What can Bottled Up do for me?
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Access to expertise
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Reduce impact of drinking on your life
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Reduce stress levels
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Give you strategies to address drinking issues
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Empower you to make changes
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Improve your relationship
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Reduce levels of conflict
Bottled Up Empowers You to Change Your Life
.The Bottled-Up approach comes from combining experience and research and a decade of providing help and support for families of problem drinkers.
We start by recognising that many of you really care for your drinker and want to make your relationship better. We can help!
It is a very pragmatic and practical approach that aims to empower you and put you back in control of your own life.
The Bottled-Up approach has 6 main goals. We hope that, since you are on this website, you share these goals.
We will help you:-
- to maintain safety – we believe that your safety and survival is of paramount importance.
- to preserve your relationship – to provide you with tools that may save your relationship *
- to reduce problems – we assume that you want to reduce the problems associated with alcohol.
- to inform/educate/support you – we assume you are looking for information and support to address your problems.
- to empower – we will show you how, with a few simple steps, you can have more control and to live a more fulfilled life.
- to promote dialogue – we provide a means of communicating with your drinker in a productive way (we have a unique Intervention for this purpose).
* If as we proceed maintaining the relationship feels more and more difficult, don’t despair. If you do leave the relationship eventually, having worked through this process will help you to move on with your life at a later point knowing that you really have done what you could.
See what members have said about Bottled Up
The (Em)Power Tools
To do this we have put together a process we call HOPE, a tool called SHARE and a suggested attitude called LOVE.
LOVE
Love, as we use it in Bottled Up, does not refer to an emotion or feeling. It is an acronym (a word made up of the initial letters of other words).
This powerful approach when applied mindfully and in the right way reduces conflict and the impact of negative behaviour on loving feelings. It also highlights situations where genuine feelings can begin to grow again.
Leave him/her to sort out their own issues
Optimise your time with him/her when they are sober
Value the person that you love(d)
Encourage and praise any attempts at positive change
HOPE
HOPE is the engine that drives the Bottled-up approach. It is a process that allows you to take control of your life, to examine the problems in detail and to apply measures to minimise the damage. As before we will explain HOPE in detail and walk you through step by step in the members’ area. HOPE stands for:-
Assess the Harm
Survey the Options
Promote change
Evaluate progress
SHARE
SHARE is the tool that you will use to create these changes. It represents a way of looking at your life and especially the effect of alcohol on it. It provides you with the priority list for change and a method of evaluating whether your efforts are having the effect that you hoped for. As with the other tools, we will look at SHARE in some detail in the members’ area. For the moment SHARE stands for :-
Safety
Health
Ambition
Relationships
Environment
In Summary
Bottled-up was created to provide help and support to the families of problem drinkers. As an approach it has six main aims, discussed above. It suggests that these aims are best achieved by adopting a particular pragmatic attitude – LOVE and by engaging in a process – HOPE that utilises an unique assessment tool – SHARE.