Online Alcoholism & Addiction Counselling

Alcohol is a common feature in abusive relationships, so if your partner is an alcoholic you might have to deal with erratic mood swings and unpredictable behaviour, arguments and aggression, recklessness (DUIs), the risks to your children and so on.

So how do you confront a partner about their drinking? (when it is often a very touchy subject) Usually, people learn to avoid the issue, simply changing the subject when it comes up. And so the situation continues for years, unless you decide to address it.

But quite often each person may be so afraid of loneliness, or have such low self-esteem that they believe themselves unlovable, that no-one else would have them, that they couldn’t survive alone. This co-dependency makes people tolerate more than they should have to, in order to stay together.

The abuse of alcohol might affect your relationships in many ways. But those same close relationships are often the ones that can perpetuate alcoholism. A dysfunctional marriage can be so much stress for anyone involved - if your first choice for coping with that is alcohol, then you can see how some people justify their drinking by blaming it on their husband/wife.

If the extra drinking that arises from relationship problems itself makes those problems worse, then a very messy loop can develop.

Alcohol can serve a number of purposes in a relationship -

• a temporary boost in self-esteem,
• soothing anger or escaping from conflict (which often leads to more arguments or even domestic violence),
• an emotional escape from unhappiness,
• exerting control through defiance of the partner’s requests not to drink.

Alternatively, if you’ve decided you want to quit drinking, but your partner still drinks heavily, then you might have real difficulty resisting temptation - there you are trying to have a sober day, when your husband is cracking open a bottle of wine for the evening!

This sometimes happens as a form of sabotage too - if a couple both have a problem with alcohol, your partner might not want you to get sober, might not want you to get your confidence back.

This is all sounding rather gloomy, surely there’s a light at the end of the tunnel? Of course, your close relationships can be your biggest source of support and encouragement. Even if you might think you’ve damaged some relationships beyond repair, the people who care about you will still be there if they can see you really want to change.

There are many ways to quit drinking -

• you can check in to a rehab if you’ve got the time,
• you can try taking ‘Antabuse‘ (which will make you feel very ill if you drink anything alcoholic),
• or maybe just try white-knuckle will-power,
• you could go to AA meetings and meet a few people with similar problems,
• then maybe work through the 12 steps?
• you could become a gym bunny and spend all day working out to distract yourself (not going to happen, right?),
• you might want to try Kudzu (a herbal supplement which helps you cut down how much alcohol you want to drink),
• best of all though, you can try the most convenient help available - online one-to-one counselling.

Online counselling will help you to quit drinking by encouraging you to change some aspects of your lifestyle, by getting you to look at the emotional and cognitive aspects of your habit, helping you to deal with anxiety or stress a bit better and by giving you some easy, practical tips to cut down the amount of alcohol you drink on a daily basis. It is probably the best option for those who are abusing alcohol, but who are not dependent alcoholics. (see: Am I an alcoholic?)

To quit drinking you first have to ask the question - “WHY am I drinking so much?” Our counselling service will help you to answer that.

A new report from the United Nations finds that prescription drug abuse is now more prevalent than illicit drug abuse. With the only exception of cannabis, there is now more trafficking and consumption of pharmaceuticals (particularly stimulants, painkillers and tranquillisers) than street drugs. This is causing a huge increase in the level of fake prescription drugs too (which contributes to 10% of the overall amount). And far worse, a huge increase in the number of overdose deaths as a result.

The International Narcotics Control Board estimates that the illicit market will double to $79bn (£40bn) over the next four years.

This poses the question - if the politicians are trying to reduce the harm caused by drugs use, perhaps some of their funds should be diverted towards encouraging the pharmaceutical industry to take some responsibility for the problem - if 90% of these illicitly used drugs are coming from licensed factories, why aren’t the big pharmaceutical corporations being asked to take more control of their supply lines? They are one of the most profitable industries in the world after all.