Between us, Dr. Mary Ellen Barnes and I have over 30 years of experience helping people leave alcohol abuse behind. We use that experience, along with real research and our clients’ experiences, to create individual solutions that will actually work for you.
Here are the “Real Steps” that make up our full recovery program:
1. It’s not the alcohol, it’s your life! Forget the focus on drinking and demeaning labels and concentrate on creating your life. Think about building fulfilling relationships along with satisfaction in your professional, social, and recreational life. The alcohol abuse won’t just disappear, but it will cease to be a problem, as it takes up less and less time and fills fewer unmet needs.
2. What do you value? What are your private and personal motivations? Health? Family? Career? Vanity? It helps to start by focusing on one or two and then actively building on what really matters to you.
3. Pick your peer group with care. Hang out with the people who are leading the kind of life you want to lead. Avoid the losers with their negative focus, labels, and infantile slogan-riddled existence. Don’t fall into The Bucket of Crabs.
4. Creating your own life really does work! You can manage your own behavior and you can enjoy health, self-respect, improved relationships, productivity, reduced stress, along with happiness and contentment.
5. Engage your loved ones. Remember, habits and behaviors exist within the context of your day-to-day life. No, other people aren’t responsible for your choice to drink, but they are affected by both your choice to abuse alcohol and your decision to stop. Think about how they can help you, and ask. Focus on the present and future, and let the past go.
6. Plan! Becoming an alcohol abuser probably wasn’t your plan, but changing this does require planning, focus, attention, and effort. Unplanned time is not your friend and you’ll have trouble changing what you’re unwilling to track.
7. Aim high. Aspire to more and better things. Do you want your legacy to be that you were a slave to your urges or that you contributed to the world? That you were just an “alcoholic” or a person with real accomplishments? Decide what you’d like to focus on, at least for now, and start!
8. Finally, remember to be gentle with yourself. Reverses happen and we all occasionally repeat old habits or dabble in another self-destructive one. That’s not failure. That’s learning. We just need to get up, dust ourselves off, and continue. No, we don’t go back to “zero” and start over, mindlessly counting days of life-sucking “recovery”.
Got it? Good. Ready to give your life a chance? Give us a call and let’s get started. Today!