I thought my problem was the thing I kept doing. It was actually the way I was thinking.
For a long time, I believed the problem was the behavior. Whatever I was doing too much of, leaning on too hard, white-knuckling my way through — that was the thing to fix. If I could just get a handle on the behavior, I thought, everything underneath it would sort itself out.
I was wrong about that.
The behavior was never really the problem. It was where the problem went to hide.
I lived a good part of my life in fear — fear that showed up as worry and anxiety. That fear was ignited by my own thoughts and perceptions of what life was supposed to look like. The who, what, where, and when of everything had to stay in my control, because I believed I knew best. Knowing best made me feel safe from the fear.
It did the opposite.
And this is not particular to any one thing. The same pattern can attach itself to anything — money, success, achievement, food, the need to be right, the need to be in control. The specific outlet is almost beside the point. It is just whatever happened to be within reach. Underneath it is the same fear, looking for the same false sense of safety.
For me, the outlet was alcohol. Not because alcohol was the real target — it was the solution. It was how I numbed the thinking, long before I knew the thinking was the thing that actually needed attention.
It wasn’t until I started my journey toward sobriety that someone told me something that stopped me cold: my problem wasn’t alcohol. My problem was my stinking thinking.
I remember pushing back. Who are you to tell me that what I’m thinking is the problem? I drank too much — I was a blackout drinker. Where does thinking come into that? It didn’t make sense to me. But I was desperate enough, and willing enough, to stick around and find out what they meant.
That was my stinking thinking. Ego-driven, self-centered fear, at its best — dressed up as certainty, as planning, as having it together. It told me that if I controlled enough of it, I would finally feel safe. Instead, the controlling was the fear. It just wore a more respectable outfit.
There has been a lot of work on my part since then — learning to let go, leaning into the unknown, trusting that things will be okay even when I cannot see how. That work didn’t come from thinking my way to a better answer. It came from questioning whether the thinking was the problem in the first place.