Online Alcoholism & Addiction Counselling

As you’re reading this website, then you might be thinking that you need to change your habits around alcohol. This means you’re in a stage called ‘contemplation’.

The Stages of Change model is a well established and useful way of considering different people’s levels of motivation to change their behaviour. This is how it applies to alcoholism:

Stage 1: Pre-contemplation -

Someone who drinks alcohol but doesn’t consider that they have a problem with it, or that they need to do anything about it. Other people around them might disagree however. Occasionally they might regret drinking too much, have an accident perhaps, but they still don’t feel their drinking needs to change.

Stage 2: Contemplation -

Possibly where you are now - you might have realised that your drinking is causing more problems than it’s worth, and that you’re probably drinking too much. You’ve noticed your health is suffering, or your closest relationships have been affected. Maybe your work is not up to scratch because you’re always hungover. But then on occasion you switch back to thinking it’s not such a problem after all, and you get drunk again.

Stage 3: Decision -

You realise that you do need to do something about this, so you decide to seek help, or talk to someone professionally, join a support group, maybe check out AA, or start looking online for some possible tips to cut down your drinking.

Stage 4: Action -

You start to reduce your alcohol consumption, you set yourself limits and you achieve them. You start talking about the problems in your life that might be causing your drinking, maybe to a counsellor or another mental health professional. You might well announce your decision to cut down or quit drinking to your partner or family members.

Stage 5: Maintenance or Relapse -

Your new pattern of drinking is becoming a habit, your alcohol consumption is back to acceptable, healthy levels again. Or maybe you haven’t had a drink for a couple of months, and you’re feeling comfortable with your sobriety. You can feel the benefits of not drinking so much - you’re healthier, happier and functioning better.

There is always a possibility that future circumstances might take a turn for the worse, and you end up drinking again. Maybe you go right back to stage 1, or one of the other stages instead. The important thing is to learn from this process, not to blame yourself for it. If you see this set-back as a ‘failure’, then you’ll just feel more depressed about it. You’ve made a mistake and had a relapse, that’s all, but you can get back to where you were again.

If you think you’re ready to take action about your drink problems, contact us to arrange an online live chat with a professional alcohol counsellor.

Focussing on negative thoughts as opposed to positive ones leaves you feeling depressed and unmotivated.

If you concentrate on how many mistakes you’ve made, or how you haven’t managed to stop drinking like you wanted to, maybe how you’ve ‘failed’ yourself and those around you, then of course you won’t feel good about yourself. Notice when you’re thinking these thoughts, and take control of them. Here’s where you need to make a choice to -

Concentrate on positive thoughts instead :

• What will improve in your life when you’ve cut down or stopped drinking?
• How much better will you feel?
• What improvements have you already made?
• Have you managed some slight reductions already?
• If so, what benefits have you started to notice because of that?
• Are you still essentially a good person, even though you’ve made mistakes?

The theory of ‘negative suggestion’ warns that if you focus on NOT doing something, it’s more likely that you’ll end up doing it, than if you were focussing on something else entirely. So if you find yourself thinking, “I must not drink, I must not drink” it’s a warning sign that you need to start concentrating on something else instead - distract yourself with another task, something absorbing. Just telling yourself “I mustn’t think about not drinking” is clearly still in that loop.

Likewise if you need to quit for a while, but you’re thinking, “Oh no, I’ll never be able to drink again“, then that will undoubtedly keep you focussed on the negative. Maybe you can drink again in the future; you don’t need to decide that now, focus on the present moment, and how good you feel about not drinking today.

We’ve now opened our free support forum for anyone with alcohol problems.

There are no expectations that you must be sober, it is just a community space where you can share your experiences and hopefully get some support from other people in a similar situation to yourself, whether you want to give up drinking completely, or if you just want to cut down.

You need only provide a valid email address to join - but this will never be displayed, so you can remain completely anonymous.

Join the forum or just have a look first.

Many people do not accept their own feelings - especially the negative ones. When you feel angry, you might tell yourself, “oh no, I shouldn’t feel angry about it”, or maybe “why do I feel so lonely, what’s wrong with me” ?

But the key to mental health (or suffering a bit less at least), is accepting your own feelings as they are, and not judging yourself for having them. That doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly go away, but just that you realise that its OK to be feeling them, there’s nothing wrong about them.

You need to recognise that you feel a certain way for a reason, so your feelings are valid. Most of the time we have very little (if any) control of our emotions - they appear within us without our choosing them, they are not our creations. So we cannot really judge ourselves as ‘bad’, or stupid for having them.

Nor can we judge ourselves if we’re finding it hard to deal with those feelings - we often think “oh why can’t I cope with this, I’m useless” etc. Well there’s not many people who can easily handle their emotions all the time. The truth is, we’re all struggling with our feelings, few of us really feels in control of them.

So there’s no easy solution for coping, but accepting who you are and what you’re feeling (however painful that might be) is a good start. There’s nothing wrong with you for feeling like you do.

Work is often the biggest source of stress in our lives, and people sometimes end up using alcohol to relax and deal with that stress.

The result is often that your work performance suffers because of your hangovers. This makes it hard to concentrate, so you might well be feeling guilty.

Perhaps you’re also worried that your colleagues suspect you have a drink problem - can they smell it on your breath perhaps? So this creates even more stress.

Have you got to the stage where you feel the urge to have a little drink at lunchtime, just to calm your nerves? Or at the end of the day, are you watching the clock in the office, thinking about that first drink you can have once you leave work?

For some unfortunate people, alcohol becomes a part of their job - people in the promotions business, or staff in pubs, bars or restaurants for example. Then the two issues can be even more complicated. Business meetings at lunchtime or Friday afternoons can often involve a drink, it can be a source of bonding with your colleagues, or an important part of relationship building with a client.

So what can you do, if drinking is part of your work culture?

Is there any way your job situation could be improved so it’s not so stressful? Or is there perhaps another way to deal with that stress that doesn’t make the situation worse, like drinking does?

Give us your suggestions:

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.

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!

There’s a campaign being run in the UK right now to improve access to talking therapies (like counselling, psychologists etc.). At the moment, waiting lists for NHS funded help can be up to 18 months. This is just not acceptable.

The government is holding a funding review very shortly - so a group of UK charities (including the Mental Health Foundation, Mind, and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health) have organised an online petition asking for more funding to be made available for this area.

If you’re a UK resident then please sign it now at www.weneedtotalk.org.uk/petition.asp

Update - This petition has now been presented to the government.

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)

Struggling with addiction is stressful - when you’re trying to stop drinking you can end up in a cycle of battling with cravings and guilt, having to remember all those things that you’re supposed to be doing differently.

It can be exhausting, so much so that it creates its own cravings. But stress is all about your perceptions of your abilities - if you tell yourself that “I can’t do this”, then of course you’ll feel stressed about it.

If you tell yourself that, “yes this is difficult, but I think I can do it”, then you’ll feel more confident. It’s simple really, you just need to get into the habit of saying positive things like that to yourself, eventually you’ll believe them.

What you’re trying to do right now is very difficult, so recognise that you need to off-load to people, to talk it through, to schedule in some relaxation time, some treats for yourself. If you’ve got a family to think about too then this can be hard to justify: “I’ve been such a strain on them already, how can I ask them to sacrifice even more?”, or “How can I take time away from my children when I’ve already been neglecting them because of my drinking?”

The point is, you need some time to relax if you’re trying to stop drinking, because it’s an incredibly draining task. Acknowledge that, be honest about it. You can’t be strong all the time!

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.

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.

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.

Different people have different levels of self esteem - some people think they’re wonderful, some people think they’re worthless. Whether other people would agree with either of those judgements is a different matter.

People with alcohol problems often have low self-esteem. They judge themselves negatively - not just for their addiction, but also for other parts of their behaviour or their personality.

These beliefs or views about the self may have been picked up as far back as childhood, from parents, siblings, or friends -

• “you’re not good enough to deserve that treat”,
• “you don’t measure up to our expectations”,
• “you don’t deserve love and affection”,
• “we don’t accept you for who you are”,
• “why are you so much trouble, what’s wrong with you”.

Of course such things may not have been said literally, but that may have been the message being conveyed. These messages become incorporated into our beliefs about ourselves, and affect our self esteem. As such they can be quite difficult beliefs to change.

When you believe such negative things about yourself, you probably won’t be very capable in dealing with life or coping with the difficult feelings that we all have. So you might then tend to turn to something which does deal with those feelings, if only temporarily. From there you can come to rely on those things - alcohol, drugs, food, whatever it might be.

Then of course, the dependent use of alcohol can further damage self esteem and reinforce those negative beliefs. “I’m an alcoholic now too - so I must be really useless then”. Alcoholism or addiction can lead to social isolation, or uncontrolled behaviour, alienating those around you and maybe removing any possible positive feedback or encouragement, making it even more difficult to improve your confidence again.

However, what often happens with friends and family, is that the issue of concern for them becomes the alcohol use itself, rather than the lack of self esteem that’s causing it in the first place.

Try our self esteem test if you’d like.

Anxiety ruins many people’s lives, and lessens the enjoyment of it for most of us. It’s focus can be anything, from the seemingly trivial to the life threatening.

Of course the solution that many people find is through alcohol. This can provide temporary but undoubtedly effective relief - allowing us to relax again and get on with life without being so preoccupied. But alcohol does not actually allow us to deal with our anxiety or manage the situations provoking it, so we fail to develop our resources.

Anxiety arises as a result of our interpretations of a situation as being in some way threatening or unpleasant. This is then combined with our perception of our ability to cope with that threat.

For example, two people are experiencing the exact same event - the possibility that they will lose their job. The anxiety prone person might think -
“but I’ll never find another job, I’m not good enough. I won’t have enough money, I won’t be able to cope - I’ll lose my house”. Obviously thoughts like that will tend to create anxiety.

The other person facing the same situation might think -
“I can get another job easy enough, I’m adaptable. Money might be a bit tight for a while, but I can cope with that”.

So if the first person can learn to adjust their perception of their abilities, they might not get so anxious, and they might not feel the need to drink so much alcohol as a result. Those perceptions and beliefs happen so automatically, we often forget that we have a degree of choice over them.

Unfortunately alcohol, and drugs like Valium particularly, tend to exacerbate anxiety levels subsequently - firstly by causing disruption to the nervous system, secondly by creating disruptions likely to induce further worry. A spiral of increasing use causing increasing anxiety can develop.

Anxious people tend to have a central belief about themselves as being helpless - they underestimate their ability to cope. Although, they are often aware that their fears are exaggerated.

Five key questions can be used to challenge the initial perception of threat and the appraisal of your coping ability:

• What alternative interpretations could I make about this situation?
• What concrete, factual evidence do I have to back-up or deny these beliefs?
• What is the worst that could really happen, and how would that ultimately affect me?
• What positive action can I take to manage this?
• What are the pros and cons of me continuing with these negative thoughts I’m having?

Coupled with some simple relaxation techniques like keeping aware of your breathing, you can soon lessen your anxiety to a tolerable level. If you can adjust the way you interpret the world, and thus not feel so worried about it, then you may not need to drink so much alcohol to cope.