A recent client wrote to summarize his work with us: “Dear Mary Ellen and Ed: It¹s been a while since we last saw each other. I don’t miss the drinking, but I have to admit I miss our chats. What I was most surprised at was how easy the process was. I didn’t have the [...]
Why your doctor won’t help… This month our favorite unbiased alcohol research site, Alcohol: Problems and Solutions, featured a review of new research on The Road To Recovery. It’s a good article reporting on a survey of physicians, ministers, and others and how their attitudes towards “alcoholism” effect individual’s willingness or ability to get help [...]
The “Relapse” Myth. After the most destructive myth of “powerlessness” no single notion is more apt to keep you trapped in the alcoholism cult than “relapse”. Most “programs” insist that you keep track of the days, months, years of “sobriety”. Think about it for just a moment, just how silly is it to try building [...]
“No, It’s Not Rocket Science!” Along about Wednesday or Thursday morning the week’s client usually says something to that effect and we absolutely agree Ending your alcohol problems isn’t rocket science, voodoo cults, magic bullets, pixie dust, labels, slogans, “90 meetings in 90 days”, or months in expensive “rehab”. It’s discovering what you are using [...]
Over the weekend I had dinner with my friend and colleague, Dr. Tom Horvath, founder of Smart Recovery. We discussed the ironic situation where it’s far easier to get people to spend $60,000 for a traditional residential “treatment” program that doesn’t work than it is to get them to spend $10,000 for an outpatient program [...]
We extend our best wishes in the your celebrations of Easter, Passover, and all of the other reminders of hope and renewal. ********* A recent client wrote the following comments which she has graciously allowed us to reprint: “I do think often of that week in California and I get almost a ‘high’ realizing the [...]
Recently a client’s accompanying friend suggested we might want to be just a bit clearer about how we work together with you. “I’d assumed,” he said, “that she’d be working with just you, Mary Ellen. I hadn’t realized that the two of you work as a team. Not only does that explain your very high [...]
There is never a perfect time to quit, so stop waiting. Most of us waste a lot of years waiting for the right moment, person, job, or other external change to come along and make it easy to quit drinking. Or we wait for that outside event, the DUI, the failed liver function test, the [...]
A reader recently wrote, “I know two people who still attend AA meetings even though they stopped drinking decades ago. How did the organization replace all their other social ties? That seems to me the most pernicious part of it–denying that a primary goal is to create an addiction to AA itself that excludes many [...]
The Power To Build a Good Life Frequently we hear from people who are eager to tell us why it is they can’t fix their alcohol problem right now. They explain that their life is out of their control, their employers are cutting back, their spouses are sabotaging them, and their desire to quit drinking [...]