I am no Freudian psychoanalyst and I am not a therapist, as I said before. But I think I can identify strong relations between my drinking habits and the way of my socialization in my family. That is of course nothing new, but this insight came so strongly to me after meeting my parents after Christmas.

Drinking was always normal in my family. If my parents had/have an alcoholic problem, I don’t know. All I can say is, that my father and my mother had normalized alcohol on a daily basis. Nothing new here. I have written about this earlier.

The juicy part comes in the second tier of going down the pit when having a look of how not only drinking patterns of my parents influenced my way into addiction, or the tolerance of my parents about my drinking as a youth (mind you, in Germany drinking is allowed from ages 16+, and “accompanied drinking” even from the age of 14).

Even though my parents followed an education style what you could call little to no authoritarian, they taught me their values and expectations. Interestingly, having had authoritarian parents would, maybe, have made a little bit easier, since I lacked orientation sometimes.

Plus, when you have parents who are still traumatized by their Nazi parents and the aftermath of WW 2, you will inherit part of their psychological hell. For that matter, I can say I hated my grandfather, because he was such a glowing Nazi, who made everybody responsible for his ineptitude and failures in life.

Especially my mother was badly influenced by this man, and she carried his and her own insecurities to me, while at the same time talking me into “you are an intellectual” and “you are the type to stay at uni” when I grew up. She projected so many expectations that she could never fulfill herself onto me, that I strongly believed this and made it my own mindset.

At the same time, my father always had the conviction that I was “not a mathematician” and he was convinced I would be a great teacher.

I carried these mindsets with me for so long and only found out a couple of years ago, that all these mindsets expectations contributed to my feeling of not being able to be something else but a teacher. Only when I decided to change my career preferences (being a social worker), I found true happiness and self efficacy and acknowledgement (not by others, but through my own self). The old mindset didn’t ruin my life. I still have the conviction that your personality is the sum of your experiences, so I can happily live with it and I don’t dwell on past developments.

But I am sure that all these things contributed heavily to my feeling of insecurity, disorientation, search a life sense and so forth, that the “bad advisor” had an actually easy play.

And now? Being sober and clear with my past makes me happy. I am approaching my 50 fast, but all the decisions I made in the past year show me, that I can work on being “bullet proof” and to be the person I want to be, or, like Robbie Williams once sang, to be the “Better Man”. Maybe that process was my way of dealing with Midlife Crisis, who knows?

Until then, take one step at a time and don’t lose the faith in yourself