Your Self-Image and Alcohol Abuse

Just as habit patterns contribute to maintaining our misuse of alcohol, so does our self- image.

Look at advertising – all advertising – and you can easily see that what’s being sold isn’t a product but images of what this product will do for you. The two classics were the Marlboro Man and the Virginia Slims cigarette campaigns. Both among the most successful ever.

Sex + Self-Image = Sales.

Just drink Dos XX’s and you too can be the most interesting man in the world.

Select that $30/bottle Chardonnay and you are the most glamorous woman at the country club.

And there’s the crystal glassware, sterling silver ice bucket, and…

It’s all about fantasy land, and you can move right in, temporarily, if you just drink, and drink and drink.

Some of this, of course, is what we absorbed by osmosis as we were growing up. We learned from our parents and other adults what alcohol was for. We learned from peers how to use it to fit in. We learned to use it to quell anxiety when we were dating. We learned a lot – except how to manage it appropriately.

And, as a brief but dramatic lesson in how self-image plays into your drinking, spend an afternoon watching a baseball game on TV. In the course on one game, you will see more spitting than you will see in a lifetime outside of a ball park.

Exactly what does constant spitting have to do with being a professional baseball player? Absolutely nothing. Except that from the beginning of baseball, tobacco chewing and spitting was part of the image and that continues to this very day even if gum and sunflower seeds have replaced tobacco in most, but not all, cases.

Now take a hard look at what you tell yourself about your drinking. Is it sexy? Manly? Glamorous? Does it reflect status? Wealth? That you’ve “made it.” Is it a reward? Or just a reflexive habit like the ballplayers expectorating?

For most of us who are in trouble with our drinking it’s a hodgepodge. A little of this, a lot of that, smidgeon of something else. Fixing it will also require a mosaic of approaches to address instead of self-medicate.

That’s what we do, why we only work with individuals and couples, never groups, and addressing the real problems – anxiety, boredom, loneliness, habit, self-image, unbalanced relationships and whatever else your unique circumstances dictate.

And we work with you to accomplish this by marshalling your strengths, intelligence, abilities, self-knowledge, and experience. NOT by degrading, humiliating, dehumanizing, and keeping locked in a child’s world. That’s what they do.

Don’t you deserve the best? Delivered personally, confidentially, effectively and affordably?

“AA? Harrumph, that’s just the Peter Pan Society for all the little boys who never want to grow up.”

So said my crotchety old uncles – who, admittedly, where younger then than I am now – back in the 1950s. I heard them, believed them, didn’t go there when I had my own alcohol problems, and later got a Master’s thesis and a Doctoral dissertation out of proving they were right.

Unhappily the rest of our culture never got the message and, hence, the creation of the “facilitated 12 Step” rehab con game.

It’s easy to fall into the trap.

Frankly, most people mature beyond AA’s actual level – people whose emotional and psychological development was arrested prior to the age of 12.

But there are several insidious factors that may lead you into the 12 Step trap.

The first is the way in which AA’s voodoo mythology has permeated our culture. Everyone “knows it works,” and, even worse, that “it’s the only thing that does.”

Then there is alcohol’s own unsuspected contribution, Alcohol isn’t just a depressant, it’s also a regressant, a chemical that reduces our functional age level down to match the AA group. Now you’re really hooked, not on alcohol, but on meetings and all of the mythology.

But when you stop drinking, and artificially lowering yourself to an 8 year old’s level, you will quickly rebound to your normal age appropriate maturity level and you will have, literally, outgrown AA.

Unhappily, by now, you will have been so brainwashed that you’ll be afraid to leave.

Many people spend decades living in fear, or they continue to drink in order to fit in with AA’s required childishness.

Now there’s a third option. Work with us to become deprogrammed, address the issues you’ve been medicating – or hiding in meetings to avoid – and regain your independence, integrity, and YOURSELF and YOUR LIFE!

You’ll be glad you did. Call and sign up for an adventure and get out of the darkness.