We’d like to wish all of you a wonderful Thanksgiving and a happy holiday season throughout the weeks to come.

Please remember that enjoying this season is recognizing that alcohol abuse is usually a way to avoid having an actual life. It means being a spectator of our lives, not participants.

As a former client noted when he dropped by to visit, “I was just killing time waiting to die.”

It’s always tempting to medicate our way through life, but, really, we’ll all be gone soon enough.

Why not take a chance on life?

Consider the following video:

Dream Riders – based on a true story
http://youtu.be/vksdBSVAM6g

Then you might want to give us a call and set about reclaiming your life!

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First, let us warn you that this Newsletter is only meant for those of you who actually do want to end your alcohol abuse. To that end it’s brutally honest.

SO! PLEASE! STOP READING RIGHT NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT YOUR REALITY EXPOSED!

Still here?

Good – now take a minute and relax. Drop your shoulders and take a couple of deep breaths.

Now that you’re a bit more settled, there are two reasons why you haven’t yet fixed your drinking problem.

The second one is the real shocker so let’s start with the first one:

YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO STOP DRINKING!

Yes, you’ve occasionally cut back – even stopped for a month or sixty days, or even a year. Maybe you went to a few AA meetings. But you haven’t figured out how to create the day-to-day life you want and still escape alcohol’s allure, ease, and, let’s face it, comfort.

Your alcohol misuse, right now and through the holiday season, is the clearest reflection of your failure to create a satisfactory life without alcohol.

Your drinking is a reflection of:
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Stay away from the “Normies”?

AA and 12 Step based treatment programs are always exhorting you to stay away from “normies” – anyone who is actually living a normal life and who doesn’t have problems with alcohol, whether they drink or not.

Ironically, we have similar advice for our clients, but for diametrically opposed reasons.

AA advises you to stay away because you are a powerless and diseased victim who is only safe within the AA “family”.

We suggest that you stay away because you are setting your sights way too low!

50 years ago, psychologist Jane Loevinger, of Washington University in St. Louis, decided to study adult development in women. Basically she was looking to describe and measure emotional and cognitive maturity, which she labeled “ego development”.

25 years later I was able to take her research and use it to figure out who AA works for, who it doesn’t, and who it harms, men and women both.

This insight has allowed us to focus on those clients who have traditionally found AA to be either irrelevant or harmful while also allowing us to refer appropriate individuals to that program – something we do about a dozen times a year (which is a dozen times more often than everyone else refers anyone).

What’s all of this mean? Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Halloween?

Here it is, Halloween weekend and a time for massive “adult” celebrations that usually involve more alcohol than any weekend including Super Bowl Sunday.

How’s that working out for you?

Probably not too well.

Is it also a preview of the rest of the holiday season right up through the Super Bowl?

And why is it that you want to keep doing this to yourself and family and friends?

There are people who keep on doing the same self-destructive patterns and behaviors because they aren’t smart enough to figure it out. But they’re neither our clients nor our readers.

So why are you acting dumb when you’re anything but? Why do any of us, whether it’s alcohol, carbohydrates, cigarettes, or sloth?

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Real Accelerated Recovery – when it actually works, how it works, and why we can offer it and no one else can.

A number of treatment programs are now offering “accelerated recovery” options that, frankly, don’t work.

Why not? The real problem for virtually all programs is that they rely on groups to deliver what passes for treatment – and groups simply don’t work. Compressing even more groups into a shorter time frame obviously doesn’t work any better.

Other programs rely on substituting massive amounts of drugs to fix your drinking problem – substituting one “fix” for another. How do you suppose that’s going to pan out?

Others simply promise the same old pixie dust and magic we debunked two weeks ago.

We, on the other hand, offer an approach no one else even tries to match.

First – NO groups!!! Just you, us, and possibly a spouse or other significant person (at your choice). That amounts to about 15 hours of individually focused time during the first five days. The typical traditional program will offer 6-8 hours during 60 – 90 days of residential. Other “accelerated” programs offer as little as 1 hour of individual treatment.

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How much do you like being a victim?

That may sound like a dumb question – who wants to be a victim? But, unhappily, the answer is, most of us, too much of the time.

That’s easier to understand when you realize that the alternative to being a victim is being responsible. And again, most of us would rather blame someone else – our parents, spouses, the economy, and so on – than take responsibility for our lives and behaviors, including self-medicating. Especially self-medicating.

That reality probably costs us more potential clients than any other single factor. Most of us, deep down, would prefer to be “powerless over our disease” than to have our alcohol abuse simply be a logical, if destructive, choice.

We’d also rather have someone else, or some program, be responsible for fixing it for us so we can continue to drink our lives away, but place the responsibility elsewhere as in “I went to AA,” or “treatment” but “it” didn’t work.

Admittedly, those are attractive choices if you have successfully conned yourself into believing that the mess you’ve created in your life is a better choice than actually getting a life.

But if that’s the case for you, personally, then why are you reading this Newsletter and spending late nights on our website?

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It’s Magic in Malibu!!!!!

“The Magical Part: There is a quality about ****** that words simply cannot convey. After you have been at ****** a few days, you will most likely say what many of our clients say: “This is the best thing I ever did for myself.”
Magic and magical, words you hear around treatment centers across the country. As if recovering from alcohol abuse were some mystical process based on locations, views, fine dining, beach walks, equine “therapy”, and secrets known only to those “in recovery”.

And you hear about the magic of the winds blowing through the palms, the spruce, the maples, or the canyons.

Where the magical winds actually blow is through the empty spaces between these people’s ears.

Yes, we all want the magic that’ll take away the problem without us having to do anything beyond soaking up the sun and playing with the horses. But for better or worse, no such “fix” exists and paying for “magic” doesn’t make it happen.

Yes, you are welcome to buy the magic, just as you can still buy Laetrile to treat cancer. Both have about the same effectiveness and are still sold by the same sort of folks who want you to invest in their various revolving door treatment schemes.

But what if you actually want to fix your problem?

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How to quit drinking on your own…

This is a very common search phrase that has people coming to our website. The important points here are understanding exactly what you want and what you need.

First, we assume you don’t want to join AA, go “off to treatment” for 30, 60, or 90 days, or label yourself a diseased alcoholic loser for the rest of your life.

Second, we also assume you’d like to be able to assemble the best collection of tools for overcoming your alcohol abuse as effectively as possible. Who wouldn’t?

Given those two concerns it seems like an analogy might be helpful.
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Change is Hard. Here’s How to Make it Easier!

From personal experience and working with hundreds of clients, we know that change is hard and all too often old habits come back.

Fortunately, there is a way to be successful – if you know how successful people actually change and follow their example!

First:  Acknowledge that change involves, well, change! Ingrained behaviors and habits die hard.

Our brain has ingrained neural pathways that mostly serve us well – from getting dressed to driving our cars to walking, for example – and make life easier and efficient. But when we try to change our habits, our brain resists.

As a result, we often note that giving up alcohol is relatively easy – giving up the associated habits is not!

Take this normal resistance seriously, admit it exists, and let us help you learn to create new habits that override the old ones.

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How to be happier!

Over the years we have said that what we do best is give our clients permission to lead happier lives. That might not sound like much, but consider this fact: happy people don’t have alcohol problems.

It turns out that leading a happy life is a very big deal after all.

It’s also elusive.

Most of us have fallen into the trap of believing that we’ll be happy when we meet the right person, get the right job, earn the right amount of money, drive the right car, and so on. Then we seem to reach these goals and discover we still aren’t happy.

Worse, we blame our unhappiness on not having found the “right” this, that, or someone.
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