The Reason the Wine Stops Working

It is the end of a long day and the world is on fire in six directions, so you pour a glass of wine and sit down, and for a little while it is better. The edges soften. Your shoulders come down. And then the glass is empty, and somehow you are pouring a second one you did not quite plan on, and by the time the evening is over the relief is gone and the low dread is right there waiting, maybe a little heavier than before.

Or it is the match. You sit down to watch, and for ninety minutes you are somewhere else, you are fine, the chaos is out of frame. Then the whistle blows, the screen goes dark, and everything you were not thinking about comes flooding back the moment the room goes still.

Or it is the scroll that ate two hours you will never get back. The online cart you filled and half-bought. The show you binged. The work you could not seem to put down. The snack you do not even remember tasting.

I want to say something about all of it, and I want to say it without one ounce of shame, because shame has never healed a single person. Reaching for relief is not a character flaw and it is not weakness. When your body has been on alert for months with nowhere to put the strain, of course you reach for something that takes the edge off. Everybody does. You are not failing. You are a tired person looking for a break, the only way you have found so far.

But here is what you have probably noticed, even if you have never said it out loud. The relief is borrowed. It works, and then it runs out, and it leaves you about where it found you, sometimes worse. The wine wears off. The match ends. The screen goes dark. The cart does not fill the thing it was trying to fill.

There is a reason for that, and it is the same reason all the books and the breathing techniques and the good advice have not fixed the underlying thing either. Whatever is generating that dread does not live in your thoughts, so things that work on your thoughts cannot reach it. Distraction does not touch it, it just takes it out of the frame for a while. Insight does not touch it, it just explains it back to you. The pattern lives somewhere underneath all of that, in a part of you that was shaped long before you had language, a part that runs faster than thinking and does not check in with the conscious mind before it acts.

This is why you cannot think your way out, and why you cannot drink, scroll, shop, or binge your way out either. None of those reach the floor the dread is sitting on. They reach the surface, and the problem was never on the surface.

I am not here to take your comforts away. Your pleasures are yours, and you are allowed them. The thing I want you to see is that the ache underneath, the one the wine keeps almost reaching and never quite touching, can actually be reached. Not numbed. Not managed. Reached, at the level where it actually lives.

That is what my short ebook Why Nothing Has Worked is about. It is a clear, no-pitch look at why the relief never lasts, where these patterns are actually stored in you, and what it takes to finally clear them instead of covering them over one more night. If some part of you has been nodding since the first glass of wine in this post, that part is worth listening to.

Get your free copy of Why Nothing Has Worked here: https://judithrichey.com/ebook-optin