Booze, belonging, identity and what sits underneath a behaviour

There is a tendency to talk about addiction as though the problem begins with the substance.

Drink too much. Stop drinking.

It sounds simple when reduced to those two sentences.

Real life is rarely that simple.

In a recent conversation with my old friend Don Parker for his podcast The Space Between Conversations, we ended up talking about much more than alcohol. We talked about growing up, belonging, punk, identity, aggression, family, rejection, self-esteem, recovery and the strange paths that can eventually lead us somewhere we could never have predicted when we were teenagers.

Looking back across more than forty years of friendship, some of the connections become easier to see.

Not necessarily because there is one neat explanation for everything.

There isn't.

But because behaviours that appear irrational from the outside can sometimes make more sense when you understand what they were doing for the person at the time.

The armour

When I was a teenager, punk and the associated street culture gave me something I didn't realise I was looking for.

An identity.

A visual identity came first: boots, clothes, hair, attitude. Then came the music.

The music mattered because it sounded like something from my own world. Bands were singing about working-class life, frustration, authority, rebellion and experiences that felt recognisable.

But there was another side to the image.

Looking aggressive could make you feel protected.

I described it in the conversation as a kind of suit of armour.

The problem was that armour can work in both directions.

What you think is telling the world leave me alone can instead communicate come and test me.

The result was more aggression, more confrontation and more situations I didn't actually want to be in.

That pattern is interesting because it illustrates something that turns up repeatedly in behaviour change.

A behaviour can have a function even when its consequences are destructive.

You don't necessarily have to like the behaviour to understand why it became useful.

Belonging is powerful

One of the less comfortable parts of the conversation was looking back at the politics and extremism that surrounded parts of our youth.

At the time, simple answers could feel enormously attractive.

When you are young, uncertain about yourself and looking for somewhere to belong, someone offering certainty, identity and a group can provide an immediate sense of significance.

You are no longer alone.

You are part of something.

That doesn't make the beliefs correct. It explains something about the attraction.

Looking back now, what struck me was how similar the underlying pattern could be across very different forms of extremism.

Different enemies.

Different ideologies.

Different language.

But the same promise of belonging, certainty and identity.

The important distinction is between explaining why something can be attractive and excusing what people subsequently do with it.

Understanding the mechanism isn't the same as approving of the outcome.

Then there was the drinking

Alcohol became another part of that landscape.

For years I drank heavily. Eventually it wasn't something I was choosing in any meaningful sense. It was something that had become embedded in how I lived.

I didn't drink every day, and that distinction can sometimes obscure the problem.

The more useful question is what happens when you try to stop.

By my late twenties, I had already had enough of the destruction.

The problem was that knowing you have had enough isn't necessarily the same as knowing how to change.

The advice around me was largely simple:

Don't drink so much.

Drink less.

Don't be such a fool when you're drunk.

None of that addressed the machinery underneath the behaviour.

There was shame.

There was guilt.

There were consequences.

But there wasn't necessarily a useful explanation of what I was trying to regulate, escape from or protect myself from.

Eventually I began to make connections between the disappearance of my father when I was five, the rejection I experienced and the way I had subsequently lived.

I'm careful about turning that into a neat causal story.

Human behaviour is more complicated than that.

But for me, understanding the connection became important.

The missing person

My father disappeared from my life when I was five.

I remember seeing him on my fifth birthday.

I never saw him again.

For years, there was simply a hole where an explanation should have been.

As a child, you don't have the psychological vocabulary to analyse something like that.

You have questions.

What happened?

Why?

Was it something I did?

Was I not worth staying for?

Those questions can exist underneath conscious awareness for a very long time.

I eventually tried to find him.

I wrote to him.

He received the letter.

He didn't reply.

Years later, when I tried again, I discovered that he had died.

There was no confrontation, no explanation and no final conversation.

Just the end of the search.

Strangely, that brought some relief.

Not because I had received the answers I wanted.

I hadn't.

But because there was no longer anything to wait for.

The search was over.

And that taught me something important about change: sometimes the thing you need most isn't an answer. Sometimes it is acceptance of the fact that an answer isn't coming.

You can't control another person

This is one of the more uncomfortable lessons of adulthood.

There are things you can work on.

There are things you can repair.

There are things you can understand.

And there are things that remain completely outside your control.

Another person's decisions belong in the last category.

That can be difficult when those decisions have shaped your life.

It is tempting to keep searching for the missing explanation because we imagine that understanding another person's behaviour will somehow repair the damage.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes the most useful point is recognising that their behaviour is not a measurement of your value.

That distinction took me a long time to understand.

Recovery changed the direction of everything

Eventually I reached a point where I stopped drinking.

A chance encounter introduced me to Alcoholics Anonymous and, for the first time, I had a framework for building long-term sobriety.

That was more than simply removing alcohol.

Once the behaviour stopped dominating my life, other possibilities appeared.

Things I had talked about doing for years suddenly became things I could actually do.

I started riding a motorbike.

I started recording music.

I resurrected old creative projects.

I made records.

I started gigging again.

And eventually the same process led somewhere completely unexpected.

Hypnosis.

The strange beginning of EnTrance

The origin of EnTrance wasn't a business plan.

It was a hypnosis CD.

Someone I was living with was using a hypnosis recording to help stop smoking. One day, with a bad hangover, I put it on.

Something happened that I hadn't experienced before.

I found myself entering a deeply relaxed, altered state.

It completely surprised me.

That moment stayed with me.

I started investigating hypnosis and experimenting with recordings. Later, through another chance meeting, I met someone with knowledge of hypnotherapy and an interest in the subject.

I had the recording and production background.

He had the therapeutic and scripting knowledge.

Together we created EnTrance.

That original work eventually became a substantial audio library and was distributed through YouTube and other platforms. The response from listeners became one of the most meaningful parts of the project.

People weren't just listening.

They were using the recordings to help themselves change behaviours, manage anxiety, sleep, relax and work through difficult periods.

And there is something quite strange about that journey.

The person who had spent years making punk documentaries, shouting in bands and living at the aggressive end of the cultural spectrum eventually found himself sitting behind a microphone saying:

"Welcome to EnTrance."

The contrast is almost absurd.

But perhaps it isn't as contradictory as it first appears.

Change isn't always about becoming someone else

One of the traps in thinking about recovery and behaviour change is imagining that you have to erase the person you were.

I don't think that's true.

The teenager who was searching for identity, belonging and protection didn't disappear.

The experiences didn't disappear either.

What changed was the relationship with them.

The same creative energy that once went into music, confrontation and excess could eventually go into filmmaking, sound design, music, writing and hypnosis.

The energy wasn't necessarily the problem.

Where it was directed mattered.

The behaviour is not the person

This is one of the principles that sits underneath the work I now do.

A person can have an addiction without being an addict in every aspect of their identity.

A person can have an anxiety response without being an anxious person.

A person can develop a destructive pattern without that pattern being their essential character.

That distinction matters because shame tends to collapse the behaviour and the person into one thing.

I drink too much becomes I'm a failure.

I keep doing this becomes this is just who I am.

Once that happens, change becomes harder to imagine.

A more useful starting point can be:

Something is happening here.

What is the pattern?

When does it appear?

What does it provide?

What does it cost?

What keeps reinforcing it?

And what happens if the pattern is interrupted?

Those are much more useful questions than simply telling someone to stop.

The journey doesn't end

There is another idea from the conversation that has stayed with me.

Life isn't a destination.

There isn't a point where you finally arrive and everything is permanently sorted.

You can climb a ladder and still slide back down it.

You can have years of stability and still encounter something unexpected.

You can change one part of your life and discover another part that needs attention.

That doesn't mean change has failed.

It means you're still living.

Perhaps the more realistic definition of recovery isn't reaching some perfect final state.

It is developing enough awareness, authority and flexibility to deal with what comes next.

That is also why I don't think the useful question is simply:

How do I get rid of this behaviour?

Sometimes the better question is:

What has this behaviour been doing for me, and what could replace that function without destroying the rest of my life?

That is a much harder question.

But it is also a much more interesting one.

And after everything that happened between a school playground in the early 1980s and a microphone in a studio decades later, I'm increasingly convinced that meaningful change begins when we stop treating the behaviour as the whole story.

The behaviour is the visible part.

There is usually something underneath it.

That's where the interesting work begins.

The full podcast interview with Stuart Newman can be viewed here now. 

#SelfDevelopment #PersonalGrowth #HabitChange #BreakingPatterns #UnderstandingBehaviour #ChangeYourLife