Addiction: One Cause, One Solution with Christian McNeill

What if addiction is not a disease? What if addiction is caused by the same thing that causes fights with a spouse or anxiety about air travel or suffering about school grades: Thought. In this episode, Christian McNeill and I explore how thought plays such a huge role in our attachment to (or addiction to) substances, including alcohol and drugs, and how the solution to these attachments is simply seeing how being human works.

Christian McNeill is an author, coach, and former barrister and tribunal judge. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

* On the life-changing insight that ended an alcohol addiction

* How Christian’s creativity was enhanced by sobriety

* Recognizing and experiencing that insight is the key to change

* An insight about the importance of listening to oneself

* Co-writing a book from 2 separate continents

* Why variability of moods and life experience is nothing to be worried about

* What is ‘subtractive psychology’ and why does it matter?

Resources mentioned on the show

* Christian’s book is Addiction: One Cause, One Solution

* Joe Bailey’s book about addiction is The Serenity Principle

* Sydney Banks’ book: The Missing Link

You can find Christian McNeill at ElementsOfWellbeing.net and on Facebook at Recovery From The Inside Out.

Transcript of Interview with Christian McNeill

Alexandra Amor: Welcome Christian MacNeil to Unbroken. It’s lovely to see you.

Christian McNeill: Well, it’s lovely to see you too, Alexandra. Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here honored to be here.

Alexandra Amor: Oh, my pleasure. You’re going to be my first guest actually. So even more exciting. I’m thrilled to have you here.

Why don’t you tell us anything about yourself that you’d like to share about your background. And maybe when you came upon the 3 Principles.

Christian McNeill: Sure. Thank you. Yes, on the one hand, I have a background, a career in law, and I was a lawyer for a long time. And unbeknownst to me, at the same time, as I was training to become a lawyer, I was working out an alcohol addiction. I did not know that. I was not aware of that until it became a real crisis in my mid to late 20s. And at that point, I had a rock bottom kind of experience and followed immediately by a moment of clarity, and I got sober and it was a completely life changing shift.

And although I had a lot of help from the 12 step movement in getting sober, the actual moment of clarity occurred more or less in a gutter in Edinburgh in a city street on a Saturday night. And almost everything I see or talk about now is kind of informed by hindsight. I see things differently, or I understand what was going on in a way that I didn’t at the time.

I didn’t know that my life was going to change in that moment,