AA Alternatives For Men
What does it mean that 95% of the men who try AA find it useless, or worse? It means you are, after all, the men who visit our website and read our Newsletters.
It actually means that you are the lucky ones. You don’t need to join a cult, label yourself, attend meetings, be “in recovery,” collect tokens, chant silly slogans. or spend the rest fo your lives obsessed by alcohol.
You can simply put the alcohol abuse behind you and “become a man who has put away childish thing,” including AA.
Doing that does, however, require an increased bit of self-awareness. You need to learn what benefits you’re getting from your drinking and replace them with more satisfactory, and less self-destructive, activities. Are you drinking to piss off your controlling wife? Life will get more interesting if you learn to be a little more assertive and less passive-aggressive.
If the object of your drinking is to precipitate a divorce, you’ll come out a lot better — particularly in the eyes of your children — if you do it straight rather than assuming the passive bad guy role.
These are only two examples, of course, but they are ones we see fairly often.
Other self-medicated conditions include boredom, loneliness, anxiety, exhaustion, depression, and the typical concerns of aging and retirement.
So whether you’re drinking to “kill time waiting to die,” as one client put it, or because you don’t know what to do with retirement and free time, or if you are crumbling under a load of responsibility you don’t know how to put down, it’s time to sort things out.
Whatever your particular mix of worries and troubles are, alcohol is not making them better, and it is preventing you from creating a life worth living.
We often say that we help you see new options, grant you absolution for past mistakes, and give you permission to be happy.
Then we help you create the plans to achieve that happier life and support you through the first few months until the changes are well on the way to being established.
Isn’t that what you want too?
It’s available. Right now. Give us a week and we’ll help you change your life.
Privately. Confidentially. Affordably. Permanently.
Igneous, Sedimentary, or Metamorphic?
After spending several of my teenage summers mapping wild caves in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, I headed off to college and a degree in geology, hoping to become a professional Speleologist.
That didn’t pan out, but I never lost my geologist ‘s perspective even when, 20 years later, I moved on to psychology. I still see prospective clients as igneous (angry, possibly psychopathic), sedimentary (neurotic whiners) or metamorphic (actually interested in change!).
Those of you who read and call, fit in the metamorphic category, as do all of our clients. The igneous don’t call and the sedimentary we refer back to AA and Alanon – the perfect places for those who only want to appear to be doing something about their alcohol related problems.
For those of you without the benefit of a geology background, metamorphic rocks are those that have changed for the better under heat and pressure. Coal becomes diamond; limestone becomes marble; shale to slate; and so on.
So here you are in your life and the heat and pressure are mounting and the question is, will you crumble into apathy, despair, and being a self-medicated spectator in your life?
Or will you emerge smarter, stronger, happier, and actually live your life?
Don’t choose Thoreau’s “life of quiet (read drunken) desperation,” but rather choose, again in his words, to listen to your own “different drummer.”
We’re here to help you discover the unique rhythm of your own life.
Scruffy’s a great office dog, but a lousy role model.
Please don’t emulate him!
Popular Links for Getting Your Head Out of the Sand:
Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, and 12 Step Programs That Can’t Tell the Difference
“How Can You Possibly Cure My Years of Alcohol Abuse in Just 5 Days?”
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