Online Alcoholism & Addiction Counselling

Have you become dependent on alcohol to give you self confidence? Many of our clients say they have no self confidence left because of their drinking. Sometimes they feel so guilty about their behaviour, towards their families for the pain they’ve caused them, for instance.

Eventually you might lose your belief in your own abilities or worth. If you can’t socialize comfortably when you’re sober, if you don’t think you’re entertaining / clever / open enough without having a drink first, then your confidence obviously needs to recover.

When you try to cut down on your drinking, one of the things people often have difficulty with is their lack of confidence in themselves. To rebuild that self esteem again takes time. When you feel good about who you are, then you’re more confident. You need to observe yourself - notice when you are judging yourself negatively or blaming yourself for mistakes you think you’ve made.

Part of this comes down to forgiveness. We all make mistakes, we’re human after all. But forgiving yourself for pain you’ve caused loved ones can be particularly difficult. Very often we are far more forgiving of others than we are of ourselves. Mistakes or failures are just incidents, or certain things you are still learning, try not to see them as evidence of a defective personality - there’s no doubt still plenty of things that make you a valuable person.

The process of rebuilding your self confidence also requires recognizing your ability to deal with difficult feelings or difficult situations without alcohol - you don’t fall apart, it’s just difficult that’s all. If you don’t believe you can cope with life without being drunk, then you won’t.

And believing in yourself is what self confidence is all about.

Everyone seems to drink alcohol in our culture. Many seem to drink to excess on occasion. But how much drinking is too much?

Many of our clients say - why can’t I be like other people? They seem to be able to drink without getting drunk all the time.

Regular drinking is not necessarily a problem - in Mediterranean cultures families will usually have wine with dinner on most days. But they just have a glass or two. Few people in those countries see any problem with drinking like that.

The truth is, it varies from person to person - there’s no absolute level of alcohol consumption at which you have a problem.

Most people know if they’re drinking too much

… even before other people tell them. Basically if the negative consequences are more than the positive ones. But there are many signs to look out for -

• if you’re looking forward to a drink more than the other things in your life,
• if you’re often feeling depressed or guilty - like you need to hide how much you’re drinking from others, or even having a ’secret’ drink when you can get away with it,
• if you’ve ever noticed a pile of your empties and thought ‘wow, that’s getting big’,
• if the following day, you can’t concentrate on what you need to, because you ‘just can’t face it today’ - (you’re too hungover),
• if you’re finding it difficult to look people in the eye, because you think they might be judging you,
• if you’re buying a bottle during the day, do you buy lots of groceries with it to hide the fact that you’re buying alcohol before lunchtime?
• but one of the surest signs is this - if you’re hungover, and you start thinking ‘just one drink will take this hangover away’, then you’ve definitely got a problem.

What signs have you noticed that you’re drinking too much?

Some unfortunate research has just been published that alcoholic women suffer more brain damage as a result of their drinking than men do.

They appear to be more vulnerable to the neurotoxic effects of alcohol withdrawal particularly. In the long term, this eventually leads to cognitive dysfunction and motor control disorders.

Male brains, by comparison, seem to be better at repairing some of that damage. But not all of it of course, just in case any men were thinking that was a carte blanche to drink more!

Liv.52 is a herbal medicine specifically formulated to help strengthen the liver. It assists in the elimination of acetaldehyde (the toxic by-product of alcohol) - which means you don’t get so much of a hangover. It encourages regrowth of new liver cells and protects against alcohol induced liver damage.

This is one of the few herbal medicines that has actually been researched extensively, and shown to be highly effective. Look at some of the research if you don’t believe us.

Taking this medicine won’t solve all your problems with alcohol, of course not. But it might just help your liver to cope with the effects of your drinking.

BUY LIV.52 ONLINE HERE
.

If you’re interested in herbal medicine to help reduce your alcohol consumption, read this about Kudzu…

Quite often, people trying to beat alcoholism will need to make some changes to their lifestyle as well as their drinking habits.

Your alcohol problems are not separate from the rest of your life, they are very much connected. So you might have to ask yourself - what needs improving in the rest of my life to help me beat this addiction?

You should perhaps take a look at how you tend to unwind, how you relax. How do you cope with stress?

Is alcohol your only way of de-stressing?

How do you tend to have fun in your life - does it always involve a bar or a bottle? Maybe you need to find some new ways to have fun?

Do you get enough exercise? (Government guidelines suggest 30 minutes daily rigorous exercise as a bare minimum) It’s one of the best ways to combat stress, feel good about yourself and release some of those natural happy chemicals (like serotonin) to prevent depression.

What about your diet - do you eat healthily, with lots of fresh vegetables, fruit and whole grains? Or are you eating lots of sugar and fat? You are what you eat, nothing more, nothing less, and your brain and nervous system need plenty of essential nutrients if you’re going to keep your moods stable.

Are you getting enough opportunity to talk honestly about how you’re feeling, without being judged or ridiculed? Have you got enough supportive people in your life?

Do you have any sort of spiritual practice or beliefs? How do you remind yourself that you’re connected to the rest of the world, that you’re not isolated?

Above all, make sure you don’t tie yourself in knots by thinking you should do all these things, but you don’t so therefore you’re useless. Making yourself feel guilty won’t help at all. Motivating yourself is the key (and often the most difficult part).

What needs to change in your life, and how is that going to happen?
Set yourself some step-by-step goals to make sure you take action.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest causes of people drinking too much alcohol is as a way of coping with depression. The unfortunate thing is, that as a solution it’s probably the worst there is, because alcohol itself causes further depression.

It directly reduces the levels of Serotonin in the brain - this is the neurotransmitter that anti-depressant drugs like Prozac (an SSRI) increase your levels of.

Only when you cut down your drinking will you be able to feel any happier. But once you’ve cut down, how do you stop the cycle beginning again? You have to deal with your depression some other way…

Read this report from the Mental Health Foundation on the effects of Alcohol on Mental Health, it explains in more depth the link between alcohol and depression.

(if you don’t have Adobe Acrobat installed to read this pdf, get it from the Adobe Website)

One of the things that can easily induce a craving for alcohol is low blood sugar. This can occur after a ‘rush’ of simple carbohydrates (sugar, processed wheat etc.), blood sugar levels quickly increase, then decrease again just as sharply.

It can also occur if you haven’t eaten anything for a long time - so don’t let yourself get too hungry!

The craving comes about because your body associates drinking alcohol with lots of quickly available carbohydrates, and that’s what it asks you for. So the one thing you need to do when you’re cutting down your alcohol intake, is keep your blood sugar levels fairly balanced.

You can prevent the low blood sugar, and hence the craving, by not eating so much sweet or processed food. Eat more fibre-rich whole foods, like wholemeal or granary bread, muesli or granola, fruit instead of chocolate (sorry!). And don’t forget those sugar-packed fizzy drinks, they’ve got to go too.

So next time you get a craving for alcohol, eat something instead - you’ll be amazed at how quickly that craving disappears. Just make it something healthy though, OK?

Many people looking for help on this site do not consider themselves to be alcoholics. They are not drinking all day, every day. But they are regularly binge drinking alcohol to excess, such that they are damaging their health, their relationships and their self esteem.

It is easier to convince yourself that you haven’t got an alcohol problem if you can regularly have days where you don’t drink at all. You think you’ve got control of your drinking again, so you’re not so concerned any more.

Then it happens again - you binge, and wake up feeling awful. Maybe you carry on drinking heavily for a couple of days to deal with how guilty you feel about it all. But this type of binge drinking can have serious negative consequences which you need to do something about.

Are you an alcoholic or a binge drinker?

Take our test of alcoholism signs and symptoms.

Many people with an alcohol problem are drinking as a way of dealing with boredom. They’ve got nothing exciting or interesting to do, so they drink instead, and that keeps them entertained.

Watching TV for hours is boring and uninspiring, but if you have a drink then it becomes more tolerable.

So, is your life too dull? If you weren’t drinking so much, what would you be doing with your spare time instead?

If you have difficulty answering that question, then here’s the first problem you need to solve before you can move forward.

The alcoholic head taster for a brewery in Brazil has been awarded financial damages by his employer after the courts agreed he had not been prevented from developing alcoholism.

How were they supposed to have done that?

He drank anywhere from 16 to 25 glasses of beer in an eight hour shift. The company argued that he was already an alcoholic before they employed him. The judge decided that in that case they were negligent in employing him in the first place.

Maybe he wasn’t spitting out enough of his tasting samples. But I’m sure there’s a few people out there who wouldn’t mind his job. If you’re looking for help with an alcohol problem, try our free consultation with no obligation, we’ll get back to you asap with some ideas about how our online treatment programme could help you.

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.

You are probably well aware of the effects of your drinking on your life - hangovers, inability to concentrate, relationship problems, poor health, weight gain etc. However, if you are a parent, have you given enough consideration to the effects of alcoholism on your children?

Primarily of course, when you’ve had a drink you’re not interacting with them in a rational, responsible way, you may be inconsistent with how you were acting towards them earlier in the day, which can be very confusing.

You may be exposing them to arguments with your partner which they might otherwise not have to see. This is really just the tip of the iceberg of the variety of alcoholic behaviour your children might have witnessed on occasion.

One of the recognised effects of alcoholism on children is that they tend to find it difficult to trust others. They also often learn to suppress their feelings, because any expression of them can cause angry outbursts from the drunken parent.

Beyond that though, they’re learning that drinking alcohol is a normal, regular thing to do. They’re learning that it’s something you do to relax if you’re upset, or tired. Eventually the most likely effect is that your children repeat your pattern of alcohol use themselves.

Before that though, your own health might deteriorate sufficiently that you’re admitted to hospital, or you end up there due to an accident. And nobody wants to think about how horrific it would be to injure your children (or worse) from driving whilst drunk. Have you ever done it?

Alcoholism doesn’t just affect you, it’s affecting those around you too, your children probably more than any other.

The symptoms of alcohol withdrawal are exceptionally unpleasant, as I’m sure you know. There are physical symptoms and emotional ones. Let’s start with the most extreme to get it out of the way - death.

Yes, if you’re sufficiently dependent on alcohol, then a sudden withdrawal as opposed to a gradual detox can actually kill you, usually via a seizure. But lets hope you’re not quite that bad just yet (if you are, then at least try to cut down gradually, or better than that - see a doctor). Heart palpitations are the milder form of this.

On to the less fatal withdrawal symptoms then, we have hallucinations (usually unpleasant - spiders or snakes are common), the shakes, nausea and vomiting, oh and diarrhoea of course. Particularly unpleasant is waking in the middle of the night soaked in cold sweat, or alternatively, your own piss. It’s not sounding like a party exactly, is it?

Then you might have a splitting headache, often from severe dehydration and dilation of blood vessels. Basically the brain shrinks away from the lining of the skull. Ouch!

Hypoglycaemia, caused by the inability of the liver to metabolize sugar, can then leave you feeling irritable, nervous or aggressive, and weak.

You might end up with a few more emotional effects too, like mood swings, depression or confusion. Basically feeling like the lowest form of life on the planet.

So how can you make alcohol withdrawal easier?

• Electrolyte replacement might help (the sachets you can get for diarrhoea are the best), along with plenty of liquids.
• Complex carbohydrates (like brown rice, wholemeal bread, wholegrain cereals etc.) will help to slowly stabilize your blood sugar levels.
• Eggs contain Cysteine, which can help the liver to metabolize Acetaldehyde (the toxic by-product of alcohol).
• B-vitamin supplements are essential, as they help your nerve cells to recover from the damage you’ve inflicted.
• We all know about the healing powers of caffeine - this constricts the blood vessels and can therefore alleviate the headache.

The other ones are obvious - don’t mix your drinks, and don’t drink too much in the first place!

Most people who are drinking too much, in whatever way, will occasionally ask themselves the question - am I an alcoholic?

It’s a scary question to ask yourself, but as with most things the answer will not be a black or white,

‘yes you’re an alcoholic’ or
‘no you’re not’,

but a shade of grey somewhere in between.

What sort of alcoholic are you?

Binge Drinker

• Irregular over-drinking,
• Monster hangovers,
• Doing embarrassing things you regret,
• Alienating your friends,
• Accidents,
• Days off work,
• Mood swings…

If this sounds like you, then get some help here.

Heavy Drinker

• Very difficult to have a day without alcohol,
• Can’t sleep without drink,
• Drinking alone,
• Guilt,
• Cravings,
• Can’t concentrate,
• Low energy,
• Depression…

Or if this sounds more like you, then contact us here.

Dependent Drinker

• Physical withdrawal,
• Drinking from early in the day, every day,
• Isolation,
• Poor health,
• Unstable work,
• Relationships failing,
• Feeling hopeless & ashamed…

If however, this is who you are, then to start with you’re going to need some medical help to detox your liver - go and see your Doctor, then get in touch with us.

You might be wondering, more simply, how can I stop drinking alcohol? But of course it’s never as simple as that. You’ll need plenty of support, and some clear goals, plus some in-depth understanding of how your own particular addiction works. That’s what online counselling will do for you. Try one session at least, and you’ll see how it can help.

If you do nothing about your problems, then nothing will change.