When I was about 16, there was a pub in the city I lived in, where you could get drinks so cheap even a teenager with his pocket money could get hammered that one day in the week without getting broke.

The pub was called Eulenspiegel and you could get either half a liter of white beer or Pilsener in small glasses for next to nothing on each Thursday. It wouldn’t take too many drinks to get drunk and it wouldn’t take all evening, so in no time, we would be loaded up and we could even be home at a decent time. We could even go to school the next day (most of the time), but school became more and more frequently an optional thing.

My parents would or wouldn’t notice, or they would shrug it off like it was something every youth in Germany has to endure, some sort of manly initiation rite.

Then, the drinking on parties became a regularity and since we were 16, we were allowed to legally buy alcohol in supermarkets, liquor stores or gas stations, so we had a sheer unlimited supply for booze around the clock (at least if we found someone not drunk enough to go there by car or bike to get another bottle or crate of booze).

Before long, we were drunk almost every or every other weekend. We wouldn’t mark it as “problematic drinking” yet, since we all grew up in the rural outskirts of the city, where drinking belongs to growing up, like playing in the fields or the like.

I live at my parents house until I finished school, so I had a very cheap source for booze, because our cellar was always well filled with beer, wine or spirits. My parents wouldn’t notice or mind if I took beer or wine from the stock, especially in the holidays, when they were off to see the world and trusted us with keeping the house. We had a lot of parties at the houses of friends and at my house, and there was nobody who wouldn’t touch a drink. If I can remember half of these parties or going out to get hammered, I’d be a lucky guy. But blackouts seemed to be something normal and noone would dare to question our drinking habits, because “a man’s gotta do, what a man’s gotta do.”

In an online seminar I attended, it was advised to check for your “core”, ie the reason why you are/were drinking, so it would be easier to reframe alcohol to be something to distract you from your “core problem”. I found out, that first it had to do with the fact that alcohol was normalized in our family and that on a daily base. secondly, it was a matter of “manliness”, and since we had a group of people who spent a lot of time together (living in the suburbs), there was a lot of peer pressure. And if you are a guy that doesn’t look like he’s 16 or 17 or 18, but rather 13 or 14 or 15 (which I did), you want to make up for your feeling of feebleness (is that a word?) with “manly” things like alcohol, cigarettes and dope. Which I did.

These were the first two cores I could discover. The older I got and the more alcohol was the norm, I could find other reasons to fuel my alcohol.

Until then: Keep up the faith in yourself and take one step at a time.