Oh, Canada - or Why We Get So Many Clients From North of the Border! While the majority of our clients come to us from across the U.S., and others from as far away as India, a significant number of you also arrive from much of Canada. The stats regarding your countrymen are interesting. More [...]
Bingeing Many of our clients are "regular" drinkers, meaning those of you who have a fairly steady pattern of drinking that is stable, if excessive, over time. Others of you are bingers, drinking to extreme excess but in a pattern that is predictable, with occurrences coming weekly, monthly, quarterly, or on some other predictable schedule. [...]
Understanding the "dances" you've learned. The most insidious of the learned behavior patterns are those that couples develop. These "dances" - whether the tequila tango, the whiskey waltz, the beer barrel polka, or the chardonnay shuffle, always make it difficult to stop drinking when you are both invested in the drinking whether you like it [...]
Nothing is going to change until you do. Anne Frank said, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." The same could be said of your life. She could have added that none of us need wait another moment to begin improving our own lives, too. [...]
Yes, it's been one of those weeks.... My friend and colleague, Petar Sardelich, used to say, "It's one of those bottle of Bourbon and 2 packs of Chesterfields kind of days." With new computers to learn and glitches by our Newsletter subscriber service, there were a couple of those kinds of days. Yes, Petar and [...]
More resources to help you fend off the accusations and the zealots.. We often write articles that address various problems we face in overcoming the various myths that pervade our culture when it comes to the misuse of alcohol and/or how to fix it. This problem confronts any of us as we get assailed by [...]
Fear! Fear is an interesting double edged sword for most of us. Growing up, fear was an asset in that it forced us to develop coping skills that anger based people never did. For them aggression became the only coping mechanism they needed or ever developed. That resulted in them being arrested, emotionally and psychologically, [...]
Making Informed Decisions Several time over the past weeks, and more times than we can count over the years, we've found that clients are very afraid to collect the information they need in order to plan their lives. For example, "J" knows nothing - absolutely nothing - about her financial standing. She is clueless about [...]
Passive? Passive-Aggressive? You're not the first. For those of us whose natural tendency is to be passive, alcohol frequently becomes our vehicle of choice to become either passive-aggressive or aggressive. Notice that, on the continuum, we tend to skip door #3, assertive. How does this actually play out? Suppose we want a divorce, or don't [...]
Newsletter #300! You, Our Readers, Comment: "I never skip a letter from you two!! The comments always inspire. The idea that the alcohol is just a temporary self medication to help avoid looking at the real, underlying issues is so powerful. I numbed myself up for many, many years, but I am coming out of [...]