Your success…..

The process of successfully changing an unwanted behavior is easy to describe and hard to accomplish. In that regard, stopping drinking is like losing weight.

With weight loss you can join the best gym, hire the finest trainer, read all of the diet books, and go away to the “health spa” for 30, 60, or 90 days. You can even watch all the TV shows. Just like with drinking.

But guess what? You’re the one who, eventually, in order to succeed, has to modify you diet and activities. You’re the one who’s day-to-day life has to change.

Yes, the trainer can help you learn the tools, and the dietitian can help you with calories, and friends and family members can be supportive (or not), but you will have to do the work of staying motivated and making lasting changes that you are comfortable with and happy about.

That last part – “comfortable with and happy about” – is the important part.

Whether it’s drinking or weight loss, we have to be happier with the results than we are with the what we currently doing -medicating with food or alcohol or both – or we’re going to go right back to our usual behaviors and their benefits.

That’s why most treatment programs fail – their “fix” is worse than the condition they are supposedly helping you correct.

On the other hand, we’re dedicated to helping you live a better life, an expanded life, not a demeaned and diminished one.

Personal motivation, now and into the future, is what supports successful change. Let us help you find and maintain yours.


Kicking the 12 Step Habit

Over the past couple of years we have begun working with a new type of client – those people who have decided that they want to give up AA and the 12 Steps and are looking for both reassurance and de-programing.

It’s really quite common for people to use AA as an interim “step”. Alcohol is, after all, not just a depressant but also a regressant. That means that it not only causes you to feel bad, it actually reduces your emotional and psychological age.

Yes, when you wandered into AA you may have regressed to the point where you fit the model – something AA based treatment programs attempt to cause you to do as well.

But then you quit drinking and just like the depression began to lift, so did your functional age.

And, guess what?

After about six months, or six years, you realized you’d outgrown AA.

But you’d also absorbed all of the mythology and it can be tough to get rid of.

So now that it’s time to leave AA behind, let us help you leave all of the trappings, doubts, and fears behind too.