Gene Silencing

Gene Silencing

Firstly I do not know if alcoholism is hereditary, if it is a learnt behaviour, if it is in the genes or if it is just a habit, I am not here to debate or analyze on the different opinions of how it all began. I am here to give just one mans opinion as to what happened to me. I know that there were three sisters and three brothers in my family, some drink, some do not, I am the only one in recovery from alcoholism, so we could assume that just because drink was a big part of our childhood, why is it that I am the only one that ended up broken and in pieces because of alcohol. I cannot speak for the others and would not attempt to do so. All I know is that I have a problem when I put alcohol in my system and that is all I can base my information on.

You see no one ever poured alcohol down my throat, no one ever said “go and drink alcohol every time life gets a little rough. What I believe to be true, and you are welcome to agree or disagree, is that I started to consume alcohol as I liked the effect that alcohol produced. It helped me to unwind at the end of a hard day at work, it helped me to speak to girls when I had no confidence, it helped me to be funny, to be chatty, and it helped me to be me. So therefore whenever I had any of the above situations plus many, many more, I would drink. Therefore I can only assume that I became addicted to alcohol because I put alcohol into my system time and time again to deal with the emotions that I could not deal with myself, therefore I became dependant on my little crutch to feed my emotional inabilities. I am not an alcoholic because of my childhood, or my marriage, or because my grandma died, or because I am not popular with friends, I became dependant because I drank alcohol.

This is only my belief, if anyone reading this is an alcoholic because of any of the above reasons, or for any reason that they think has caused it, then I am not here to argue over it, I am here to explain my story, my way of viewing it and the way in which I was able to stop drinking and get a contented life. If this is my truth, then one would assume that I would apply the same principles to my relative in their current situation. I am pleased to tell you that it is exactly the way I deal with it. I am not responsible for anyone drinking, only my drinking. I am only responsible to be the best person I can be on any given day. I CAN SUPPORT WHEN ASKED, I CAN LEAD BY EXAMPLE, BUT I CANNOT, I WILL NOT, TELL ANYONE WHAT IS BEST FOR THEM. I do not have the god given right to tell anyone how to live their life, when only a few years ago I was doing the same. I would not be told what to do, I would not listen, and I would not change until I WANTED TO.

Want / need
Until I really wanted to give up alcohol, I did not achieve any length of time away from it. I may have needed to give up alcohol in my family’s eyes, but I did not stop until I wanted to stop with all my heart. I had to want to stop with every bit of me, with my head, my heart and my soul. When I stopped drinking eight years ago I would have done anything to stop. I would have done anything to get alcohol; I would steal, cheat and lie to get the bloody stuff, as I was that dependant. So in order to get sober, I had to be willing to do anything that is required to stay stopped. I remember that I once said that I would stand naked on my head in the middle of a packed out room full of people with a mars bar sticking out of my arse to stay sober. I would not recommend this as the chocolate melts and it is not helpful. However that sort of determination is what is needed, it is required and it is the only way I know to do it. I have to find a deep inner resource if I am to remain sober, I have to invite the help that is required, I have to be willing to take on board new ideas, new ways of dealing with my emotional turmoil. Just because I have stopped drinking, life has not stopped throwing its usual shit at the fan. I have had a number of things to deal with as all human beings do. There is one big difference however; I do not have one single excuse, not one excuse to pour alcohol into my system.

Death of a loved one is not a big enough excuse to drink, the breakdown of my marriage is not enough of an excuse to drink, my relatives drinking is not an excuse for me to drink. All of the excuses to drink have gone, if I choose to drink today then I have chose to, not because my childhood was shit, not because my marriage was shit, or because my life is shit, it is because I have chose to pour alcohol into my system instead of dealing with the problem that has come knocking on my door. My childhood, my marriage and my life were made shit by ME. It was my attitude towards it that was wrong, not the things themselves, I had an ability to turn gold into shit, I had the ability to turn wonderful people into enemies and I thought it was your entire fault. I know today that if I am feeling shit, or I am viewing things as shit, then there is something wrong with me. It isn’t your fault I am feeling shit. I am responsible for every thought and feeling that enters my body, there maybe a number of things that happened to me that were as a direct result of someone else, but I am responsible for how I deal with it.

I remember an incident that will explain this quite well, I was just leaving my place of residence early in the morning, it was a cold morning and I didn’t want to leave to go to work. I was living on a council estate (nothing wrong with council estates) and as I left the front doorstep, a particularly large gentleman came heading towards me with a face liked a smacked arse. I was early in recovery and had not begun to understand myself very well. My first thought was “what is that cunt looking at”, for some unknown reason a thought came into my head that I had never had before, the thought was “say hello to him”. I said Good morning and he walked on without saying a word. A second thought came into my head” turn around and look at him” as I did I was about to experience something that I had never experienced before, He looked back at exactly the same time and he smiled too.

This taught me an entirely new concept that until that day I had never experienced. The concept was this, I can allow the world to dominate me or I can meet it with love. If I had of reacted in the way my head had first wanted me too, I am sure that I would have ended up hurt that day. I began to look at this on a deeper level and thought that maybe the guy with a face like a smacked arse, dad had died that day or maybe his wife had just ended their relationship, or maybe he had lost his job. WOW for the first time that I could remember it wasn’t all about me, how dare he look at ME like that, does he not know who I am. Yay, I had turned a corner in my thinking, I was starting to think about others and not let their mood or behaviours effect me in a negative way. It was his mood not mine, my mood was quite good, and my mood had a positive effect on him. That’s amazing; I never knew that it was possible to allow others to be in a mood without it affecting my mood. That is a tool I want to hang onto, that is something that I want to practice more of, I would like to say that I do it all the time but unfortunately I am sometimes the one with the face like a smacked arse.

Practise or perfect
Most of my life I wanted to be perfect, perfect in the eyes of every individual that walked on this planet. That is a very tall order, one in which I failed miserably, I failed in regularly, and continue to fail in on a day to day basis. I keep saying this but I am going to say this again to get the message across, I AM HUMAN, I am a normal, average, simple man, A man that wants to keep striving to be the best I can but and this is the big BUT that counts, I now know that I will never reach perfection. I may reach perfection at non-perfection; in fact I already am perfect at that. I am ME, warts and all and guess what I like ME. I like who I am and more importantly I like where I am heading, Heading into the unknown with faith trust and belief, and that I am doing the best I can.

I practice every day at being a decent human being, I am sometimes an arsehole, I am sometimes grumpy and I sometimes Happy, I can be any of the seven dwarfs at any given moment. This example of the seven dwarfs is a very powerful one, one in which they all live in the same house, do the same job, eat the same food, in fact there lives are almost identical, yet they are all individuals with different attitudes and outlooks on life. So here I go again repeating myself with the same old stuff. What is the difference between them all? It is their thinking. They practice every day being the same person day after day after day. If you practice hard enough at anything you will definitely improve. So I would like to offer to you now an eye opening question: What are you going to practice being today? Are you going to practice being, happy, grumpy, peaceful, contented, angry or loving? I know what I want to practice, it is being happy, peaceful, contented and loving, but some days I just want to practice being grumpy, angry and self pitying. So I guess I have a choice and I can choose to go around in what ever mood I choose to be in. At least I realise that I am human, that I have a choice that I will make mistakes and that change is possible. IF I HAD CARRIED ON THE WAY I WAS GOING I WOULD STILL HAVE BEEN BLAMING YOU FOR HOW I FELT.

Then I would have needed you to change and when you didn’t you would have changed my mood, you would be pulling my strings like a puppet. You would be responsible for how I felt. How convenient, your fault your to blame, YOU, YOU, YOU. Thank god I was able to see the light, the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. A tunnel that I never thought I would reach the end of. A tunnel that you, yes you can get out of. You can change, you can take responsibility, but only if you look at yourself.

I choose not to fill my mind with shit; I choose to fill it with decent material. It makes for a better day. If I focus on the bad it just keeps growing and growing, if focus my mind on what is good, it keeps growing and growing. I can look at the state in which my relative is and think what a shit day, shit life or I can focus on the other family members who are doing well. If I look hard enough I will always find something to moan about, if however I look for the good in life then I will always, and I mean always find it. A friend of mine says “always look for the shiny shoes. He means that on first impression you may see some down and out (like me when on the drink) in a dirty raincoat, but some where there will be something good, some shiny shoes. I have a habit of making a first impression quite quickly; therefore I am not practicing looking for the shiny shoes. I am too busy looking at the dirty raincoat and making a judgement without looking a little deeper at the situation.

To conclude on practice or perfect, if I look in the mirror and realise that at a deep level I am imperfect, then I generally allow others their imperfections and guess what: I get peace, I get contentment and more importantly I am able to show compassion to others.

The brain
The brain is a powerful tool, it is probably as powerful if not more powerful that the best computer. It stores data, it holds onto information and it will upload this information at a moments notice when it is required. I will try to keep this really simple as I am a very simple individual that needs information to be precise, easy to understand and as short as possible because I get bored quickly. The brain has neural pathways which are formed each time we think or do something, the more it is repeated the stronger this pathway becomes. I am not a scientist and do not profess to be one; however when I learnt that we can always create new ones, this excited me. It means that if we have repeated a thought process hundreds of times, that pathway is going to be quite strong. If however we begin to think and behave in a different way we create a new pathway, it may not be very strong and the old pathway will perhaps in the beginning be louder, more prominent than the new one, but science has proved we can always change something that is going on in the mind. We are not stuck with it, we can change.

It also confirms a lot about my alcohol consumption. It shows me that every time that I put alcohol into my system to cope with emotional turmoil, my pathway got stronger and stronger. It also proves that if I practice, and I mean practice not putting alcohol into my system and do something different with my emotional turmoil that will get stronger and stronger. I have not drank for eight years, so this pathway is pretty strong, however this is the important bit for people to understand: If I were to put even a small amount of alcohol into my system, a little sherry at Christmas, A toast at a wedding, A larger shandy (no one ever got drunk on shandy did they?) Then I start the whole process of again, THE old pathway does not go away, did you here that THE OLD PATHWAY DOES NOT GO AWAY. What a shitter! That means that I have to practice the new thinking, the new behaviour consistently. I cannot afford to give one single reason; excuse to tell me that drinking alcohol would be different this time.

Science has proved that if I do then I SET OFF THAT OLD PATHWAY WHICH IS STRONGER THAT THE LOUSY EIGHT YEARS I HAVE BEEN OFF THE DRINK. Some people say that alcoholism lies dormant, but is doing press ups waiting for the opportunity to rear its ugly little head. What I have found is that it gets easier the more I practice the new way of being. It is not very often that I think about drinking these days; however I am fully aware that I am not cured of anything that I know of. I am only as good as my thinking on the best of days, I am, (as I have repeated over and over in this writing) human, I am made up of lots of different parts, My first thought when I am in a stressful situation is not always a good one, let me elaborate on this, If when someone is a threat to me, I always want to react with anger, do not challenge my thinking and try to look at it from a different perspective, then I will continue to think and behave the exactly same way for the rest of my life. The pathway will get stronger and stronger each time I do it. If on the other hand I try to look at it from a different perspective then I at the very least afford myself the chance to change and create a new pathway. I have been walking down the same pathways time and time again; I end up in the gutter, in depression or EVEN NOT WANTING TO BE ON THIS PLANET.

So why do I keep walking these pathways, because they are habits. The only difference between good habits and bad habits are with regard to my mental or physical well being. I know deep down what is good for me and what is bad for me, yet I continue to do things that are damaging to me because they have been repeated over and over and over. So I ultimately have a choice today to choose better, or gooder, I know, I know, I know gooder is not a word but it is a habit of mine, ha, ha, ha.

To conclude, It is possible to create new thoughts, new behaviours and new pathways in life, We do not have to repeat certain ways of being over and over, we can change, in fact we can change in an instance, the problem is that the old thoughts, behaviours and pathways unfortunately remain like the A road that takes you from Lincoln to Skegness.

They are creating by passes to speed up the journey, to make it a more comfortable and enjoyable journey, but you can always go the back road if you wish. So I would like to take this opportunity to offer you the equivalent of a sat nav for your mind. A way in which you can input data into your brain and if you are not happy to carry on the way you are going, you can go the scenic route, the direct route or the route avoiding the motorway.

Sat Nav of the mind
What would help in this day and age to create a mind map that took you to peace, contentment, happiness or even joy? It would take a similar process that the sat nav takes when you turn left when it has asked you to turn right. It has a look at where it is it evaluates where it has gone wrong and it comes up with a different route to get you to your destination. See if we are to get to destination peace, then we need to find out where we are going wrong with regards to getting no peace and look at an alternative root to get there. Firstly it would be helpful to recognise what steals our peace of mind and to look at what we can do to change our direction.

If for example I am always getting angry when I am stuck in a queue, then it would be helpful to understand what it is, that I don’t like about queuing. I never used to like queuing, it was always the cashiers fault or the stores fault for not scanning quickly enough, or not having enough staff, therefore it was their fault I was queuing. I have a number of ways in which I can deal with this. Firstly I can put my stuff down in a huff, and leave the shop if I don’t like queuing, secondly I can queue in silence with steam coming from my ears like a cartoon character, or thirdly I can have a look at why?

Why are queues so difficult for me? I would like to think that I would not allow a queue to wreck my day, but as I say I don’t like queuing. I like the cashier to be waiting for me to turn up, with a large smile on her face, asking if I would like any help with my packing. I would like her to give me an extra ten pounds in my change and to say it was a pleasure serving you sir. So when I get to the till and there is a queue a mile long, the cashier has a face like a smacked arse and not only she doesn’t say please, thank you, kiss my arse or anything. She has tapped into an expectation that I have on store staff, you should be friendly, accommodating and helpful, the customer is always right. B*ollocks, the customer is not always right, the cashier has put up with a barrage of customers arrogance, cheek, aggression, and may even (god forbid) have something going on in her day, that is a little more important than my can of beans for my tea. She may have been threatened with redundancy; she may have had a telling off from her boss (the one that says the customer is always right). He may have her on her final warning to freedom from working for the most unreasonable boss in the world. I don’t know what is going on in her life but what I do know is this, she is a human being doing her best and my issue is not with her it is with me and my inability to wait.

I will give you an example of this from when my children were younger, I took them to the doctors (because they were ill) the receptionist has one of these smacked arse faces, I am polite in my manner and she is not, I am patient with my children and she is not. I remember a thought coming into my head because this was the way she had been every time that I had been to this surgery, The thought was, “if she says one moody smacked arse thing to my kids she is going to get a piece of my mind” Jeepers a piece of my mind, a piece of this well oiled sat nav, this high tech bit of kit. Well while I was looking for the opportunity to let rip, guess what? She gave me on a plate the perfect excuse to do it. She spoke to a lady that had entered the surgery like she was talking to some piece of scum. She was vile to this lady. I jumped up, and without resetting the sat nav, I gave what was about to be the most embarrassing thing she, me, my children and a packed waiting room was about to see that day. I stood up and turned to the silent waiting room and said” Could anyone put there hand in the air if they think that the receptionist here is the most miserable BITCH IN THE WORLD. I kid you not almost every hand went up in that waiting room.
I felt like a king for about ten minutes. She went bright red and so did my kids. Then the reality of what I had done crept in like a burglar in the night, I began to feel extremely sorry for doing it to her. I sat in silence until we were called and the children got the medication that they came for. This taught me a massive lesson, people are allowed to be miserable, I am one of them, and People have the right to be whatever they like.

What I learnt is that I have a choice as to how I view the situation, the way in which I react and ultimately the outcome of how I feel. You see the sat nav was used to reacting to others, in fact it looked for the situation to happen, and it was programmed for it to happen.

I have since begun to load the information into the sat nav carefully, I have learnt that she is responsible for her mood and I am responsible for mine. Her sat nav is loaded everyday with the direction to moody, mine was loaded with anger, and some people load theirs with happiness, some with anxiety and some with a mixture of all of them. It just depends on which route I am choosing to load into it. I can set myself up for a journey to hell or a journey to contentment. I have to keep putting the right data in, and not the data that takes me to reacting to a doctor’s receptionist. She is a miserable cow, I am not here to say that she isn’t, I am here to say that I have the opportunity day in day out to set the course of my life and choose to let Mrs. moody knickers to set hers. She isn’t sitting behind her desk thinking “oh here come the Regan’s, lets be moody to them. It is not that personal, she does it to everyone.

So I try and I say try to set my sat nav on a journey that may be a bit bumpy, I might get a flat tyre and I might even break down, but and this is my truth, If I want to be happy and content I cannot afford to let life events to steal my mood. If I get lost, if I react as I did in the surgery then I can turn around, reset the sat nav and move forward.

What I chose to do later that day was go back to the surgery, I asked to speak to the receptionist and I apologised for MY behaviour. I explained that I had no right in which to tell her how to be. I said I was sorry and I left. I reset the sat nav and each time that I walked into the surgery I was able to learn from my mistake. She is still moody, but it does not affect me anymore. WHY? Because I realised that her moodiness was not mine, it was hers. What was mine is my reaction to her mood. WOW, I can reset the sat nav in the doctors surgery, the day I reacted my sat nav was on destination angry, and moody too, but I failed to see it because I was to busy looking at the receptionists. The times after that the sat nav was set to acceptance, patience and understanding and her mood were unable to take me off course.
So set your sat nav to a direction that you want to go in, and not the direction that is has been taking you in, if it taking you to a place that you don’t want to go. CHANGE DIRECTION by changing the data that is being put into the sat nav of the mind, or don’t, it is your life.

Excerpt from book (When truth met theory, Paul Regan)

Article Source: EzineArticles