Feeling Helpless and Hopeless?

Our over use of alcohol tends to find us in a state where everything is in a confused swirl and we can’t begin to figure out where to even start to fix anything. Our family, and spousal relationships, friendships, professional, legal, financial, and medical states may all be in turmoil.

On top of this, we are consuming varying amounts of a depressant and wondering why we feel lousy.

No wonder we can feel “powerless” and ready to succumb to all of the mythology and easy escape from responsibility AA offers.

But AA, like alcohol, only offers escape – it doesn’t actually fix anything.

Fixing requires some short term changes, effort, focus, and, yes, is most easily accomplished with some outside help, coaching, hand holding, perspective, and structure. All those things you have been resisting because you know you “should” be able to fix this yourself – if only you could figure out where to start.

And certainly a couple of drinks will help get it all sorted out.

If only.

Of course if that were the case you wouldn’t be reading this or have spent time on line looking. You would have sorted it out and gotten on with life.

Think of us as the people who offer the clarity those first two drinks provide, but we don’t evaporate like all those best laid plans do with drinks 3, 4, 5……….and so on.

Yes, the swirl of confusion is real, as are the problems, but your current state of being smothered by an avalanche and sitting buried with your bottle isn’t working. Even if you have sorted out some or most of it you still lack the motivation to start digging your way out.

We’re also the St. Bernard sent to dig you out but instead of a keg of brandy we bring a window of clarity.

No, we don’t know your precise circumstances – but we do know how to help you identify, define, sort, prioritize, stabilize, structure, motivate, and get moving again.

When we’re buried in the avalanche of problems, conflicts, conditions, and circumstances it’s easy to forget that we all have vastly more options than any of us recognize. Our thought patterns become as ingrained as any of our other habits and it’s that combination of ongoing habits that keep us circling around and going nowhere.

How about breaking the cycle? It really doesn’t take long. 5 days of intensive personal digging, sorting, structuring. 12 weeks of coaching, adjusting, implementing (remember “doing stuff”?). Focused, individual, confidential, advancement from contemplation to action. 13 weeks, give or take a bit. Only one week “away” to southern California which is easily explained as a vacation or business trip – not the self-disclosing 30 day disappearance into “rehab” that doesn’t work anyway (unless you consider temporarily placating yourself and/or others as “working”).

Again, your life, your choice. Isn’t it time?

Robert Pirsig?

Okay, so who is Robert Maynard Pirsig and what’s he got to do with anything?

You may not know the name, but you might know his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a best seller long ago and may hold the distinction of being the most un-read best seller of all time. I doubt if many got more than halfway through the 200,000 words, if that far. I didn’t, at least not during my first 3 attempts.

It is an odd mixture, as was Pirsig, of Zen, On the Road, Walden, Travels With Charlie, Blue Highways, mysticism and a BMW motorcycle. He once noted that, “the only Zen you find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring with you.” And that was one of his clearer quotes.

Back to what does this have to do with me? And my drinking?

It goes back to deprogramming you from all of the disempowering crap AA has infused into our cultural consciousness. Guess what? You aren’t powerless and never were.

The only power you need is what, when you come to see us, is the power you already have but which has been buried by alcohol, circumstances, other people, mythology, and depression.

We were careful when we named our practice, “Your Empowering Solutions” because real solutions to your dilemma come from empowering you with your own individual combination of interests, abilities, history, motivations, values, and preferences. Not from inflicting someone else’s mold on you and cramming you into it.

The only Zen you find is the Zen you bring. The only power you need is the power you have. Using it, ah, that’s the question, isn’t it?

Which is why we remain, after 14 years, interested in the unique people who come through our door seeking to find the solutions you carry but cannot find.

And you don’t even have to climb any mountains.