SEX! I was looking for a eye grabbing topic I haven't written much about, if anything, in the previous 298 issues and the obvious one is sex. So, having gotten your attention, I'll move along to noting a few of the things we have either learned or confirmed while listening to clients over the past [...]

"I haven't had a drink in over a year and I'm still miserable!" "AA is worse than drinking - but I'm so brainwashed I'm afraid to leave!" And from a gastric bypass patient, "If I'd come to you first, I could have skipped the surgery!" What do all of these readers who wrote to us [...]

Last week we wrote about working with couples when you are both abusing alcohol. This week we want to look at working with spouses when only one of you is drinking destructively. The first question is, to what degree do we involve spouses since all other programs exclude them? The answer is, it differs, and [...]

Couples: When you're both drinking too much? As you know, and as described on our website, we work with couples where both of you are drinking too much. Turns out that this is an "innovation" that should just be common sense. Think about it for a moment - if you're both abusing alcohol, and you're [...]

And the vacuum sucks you under... Many of us make the repeated mistake of attempting to just stop drinking. It virtually never works and then we beat ourselves up for being weak or diseased or immoral. Wrong, again. As we have often noted, we get into trouble because it works. Then it doesn't. But by [...]

Directive! That's the one word that is most commonly used to describe how we work with you and it's pretty accurate. It's also used appreciatively, not as a criticism. Yes, when you're unable to figure out how to correct your alcohol abuse on your own, you come to us for help in getting from where [...]

Drinking, couples counseling, and clueless therapists. We hear it all of the time, "We went to marriage counseling but as soon as my drinking came up the counselor said, 'Oh, we can't do anything until you've been to treatment!'" This, of course, is just plain ignorance! Nor is it excusable - any therapist worth spending [...]

Why do AA/12 Step "rehab" programs pathologize "normal alcohol abuse?" One of the many ways in which our work differs from that of the 12 Step rehab mills is that we don't confuse "normal" - and understandable - alcohol abuse with "alcoholism." As we have noted in our article: Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, and 12 Step [...]

We teach other people how to treat us. Generally speaking, as adults, we train other people how to treat us by what we accept. If we act subservient, for example, then we shouldn't be surprised when people treat us as less than their equals. We bring up this point because most of our clients share [...]

Happy? Nearly 2,000 years ago Epictetus noted that "What upsets people is not the things themselves but their judgments about the things." Lincoln suggested that "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." Both research and experience suggest they were both right. Naturally we do not see a lot [...]