Since I cannot state anything that has not already been said about this book here on good ol' Amazon, please just take this review as more of a testimonial to the effectiveness of Carr's work. Let mine be just one more voice to tell anyone out there who might be reading these words and considering getting your drinking under control, please, do yourself a favor and at least give this book a real, honest chance. It may very well be one of the best things you've ever done for yourself and the people around you.
I won't give you all the many details of my own story, but here are some broad strokes, just so you know I'm not full of crap (not on this subject anyway). I was raised in a good, supportive family by parents who taught me the joys of good food, art, company, music, and wine. My folks aren't problem drinkers (but alcoholism is in the family, that's for sure), and so I have warm memories of having one or two glasses of quality wine with dinner. Somehow that's where it began for me. Over the years, living wild and free, I went from occasional social drinking to imbibing daily, to weekly binge drinking, to basically never stopping. What began as an embracing of a life well lived became a living nightmare of daily hangovers.
I can barely recognize who I was a year ago. At that point, my life was shaped around drinking. I hid boxes of wine around the house, so my wife didn't know how much I drank beyond the usual six pack or bottle a day. I kept a separate bank account for a long time, just so I could spend money on booze with as little of her suspicion as possible. I drove drunk fairly frequently, if only in the mornings on the way to work after a long night either drinking with friends or alone. My body, at 33, wasn't looking too bad on the outside, but my internal organs literally ached and my mind was blurry and haunted by anxiety and guilt. I slept poorly, hardly had an appetite for food, and had a deep, dark fear that booze was going to destroy my life in some way. Dear lord, I was a mess.
It took some very real and difficult soul-searching to admit, however quietly and internally, that I had a Really Big Problem and that I couldn't just quit via the "Willpower Method" (as Carr puts it). I'd taken breaks here and there before, and tried moderating my intake, but always came back to drinking with a vengeance sooner or later. While researching all the usual methods of tackling this issue (A.A., rehab, detox, religion, therapy, etc...), I kept coming across Allen Carr's work as something of an outsider's take on quitting. This appealed to me, and I began to read the reviews/testimonials of others who had encountered this book. A lot of the accounts I read were really eye-opening. A number of them made me cry with their beautiful descriptions of being free from the slavery to alcohol. I wanted so, so desperately to be one of those people who said, "I cant believe it but I did it, and SO CAN YOU".
When it arrived, I took the day off of work and read the book in one sitting. I followed the instructions laid out in the opening chapters like it was my first day of Boot Camp. No messing around. If a passage in the book seemed repetitive, I took it on good faith that there was a purpose to it. If a part felt like it was patronizing because I already knew the information being presented, I would force myself to read and fully comprehend every word on that page. I highlighted passages that were particularly meaningful. I read, and re-read any part that I didn't agree with until I could at least appreciate the objective truth in it. By the end, I was ready to change my life for the better.
Did it happen all at once? Nope, not for me. After reading the book, I enjoyed four months of very happy sobriety, amazed at how much better my life had gotten, on so many levels. My mind and body felt better than I could remember in a long time, and it just seemed like I'd really turned a major corner in where I was going.
The how and why of it don't really matter, but I found myself lingering over the memories of that one glass of wine with dinner. My wife was out of town, and our house guests (field scientists who left town for weeks at a time) had left a box of wine behind them. "Surely the world won't come to an end if I drink a glass. I'm over it now. I can be 'normal', just like everyone else." Cut to the chase, I found myself waking up one morning, having consumed that box of wine the night before, completely F'd up- A hangover so bad, I was seriously considering calling an ambulance. Spending my lunch break (yup, it was a weekday) in the back of my car, thinking how it might actually be possible to die from dehydration there, like a miserable rat. I was beyond disgusted with myself, beyond disappointed. It was at once unbelievable, and painfully obvious how I'd wound up in the same old self-appointed Hell.
Whether or not I was actually going to die is debatable, but I sure felt like that was the case, and it dawned on me then how much I didn't want it to go down like that: without any shred of dignity, no reason worth mentioning, just a shameful drunk who died a completely useless death. It scared me beyond any other danger I've ever been in, because this situation was so pathetic.
I was hungover and deeply shaken for days. On a walk in the woods by myself, still trying to pull myself together, I broke down and cried like I never have before. Shame, regret, terror, and a broken body were all this drinking was bringing me. The good times with booze were really and truly gone forever. And what's more, to continue drinking certainly meant death. That was about all I knew. And that was when I really surrendered. I didn't pray to a God, so much as I begged for some sort of guidance, some sort of help out of the mess I knew I was in. I thought back to this book, and how it had opened the possibility that I could be one of those people who had found a way out of the darkness, and I realized that it was that taste of hope that had oriented me towards the light in the first place. The examples of people for whom Carr's technique had worked always reported this "Eureka" moment occuring, wherein they suddenly and certainly knew that they never wanted to drink again. Well, this was my moment, weeping on a trail in the woods, and finally knowing that I would never drink again. I was finally done with it.
That was about six months ago and I've never looked back. There have been some big life changes and small. The biggest change is hardest to define, though- I just feel like I can listen to who I am and what is really important so much better now. I realize how much I was just checking out of life by drinking hard the way I once did. This book, while not an immediate or completely easy fix (despite the "Easyway {tm}" label) for me, was what began the process of real recovery in my life. It gave me a way to talk and think about sobriety as a real and achievable prospect, instead of something that only "other people" can do. I am no one special, with no great talent for self-control. But now, thanks in large part to the initial impact of this book, I know that I will live a very happy, authentic life without alcohol. It's almost strange to say it, considering who I was not too long ago, but I no longer WANT to drink. What I want now is to live like a real man, someone I can be proud of, someone who can contribute to the world in a positive way. There isn't even really a choice to be made, or if there was, it's been made already. I chose life over alcoholism, and will never turn back from that until the day I die.
If you want to change your own life for the better, to be free of alcohol, then please do it any way you can. You know when it is time to give up the booze, so why not spend a little time processing what this book contains and see how your own thinking changes around the subject? At worst, you won't really regret it, and at best, you too will be free from alcohol, just like I am, and like so many others are. It might take some work, it might take some processing, but this is an achievable goal for anyone with the honest will to see it through. You're up next: You too can say "I am now free!"

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Category	Addiction & Recovery

Allen Carr's Quit Drinking Without Willpower: Be a happy nondrinker (Allen Carr's Easyway, 2)