Protecting Your Privacy! We frequently tell clients and prospective clients that they need to be careful about using their medical insurance for alcohol treatment and their pharmacy benefit for medications that are only prescribed for alcohol problems. These can and do get in your record and can follow you around for years.

Here’s to a Happier 2016! Well, except for the Super Bowl, the Alcohol Abuse Season that started with Halloween has pretty much come to a close – except for those of you who add in Valentine’s Day, Groundhog Day, assorted birthdays, anniversaries, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and…..

Fear of Failure - We get quite a few calls from people who are so afraid to fail in their quest to quit drinking that they scare themselves into never even giving it a try. It reminds me of the newspaper articles I read every year about the number of kids taking their lives before end of school exams because of a genuine “fear of failure”. These are not kids who have failed, these are kids who fear they may fail. How have we created such a fear of failure in our society?

Who Does AA Help, Harm, or Kill? Twenty-five years ago, when I was a graduate student at St. Mary's University in Minnesota, I did the research that showed it was possible to use Dr. Jane Loevinger's Sentence Completion Test to answer that question.

How Does Fixing Your Problem Affect Your Spouse/Partner and Others Close to You? It’s always interesting to see the various ways in which clients manage their “significant others” when it comes time to address the alcohol problems. Usually this coping with others in your life takes one of several paths.

Pseudo-Egalitarianism - My friend and colleague, Dr. Steve Schrader-Davis of St. Mary’s University, Minneapolis, was fond of using this word to describe policies which promote the obviously false belief that equality exists where it clearly does not. In his particular field of interest, education of the gifted, it played out as schools penalizing academically superior students in order to regress them to the ranks of the average.

Essential Self-Care - Many of our clients are extremely busy people. They are so busy that they have no time to take care of themselves beyond daily hygiene or to recharge their own batteries. Not surprisingly, this leads to downing too many drinks at the end of the day. It is a quick and easy way to relax. But there is a price to pay for this way of relaxing.

Contemplation Purgatory – Women’s Waiting Room - We recently sat down with a researcher from the mid-west to discuss why women who abuse alcohol weren’t getting the help they need and deserve. Her premise was because the services offered, usually AA based, were derived from male referenced approaches. Even when they weren’t, such as Women for Sobriety, they were still largely based on many of the same myths: powerlessness, life-long recovery, isolation in cult-like groups, and a fear of “getting a life.”

Let’s Compare “Rehab,” Individual Therapists, and Our Work. Who do You Suppose Gives You the Most for Your Money? Last week we talked about “Substance vs Filler,” and how you can benefit by electing one over the other, and how to decide what’s in your best self-interest. This week we’d like to also look at one of these points in more detail so you can construct your own “Cost/Benefit” analysis for evaluating your options.

It’s Your Choice: Substance or “Filler.” Residential programs, so called “rehab,” with their 30, 60, and 90 day “programs,” have succeeded in conning most of us into believing that there is some reason for this particular format.