"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." - Ralph [...]
Is your life out of balance internally and/or externally? Underlying our misuse of alcohol with regularity are the conflicts within ourselves and our most intimate and supportive relationships. Let's start with looking at ourselves before turning a possibly bloodshot eye on our nearest and dearest. We are all a bit inconsistent in the sense that [...]
I often note that when I gave up vodka over 25 years ago it took me a couple of years to figure out and implement all of the changes I needed to make in my day-to-day life. No, I didn't go to treatment or "rehab" or AA. I knew that for me all of these [...]
Understanding Triggers - and using them to manage your misuse of alcohol (and other behavioral choices)... Treatment mythology, pushed by an industry that has a vested interest in your failure, almost never points out that the "triggers" that lead us to abuse alcohol are the very keys to ending that behavior. When our clients, current [...]
Sabotage revisited... Once you've given up drinking you expected smooth sailing in your marital and other personal relationships. After all, everyone agreed that your drinking was the problem. But.... The reality is that your drinking is symptomatic of other problems and when you stop drinking, and begin correcting the underlying problems, you start rocking the [...]
Last week we wrote about attempting to get an accurate assessment of your alcohol related problems. Now it's time to dispel a couple of myths that interfere with you fixing these problems. Multiple myths refer to "alcoholism" as a "progressive disease" - meaning that, like cancer, it inexorably develops to a fatal end. First myth is that [...]
When you begin to suspect that you are in trouble with your alcohol use, there is no more difficult problem than getting an honest and accurate assessment - one that follows such guidelines as the DSM-5, and the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT). The first can help to accurately assess where you fall on [...]
Occasionally there is a rare legal victory for the individuals who have been systematically blackmailed and blacklisted by various licensing boards. No where has this illegal abuse of power been more widespread than in the medical field where physicians and nurses have been targeted for exploitation by board members operating in cahoots with selected 12 [...]
Group? "A. Thomas McLellan, PhD, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor who has studied addiction for more than 30 years, says, "If you go to just about any addiction program in this country, the major treatment activity is 'group.' If that doesn't work, then they'll try...'group.' And when all else fails they'll suggest...'group!'?" Unhappily, he's [...]
Should You Leave? This question frequently comes up in the course of the work we do, of course. While one might suppose that it's the client's spouse who's asking the question, it's more frequently the drinker who's actually wondering. How can that be? It turns out that it's common for a alcohol abuse to pr [...]