Confidentiality – Yes It Matters, and No, You Won’t Know it Until It’s Too Late
If you are concerned about your self-medication with alcohol, you also need to be concerned about seeking help. The problem is that too many of us wait too long and then have to make decisions and choices when we are in a crisis. That being the case, we overlook the fact that a “diagnosis” of “alcoholism” will negatively affect many areas of your life for the rest of your life.
Among the other effects, the label will prevent you from pursuing many professions requiring licenses and certification including physicians, nurses, and other health care workers; positions which require security clearances; upper level management positions; political positions; and so on.
Labeling will also make it difficult for you get health/life insurance; travel to certain countries; destroy you in child custody disputes; and stigmatize you for life.
Therefore, when you’ve decided to seek help, any of the following will destroy confidentiality and leave you exposed:
AA and 12 Step based approaches (which are also ineffective);
- Groups;
- Para-professional staff and non- professional staff;
- Using insurance;
- Conferring with your personal physician (who may well be a closet Stepper);
- Receiving a Rx for Naltrexone;
- Involving family members;
- Disappearing for 30, 60, 90 days;
- Failing to obtain effective short term help before the crisis reaches public record levels.
As discouraging as this sounds, confidential help is available, though difficult to find since “what everyone knows” tends to dictate what people do and when they do it. We, however, are a professional program that protects you from all of the above.
We are:
- Research and outcome based;
- Only the two of us, both professionals;
- All individual – no groups;
- Access to private physician consultation made available;
- Intensive outpatient (2-2.5. hrs for 4 days, weekly session for 12 weeks) with both in-person and distance delivery options;
- Self-pay;
- Spouses, partners or others only involved at your specific request;
- You chose the desired outcome, be it abstinence, moderation, or harm reduction.
Affordable, private, confidential, effective, and permanent solutions without dogma, stigma, exposure, or professional penalties. See the following article for additional considerations.
How AA Prevents You from Getting Help until the Damage is Done.
One of AA’s biggest myths is the “You must hit bottom before you can be ‘in recovery’.”
That may be somewhat true in the case of those who are Stepper material, but the opposite is true for the rest of us who make up the vast majority of people whose self-medicating has become problematic – or is clearly heading that way.
If self-medicating were actually a “disease’ (another Stepper myth) then a disease model would suggest that the earlier a problem is addressed the better the prognosis. Can you imagine an oncologist saying, “Well, you cancer is only Stage 1, we need to wait until it’s Stage 4 before we treat it.” Really?
Or AA’s assertion that it’s “the only way.”
Back to our oncologist:
“We’ll be removing your left lung.”
“But I have prostate cancer!”
“Yes, but removing the left lung is how we treat all cancers. That’s what works.”
If you think this is a silly comparison, it isn’t. Virtually every “rehab” program (programs designed to fail) “treat” everyone with the same failed 12 Step regimen – which, by the way, is available to you, free, at a location near you.
The lesson in this unusually short article is just this: seek confidential help early and avoid exposure which is usually inaccurate in any case. Do not compound your problem(s) unnecessarily and irrevocably.
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