Merry Christmas!

Our favorite holiday videos

First, Jingle Bell Goats

Then: T-Mobile’s Fun

And now…our gift to you – The Great Question:
Who is in charge of your life?

Yes, it’s a personal question – but it’s the most important one we can each ask and answer. Please consider the following:

It’s Christmas once again, and the New Year lies just a week away, and this season always brings questions:

• Where did the year go?
• What did I accomplish?
• What problems continue?
• What problems got worse?
• Why didn’t I fix what I said I would?
• How can the upcoming year be different?

As you think through these questions about the past year, isn’t it time to also consider how you have disappointed yourself, and others, by failing to resolve problems you could have fixed?

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With the holidays nearly upon us, we are coming into the most stressful time of the year for many people.

Over-drinking goes hand-in-hand with stress and attempts at stress reduction. But with alcohol the stress gets worse and ratchets up the stress in other family members, who usually make sure you know about it.

Why not try something different this holiday season? If lots of parties stress you out, don’t go to so many of them. If family members stress you out, why not go away for the holiday, or decline family invitations, or strictly limit the time spent with these people.

I know, you couldn’t do that, they’re family!

But really, who says you can’t? You are an adult and it’s time to start thinking about spending your finite time on this earth in ways that make you happy and relaxed, rather than pleasing everybody else.

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Damn it, Scruffy!
Get Your Head Out Of The Sand!!

Mary Ellen’s Scruffy is a great office dog, but he’s a lousy role model.

Isn’t it time you stopped emulating him and started getting a life?

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We received the following e-mail and knew that many of you can relate to the problem of being stuck in the “contemplation hell” the writer describes. We thank her for permission to reprint it here.

“Dear Mary Ellen and Ed,

I am finally hitting send on this email I drafted Sunday.  I drank two bottles of wine last night, woke up “on time” and could have gotten up but just could not.

Instead I cried and cried. I have had SO much change happen in my life in the last few years and even last few months.  I felt miserable. I went into work late today even though I could have made it on time. I needed the time to cry and regroup. Here’s what I drafted earlier this week…

Alright….maybe we should talk.

First of all, it is easier for me to send this email right now than to dial the phone number which is plugged into my phone right now ready to hit “call”. Why?  I’ll share a couple of the 5 million conversations that I have had with myself in the last ten minutes of “stalling”.

This Newsletter is great, (November 13th) the Newsletter you sent last week (November 6th) really got me too.  I related to the “type” of client you work with…usually smarter than the average bear. This week I relate to both of your points.

So, it got me thinking and asking…”What AM I afraid of?” and, “Why haven’t I actually called?”

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Tired of being the “Frog In The Cooking Pot”?

This old psychologists’ analogy refers to the fact that if you toss a frog into a pot of hot water he (or she) will jump back out. But if you put him in a pot of cool water and gradually raise the temperature, he will remain there until he’s cooked to death.

A lot of our clients are using alcohol to compensate for rising temperatures in their personal cooking pots, but have decided it’s time to get out before it kills them.

That’s right. A lot of us use alcohol to make intolerable lives seem tolerable.

Is that what you’re doing?

If it is, then the assertiveness training component of our work with you will get you off the burner.

Surprising as it may seem, many of our clients lack assertiveness in their personal lives and alcohol abuse has become both a hiding place and a passive aggressive weapon.

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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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