragic unexpected way. Like and you're reflecting like, how would you have wanted to spend today in this moment? Just numbing out on the couch feeling sorry for yourself again. Imagine a corner up in the camera up in the corner of the room like a security camera and you're just like sitting there watching yourself just fucking veging out. Like is that what you wanted for your life? Or do you want today to be a day that like represents you're like, you know what? I'm fucking tired of playing this game and things are going to change now and I don't care what happens along the way. Let me tell you my friend listening to this, if you can get into a mindset where you say it does not fucking matter. It doesn't matter. It does not fucking matter. What happens today? Today and only for today, I'm not going to have a drink. Guess what? You can experience the most orgasmic while the streams of your life. If you just learn how to do that, I promise. And what you will learn by doing that will set the tone and serve as the soil and the seed for quite literally every other possible imaginable experience that you could ever create or call into your life. If you learn how to say that no matter what fucking happens, no matter what, I don't care who dies. I don't care if there's another world war. I don't care if I get fired from my job. And I don't care if my kids piss me off so much that I just want to fucking tear my head off. That no matter what happens, I'm just not going to consume alcohol. I will find a way to shut my eyes and go to sleep without alcohol. And I will apply every other tool and strategy in the book during that gap to figure it out. If you can do that, you can accomplish anything. Because who you will become through that process, what you will learn about yourself, your ability to stick to your fucking word, the self-respect that you gain, the agency that you gain, the power that you gain. And then everything that you have to do to uphold that, the learning of different things, mentally and emotionally regulating, clearing your energetic blockages and distortions. So that all the other times where you're not triggered and want to drink, that other 20 hours in your day or 12 hours in your day, whatever, so that you can begin to use that time more effectively because now you're not fucked up all the time. Then once or twice a day, you make that commitment and decision when you're triggered and you get through it. Dude, you cannot imagine what's available to you on the other side of this thing. You know, and think of it this way. If you're like the thought and idea of taking it one day at a time or telling myself today, I'm not going to drink as like overwhelming. Think of it this way. You already have the blueprint for it, my friend. You just have to dig deep and really understand what I'm saying here. Okay. Imagine like something that is an absolute like hard no to you. I have one that's really obvious. It's textual. I don't know if it's like too crude to say, but like imagine some stranger coming up to you, man or woman, telling you like, hey, I want to have sex with you in this moment and like fornicate with you. And it's like total crossing of boundaries. This person you are absolutely not attracted to like hideous, disgusting, like no. Feel that no in your body. Feel how strong it is. Feel how repulsed you are by the thought and idea of that person entering even within a foot of your personal space. Like imagine what that person looks like. Just repulsed. Feel the certainty of that no in your mind. How it's not even up for fucking debate. To understand that, it's not even up for debate. Feel that energetic template in your mind and your body. You know what that feels like, right? We can copy and paste that over to alcohol. We can say, apps of fucking loot.ly know. I don't care if I have a craving. I don't care if you come up to me and offer me money or give me a flower to make me feel cute before. You know, it's a it's a hard, unquestionable no. So stop wasting your breath and get away from me, right? You can learn to apply that. And I've got something inside SDC that will take you through a deep guided experience like where you're in and like we're talking some hypnosis, some neuro linguistic programming, some like really powerful stuff where you're like in an open receptive suggestive state to really apply some of these like energetic reprogramming and imprints inside of you that will make the process just more unconsciously easier. Like, yeah, no, that's just not happening. Right? I just pulled up to the parking lot here about to go to Whole Foods and grab some food. It's like somebody comes up to me and offers me a drink. It's unquestionably no. There's no doubt. There's no question. There's no convincing. It's not happening. And you can get there, right? Maybe maybe this is like going to be an interesting one for you. Maybe you've never heard anybody explain what I just shared to you. I've got a lot more of this inside of the program. When you begin to understand consciousness, when you begin to understand some NLP, when you begin to understand anchors and triggers and imprints and energy dynamics and visualization and how you can move things around and how you can change the qualities of memories and thoughts and like I'm telling you, this stuff goes deep. You don't know what you don't know, right? That's why SDSt stands apart. That's why when you listen to me speak, there's something different about the way that I speak because I've got a different arsenal that nobody else is really running in this space. It's like truly at the edge of addiction recovery and we're continuing to build more and more assets and we're continuing to, it's just like going to keep getting better. More effective. So yeah, I think I'm going to leave it there. The gap, the gap. Stop looking at the gap is the thing that's scary and start looking at the gap is like your initiation. You're being called forth to rise, to follow through on the things that you actually deeply most desire and want for yourself. Right? Like you're not going to, you're not going to go out of high school and land a job making half a million dollars a year as like, or like, let's say a couple million years like a plastic surgeon without 12 years of like or 10 years of Arduous Medical School. But imagine going through 10 years of Arduous Medical School, what are you going to get? You're going to get extreme levels of competence, extreme levels of resourcefulness, extreme levels of confidence, of self-esteem, of status, your capacity for mate selection as a man is going to increase dramatically your ability to survive and create a lifestyle beyond what most people could ever dream of becomes available to you because you allowed yourself to be present to the gap of discomfort where you had to study for like eight hours a day and attend classes constantly and like not party through your 20s as much. You know? So it's like, what do you want? And that's the whole spiritual cosmic lesson of addiction is learning how to do delayed gratification, right? Not everybody deals with addiction, not everybody is neurochemically wired or genetically wired or whatever, like it doesn't matter. You're learning delayed gratification. You want like a super simple, generalized summary is we went from having a bunch of experiences that caused lots of pain that we didn't know how to manage. So it literally wired us for short term pain relief. Our whole system or brain or mind or thoughts became long term medium time frames is too much to bear and handle because literally my brain has changed into only trying to manage this present moment and make sure that I'm safe because everything is a threat. So now you're unwinding consciousness, you're unwinding the nervous system. Can you see what I'm saying if you take a 50,000 foot view how you've been programmed and patterned into just a series of inputs that lead to a certain series of outputs. And now the thought and idea of letting go of these outputs seems deathly terrifying and scary, but it's just your initiation into the new frequency and to the new level of consciousness and wisdom and awareness and maturity, encourage and sovereignty and success in every capacity. So I will leave it there. This is the greatest path you will ever walk. And I feel honored and privileged to be in the position that I am to be able to share the story of alcohol. You know, my name is Bardia. And if you look at the root of that word, bard, back in the day, a bard is a storyteller. And certainly wasn't in purpose for my dad's name, he, Bardia, but I think it's really interesting how I believe I am like one of the leading storytellers of alcohol on earth today. And I feel really honored and grateful and fortunate to be able to help people back home. And the reason I speak with so much passion and conviction is because this was the bane of my reality for 15 years. I lost my dad to it. If you follow me on Instagram, you saw me post one of his photos yesterday. I think it still might be up. And it's like, dude, everything I do is an honor to that man. He was a good fucking man. Good looking too. If you, if you see the photo, a guy looks like a fucking supermodel or an actor. And life was really hard in confusing and scary and unstable. And I felt a lot of shame. And I felt a lot of misunderstanding around why me? Why does it have to be this way? And there was a lot of pain that I carried and a lot of confusion. And once I got out of it and walk through the gap and walk through the fire and started to learn what all this stuff actually is and what alcohol is and what it represents as an initiation to your development as a man or a woman in your growth and your maturity to lead you and to guide you and to teach you the skills and the lessons and the wisdom like I'm like, oh, okay, I get it now. And so I'm investing all my time to help others escape the prison and the chains and the fucking hellhole that I was caught up in. And I can tell you it gets infinitely better. A million times better. I'm living my dreams in every way and every day is a gift and a blessing. And it's because I quit drinking. It's because I loved alcohol more than anybody that I knew. And I made what was the ultimate sacrifice. And when I made that, God or the universe said, okay, Barty, walk the path, walk the fire, go through the gap. It's not all fucking fire. Go through the gap. And stay true, stay honorable, keep learning what you have to learn, humble yourself, put your fucking ego aside, recognize that life. May not be exactly the way you expect it and the shiny bow that you want it, but it will serve you. It will serve your soul and trust it and surrender to that process. And I did and I continue to do so and life keeps getting better. So visit www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com. I've got a Google slide presentation at the top. I'd like you to go through if you'd like to work with me. Join my program. There's an application beneath it, beneath that. There's a video free to watch. It's about 40 minutes. Then I've got tons and tons of video testimonials and screenshots. So check that out. www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com. And then fill out an application, book a call with me. And I hope to see you inside of the SDC community. Much love. 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.thestopdrinkingcoach.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.