New Year, New Opportunities
This video is slightly different from our usual, a bit more personal rather than informational. In it we talk about two topics, our website Beauty For Ashes and the Chain of Care.
Read More >This video is slightly different from our usual, a bit more personal rather than informational. In it we talk about two topics, our website Beauty For Ashes and the Chain of Care.
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 >Continue reading "learned helplessness"
Read More >Continue reading "HOPE Survey the Options"
Read More >Continue reading "HOPE – Assess the Harm"
Read More >Continue reading "When You Feel that Hope is Slipping Away"
Read More >Continue reading "Positivity and Pragmatism"
Read More >E is for Encourage change. Anyone changing any behaviour needs encouragement and affirmation. Drinkers are no different in that respect. Giving encouragement also helps you to feel part of that change, that it is a team thing, rather than something that s/he is struggling with alone.
OK, we can just hear that protests, but they are still drinking, so what’s to encourage!? Over the last few decades we have come to regard change as all or nothing, especially in drinking. The disease model of alcoholism tends to promote that attitude.
If we adopt that criteria for change – drinking vs not drinking – then many will be disappointed as it does not always happen like that. Sometimes changes can be small, like drinking less or less often or respecting a boundary that you have agreed, or agreeing to look for .help.
Recognising these small changes and affirming them can help to produce more and bigger changes. It can also help you by increasing your sense of hope.
V is for valuing your drinker. It is all too easy to forget your drinker’s good points, the things that attracted you in the first place. Hardly surprising, if s/he is drinking excessively and become undependable and lies about the drinking, it is difficult to have positive feelings towards them.
If your feelings are becoming increasingly negative (again, not surprising) then they can leak out, or even just become the way that you communicate with them. If that is the case then, unknowingly, you may be exacerbating the problem, both for the drinker and for yourself.
In this video we explore how you might start to reverse this process and feel better about your drinker, and about yourself.