Happy Holidays! We’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a safe, sane, and peaceful holiday season. We’d also like to thank our friend and collegue, Dr. Neill Neill of Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, for permission to reprint his thoughts from the following interview by Carrie Powell-Davidson that appeared in the Oceanside, B.C. [...]
Ten Things I Wished I’d Known Before I Sent My Brother Off To Rehab Almost 10 years ago, my brother was sinking fast, in the grip of cocaine and pot. My family asked me to find him help. I was not a substance abuse specialist, just a therapist, but I started looking. I stepped on [...]
Are You Tired of Being a Spectator in Your Life? Really, that’s what alcohol abuse reduces us to. Instead of being active participants, we become spectators, numbing our disappointments and nursing our regrets when we aren’t imagining grandiose successes that we’re never going to achieve as long as alcohol is our teammate. I grew up [...]
Last week’s Newsletter contained a link to the L.A. Times article You Can Cut Back and we encourage you to read it. Needless to say, this article engendered a flurry of responses, mostly hostile, everywhere it appeared. But it also elicited a few informed responses citing the research that supports the points the article makes, [...]
Happy Thanksgiving! We hope that you are able to enjoy the holiday weekend and all of the upcoming season. We are thankful for all of your support, comments, e-mails, and calls over the past year, and the privilege of helping you through many challenging changes. Thank you! Mary Ellen and Ed Sinking? Not Our Recommendation… [...]
Your Success – and Future – Is Built on Establishing Good Daily Habits In a normal day, almost everything we do is done out of habit. We have daily and weekly routines that help us organize our lives. Habits simplify our lives. Imagine if you woke up with no idea where the bathroom might be, [...]
Questions From Spouses, Parents, Siblings, Friends We often hear from parents, spouses, siblings, and friends who are worried about another’s alcohol abuse, and wondering how they can help them find the right treatment program. You can be most helpful when you understand what actually works, and how it works – or doesn’t. First, treatment isn’t [...]
Couples Many times we find ourselves working with couples – which is something we do that almost no one else does. We do it because the misuse and abuse of alcohol exists within a context and with couples both are usually involved. That doesn’t mean that the spouse is to blame – alcohol abuse is [...]
Mindfulness We just got back from Seattle and a three day conference on “Mindfulness”. In case you’re not up on the latest jargon, “mindfulness” is the new buzzword for self-awareness with some meditation thrown in. We were glad to see that our approach is steadily gaining independent confirmation and support. Mindfulness is an effective technique [...]
Another Red Herring… We’d no sooner wrapped up last week’s Newsletter with Mary Ellen’s book review of Harvard psychologist Gene Heyman’s new book, Addiction, A Disorder of Choice, than in through the mail slot came the newsletter from a 12-Step residential program we visited last year in British Columbia. We weren’t too surprised that the [...]