Surprised to Be Talking to One of Us? Callers are usually surprised that they are really talking to Mary Ellen or me when they call. It’s one of the many ways we are unique, ways we think are important to you. After all, you should be talking to the people you might be working with, not some marketing department, volunteer client, or anyone else who, among other things, jeopardizes your privacy.

Our thanks to all of you who wrote expressing appreciation for the “Unbalanced Relationships” article in last week’s Newsletter. As we noted, unbalanced personal lives specifically, and unbalanced lives generally, are the #1 factor in creating and maintaining alcohol abuse. And, as also noted, replacing passivity and passive-aggressiveness with assertiveness is the best “step” towards fixing the problem.

Tired of Being the Single Parent of Two, Three, Four, or More? Unbalanced personal relationships are one of the most common underlying factors in alcohol abuse. You may recognize it whether you are the one who’s medicating or the one living with a “missing in action” spouse or partner. Because our clients, usually, are the drinkers, I’ll explore things from that perspective, but the same factors do also operate in reverse.

Congruency, Please When I went off to college at 18 I pursued a degree in Geology. In the course of all of those classes I developed a fondness for “incongruities,” “erratics,” and the differentiation between “igneous,” “sedimentary,” and “”metamorphic.” In geology, an “erratic” refers to something that doesn’t fit, as a boulder that was transported by a glacier to a distant place. “Incongruities” are gaps that may be several million years of missing strata.

Thank you! Thanks to all of you who wrote hoping my vacation and gone well and also expressing how much the Newsletters had meant over the years. I appreciate both the best wishes – it was an excellent visit home to Alaska – and the encouragement that comes from knowing the Newsletters help so many of you.

While You’re Reading This I am Following My Own Advice… This is Newsletter #416 and I haven’t missed a week since #1 came out on September 15, 2008 – 8 years ago. I can’t believe it. I started out thinking maybe I had enough to say to send out 5 or 6. But 416? Never.

From The Little Paris Bookstore by Nina George. "Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do."

Pseudo-Egalitarianism – How’s that for a Description of 12 Step Pseudo-Science? 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 false belief that equality exists where it obviously 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.

Thank You! Your response to last week’s newsletter, Find the Courage to Take a Scary Leap, was overwhelming with many of you feeling that it was the best Newsletter ever. What was even more revealing was the number of you who are former clients who wrote wishing that you had read that advice long ago. Yes, you noted, it would have prompted you to take that “leap” sooner and you’d have lost fewer years in the process.

“Find the Courage to Take a Scary Leap” 6:00 a.m. on almost any Sunday will find me back in bed – having been roused by Sophie my 16 year old rescue dog (who rescued whom?) – with coffee and the Sunday New York Times. I will work my way through the Book Review, Magazine, and Op-Ed sections before arriving at the Business news. I always start that section with the weekly interview which this past Sunday was with Paula Kerger, President and CEO of PBS.