Evaluate your Progress To know whether your strategies are working and if your circumstances are improving, you will need to carry out an evaluation. This will mean going back to the SHARE assessment and comparing where you are now with how you were when you made it. Possible outcomes are that things have improved, in …

Continue reading "Evaluate your Progress"

Read More >

Promote Change In this part of the cycle you will start to promote change. The direct goal of the change is NOT to get him/her to stop drinking, or even to cut down their drinking.  However, it is entirely possible that these may be the indirect effects of your actions.

Read More >

Today’s topic s learned helplessness. This is a quote from Medical News Today.  Learned helplessness is a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly.  They come to believe that they are unable to control or change the Situation so they do not try, even when opportunities for change become available. …

Continue reading "learned helplessness"

Read More >

Survey the Options For any problem there are a number of possible options that can be applied. The option chosen generally depends on a number of factors. It would obviously depend on the nature of the problem, the severity of the problem, the urgency for a resolution, what you are capable of doing and what …

Continue reading "HOPE Survey the Options"

Read More >

Assess The Harm Possibly you don’t think that you need to do an assessment of the harm that alcohol is doing in your life.  After all, you have lived with it and it has caused severe disruption, heartache and pain in your home. and you know the problems only too well.  We would certainly not suggest …

Continue reading "HOPE – Assess the Harm"

Read More >

Its holiday time again.  For all our american cousins Thanksgiving happens next week and for all of us Christmas is almost upon us.  Although, it actually feels that preparations for Christmas started during the summer holidays. For some people the holidays are a time for family, for celebration, for happiness.  Unfortunately for others it is …

Continue reading "Surviving the Holidays"

Read More >

HOPE HOPE is an acronym (a word made up from the initial letters of other words).  However it was not an acronym that was chosen at random, quite the reverse.  It was an acronym that was chosen to encapsulate the message that Bottled-up aims to spread.  There is hope in drinking relationships, it does not …

Continue reading "HOPE"

Read More >

Sometimes we feel that there is no hope that its not worth going on.  If you are feeling that way, then this video is for you. In the video we discuss various aspects surrounding hope and some ways that we can build hope and sometimes that we need to view it in a different way.  …

Continue reading "When You Feel that Hope is Slipping Away"

Read More >

In this video Lou talks about LOVE and setting boundaries.  In Bottled Up we encourage a positive approach to the drinking situation - this is probably most represented in our tools, especially LOVE. There is, however, more scope than we realised for misunderstanding, that we are promoting a "grin and bear it" attitude to the …

Continue reading "LOVE – Healthy Boundaries"

Read More >

In a previous video blog post when we discussed the components of LOVE, we talked about Valuing the drinker.  Unfortunately that video seemed to provoke a bit of controversy.  Some people liked what we said, some were a bit less sure and a couple were upset by it. We can honestly say that the last …

Continue reading "Positivity and Pragmatism"

Read More >