What We Do Not See When Someone Drinks

By Gogo Bathini Mbatha

There are many things we say about drinking. We say it is a way to unwind after a difficult day, a way to celebrate, a way to loosen up when we are nervous, a way to make a party more enjoyable and, when all else fails, a way to forget.

What we do not say nearly as often is that sometimes the drink is not really about the drink at all. It is about the thing underneath it: the argument you cannot stop replaying in your head, the loneliness you do not know how to admit, the grief you have carried for so long that people assume you have moved on, the pressure of being the person everyone depends on, or the fear that you are not coping nearly as well as everyone thinks.

So you pour a drink, and for a while it works.

That is part of the problem.

Alcohol can be remarkably persuasive. It does not arrive in your life announcing itself as a thief. It arrives offering relief, promising that, for a few hours, you will not have to think quite so much, feel quite so deeply or sit quite so honestly with yourself. Because the relief is real, even if temporary, it becomes very easy to confuse relief with a solution.

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become dependent on alcohol. More often, dependence grows inside ordinary decisions: I have had a terrible day. I deserve a drink. Or, I cannot sleep unless I have something. Or, I can stop whenever I want.

There is another thing we do not say enough: you do not have to look like an alcoholic to have a problem with alcohol.

You can have a respectable job, a loving partner, children who adore you, a home, money in the bank and a calendar full of commitments, while quietly organising your life around drinking. You can become irritated when somebody suggests you have had enough, make sure there is always alcohol in the house, or start choosing friends, occasions and even holidays according to whether drinking will be possible.

And still tell yourself that everything is fine.

This is where the conversation often goes wrong. We look for catastrophe because catastrophe is easier to recognise. We wait for the marriage to collapse, the job to disappear, the bank account to empty, the arrest or the hospitalisation before we are prepared to call drinking a problem.

But why should somebody have to lose everything before we take seriously what alcohol is already taking from them?

I know something about that question because I have lived on the other side of it. My own relationship with alcohol eventually became serious enough to put me in hospital and leave me facing consequences I could no longer pretend were someone else’s problem. I know what it means to discover, painfully and belatedly, that the thing you thought was helping you cope has been quietly making your life smaller.

That is why I struggle with our obsession with rock bottom. We have somehow come to believe that a person must first lose enough, suffer enough and damage enough of their life before their drinking becomes serious enough to deserve help.

I do not believe that.

My own experience has left me deeply uncomfortable with the idea that someone must first lose everything before discovering the value of a sober life. Why must alcohol take a person’s health, relationships, money, work and, eventually, their sense of who they are before they are allowed to admit that something is wrong and that they need help?

If someone is beginning to lose control, if their drinking is affecting the people they love, if they keep promising themselves they will stop and cannot, why must they prove just how much they can lose before we reach for their hand?

There is another truth we do not say enough about sobriety. It is not simply about removing alcohol from your life; it is about discovering what was hiding underneath it. The anger may still be there. The loneliness may still be there. The grief, difficult relationships, financial pressure and fear of failure do not disappear because the bottle does.

What we do not say enough is that sometimes the person holding the glass is not really looking for a drink at all, but for relief from something they cannot quite name, for sleep after another exhausting day, for the courage to face something they have been avoiding, for a few hours of silence from the noise inside their own head, or simply for some way of making life feel a little easier to bear.

And sometimes, without realising it, they are not looking for a way deeper into the bottle, but for a way back to themselves.

That is the space Sober Beings is trying to occupy: not as a place where people are lectured about their failures, and not as a waiting room for those who have already reached the bottom, but as companionship for people beginning to recognise that their relationship with alcohol is no longer serving them.

There are still many things we do not say about drinking. Perhaps the conversation should begin not with how much somebody has lost, but with a much more human question: what would you like to save?

Gogo Bathini Mbatha is the founder of Sober Beings/ Traditional Healer/ Researcher/ Spiritual Educator