Problem Drinking

Because intoxication provides an immediate payoff, it is corruptive. The desire for pleasure or relief from suffering causes some individuals to trade what is truly precious [health, wealth, or relationships] to maintain their access to alcohol. Some individuals pay dearly for their drinking problem, and once you develop a relationship with something that can deliver this immediate gratification it is deceptively difficult to escape. The long-term outcome statistics for people your age with a drinking problem are probably worse than you think.

The extraordinarily high relapse rates of conventional treatment programs for problem drinkers is sobering only for us treatment providers. For the problem drinker, ill advised treatment efforts can make things worse. for example, consider an individual who has been clean and sober during the 30-day rehab program.  As the influence of the external sources of control (the therapeutic environment, support group) dissipate, they become less protective against the influence of local stressors and temptations grow. During a genuine crisis the abstract ideas discussed in meetings or during psycho-educational groups does not have much influence during the critical moments when irreversible errors are made.  That fact that treatment outcome for problem drinkers is so dismal, suggests that whatever treatment they recieve leaves them unprepared to cope with situations that precipitate relapse.

This web site offers a model of problem drinking and its treatment, which is quite contrary to the disease model of alcoholism and treatment programs based on the 12-Step model of Alcoholics Anonymous. In contrast to encouraging problem drinkers to admit they have a disease over which they are powerless, here the focus is precisely the opposite. This web site contains tools that can enhance the user's ability to exercise will.

A wide range of information and experiential invitations are available at no charge by following the links in the right column. In addition to text summaries from the perspective of a female psychologist (Tina's Musings) and of a male psychologist (Bill's PIG Review), invitations to experience hypnotic and other phenomena are presented in audio and multimedia files that you may download free of charge.

These and other tools available throughout this web can help high functioning individuals follow their path of greatest advantage rather than yield in the direction of least resistance. If you discover that the text or experiential invitations have a positive influence on you, you may wish to download the entire soul-directed kit: The Path of Greatest Advantage: How to Escape Addictive Traps, which includes the treatment manual and supporting media files - see below:

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"To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will."