Your Success – and Future – Is Built on Establishing Good Daily Habits In a normal day, almost everything we do is done out of habit. We have daily and weekly routines that help us organize our lives. Habits simplify our lives. Imagine if you woke up with no idea where the bathroom might be, [...]
Questions From Spouses, Parents, Siblings, Friends We often hear from parents, spouses, siblings, and friends who are worried about another’s alcohol abuse, and wondering how they can help them find the right treatment program. You can be most helpful when you understand what actually works, and how it works – or doesn’t. First, treatment isn’t [...]
Couples Many times we find ourselves working with couples – which is something we do that almost no one else does. We do it because the misuse and abuse of alcohol exists within a context and with couples both are usually involved. That doesn’t mean that the spouse is to blame – alcohol abuse is [...]
Mindfulness We just got back from Seattle and a three day conference on “Mindfulness”. In case you’re not up on the latest jargon, “mindfulness” is the new buzzword for self-awareness with some meditation thrown in. We were glad to see that our approach is steadily gaining independent confirmation and support. Mindfulness is an effective technique [...]
Another Red Herring… We’d no sooner wrapped up last week’s Newsletter with Mary Ellen’s book review of Harvard psychologist Gene Heyman’s new book, Addiction, A Disorder of Choice, than in through the mail slot came the newsletter from a 12-Step residential program we visited last year in British Columbia. We weren’t too surprised that the [...]
Stop Drinking Alcohol and Lose Weight We often hear from people who have a number of reasons for thinking about stopping their drinking. One common contributing factor is weight loss. Alcohol use, alcohol abuse, and alcoholism can all contribute to weight gain as well as difficulty in losing weight. The reasons are simple: beer, wine, [...]
Confidentiality Google tells us, occasionally, what phrases people use to find our website and “Confidentiality in AA” appeared on the list this week. The bad news is that there isn’t any. Not even 30 years ago when the joke around Minnesota was that AA had gone from being Alcoholics Anonymous to being AU, Alcoholics Unanimous. [...]
A good friend dropped by last week to bring us up to date on the status of her battle with cancer. Her first comment was one we wanted to share: “Now that I’m involved with a real disease, and receiving real treatment, the contrast to what I was forced into under the guise of alcoholism [...]
Self-Image One of the things so-called treatment programs don’t want to mention is self-image and how it plays a part in overcoming alcohol abuse. Their reason for the omission is pretty obvious – the image they’re selling is “powerless alcoholic.” Exactly how is incorporating powerless alcoholic into your self-image supposed to help you quit abusing [...]
This is a favorite poem of ours. It is about the importance of the journey rather than the destination. We hope that your journey has been and continues to be an interesting one, not one of sitting in your recliner with a bottle, as is so often the case with people who have problems with [...]