If I’m so smart, sensitive, and independent (see last week’s Newsletter) why do I keep ending up with loser spouses, partners, friends, and lovers?

Going back to your childhood, whatever you grew up with, no matter how nuts, abusive, dysfunctional, crazy, or otherwise distressing, is what you internalized as you very own personal “normal.”

Because it is your unconscious version of normal it will always have the allure of the familiar and you will always respond to it. However, you can also learn to recognize it and walk away from those you are viscerally attracted to, and who are attracted to you, simply because of this “security of familiar miseries” component of your personality.

Sigh.

But you aren’t doomed. It may take a lot of looking, a lot of becoming more assertive and less passive (including passive- aggressive drinking), and a lot of self-awareness. But childhood is not destiny, nor are the decisions of twenty years ago life sentences to be worked off at hard labor.

Humor, good will, and, yes, even joy, are still to be found when due diligence is exercised (and a cost/benefit analysis completed with a trained steely eye).

Need help correcting your emotional vision?

Assertiveness training required?

Negativity sent packing?

Demeaning labels revoked?

We thought that might be the case, which is why we included them when we designed our work with you.

Click and Read: “How Can You Possibly Cure My Years of Alcohol Abuse in Just 5 Days?”

Does your entire social and recreational life revolve around alcohol?

Many of our clients report that they’re having trouble imaging life without alcohol because everything they do, and everyone they know, drinks (and usually too much).

If you let it, of course, dining does become more about the wine list than the food; skiing becomes drinking at the lodge; fishing drinking on the boat; golfing and tennis drinking at the club; and so on and on and on…

Even our marital life can be reduced to drinking and a number of our clients further report that they have never ever had sex sober.

That adds up to a daunting list of sacrifices if you actually believe that you’ll never again be able to enjoy any of these activities if you quit drinking.

Of course the realitry is that you gave up all of those activities in order to expand your drinking. You haven’t really golfed, danced, fished, or had sex, and been present and engaged in these, or other activities, in years.

When your only friends are drinking buddies, and your social and recreational pursuits mere cover stories for drinking, you’ve already lost your meaningful and intimate relationships.

Now, if you’d like to get them back, or establish them for the first time – that’s where the motivation and rewards for a life lived instead of avoided come in.

Participant or spectator in your life and the lives of others?

Engaged or missing in action?

What’s your choice?