Your main task for this week is to explore your drinking in more detail you can look particularly at the circumstances preceding your drinking, the nature of drinking itself and the outcome of the drinking.
Program Week 2
Your tasks for this week include redoing your assessment, the Areas of Concern Tool, the Drinking Diary in the Drinking Thoughts Tool. You should continue to do this assessment on a weekly basis until you stop seeing any change. This week you will find that the assessments will have been plotted on a graph. Study these and export your previous week’s assessments to your Blog.
If you have not yet done so post in the forum. You should make a point of introducing yourself to other members of the website. Whether you take part in the community aspects of the website is completely up to you. However there is much to be gained from sharing your own experience and listening to the experience of others. Many of you will be experiencing the same difficulties so being able to share and identify with each other can be comforting and valuable.
ABC Analysis
Your main task for this week is to explore your drinking in more detail. You can look particularly at the circumstances preceding your drinking, the nature of drinking itself and the outcome of the drinking. This is known as in ABC analysis, which stands for Antecedent, Behavior and Consequence. This is an extremely important procedure and again that you should give it some time and care.
If your intention is to stop drinking altogether then carrying out an ABC analysis will help you to find out the risky situations of your drinking. For example perhaps every time that you meet a certain person you end up drinking and drinking much more than you intended. Or perhaps is not a person but rather a place, maybe every time you go to a certain place you doing far more than you intended. Maybe it is none of these and that instead it is a particular feeling, but when you feel down or you’re angry then this is when you tend to drink to excess. Whatever the reasons, and they will be individual to you, carrying out an ABC analysis will start to show you patterns in your drinking behavior that will give you information to avoid relapse in the future.
If it is not your intention to stop drinking but rather to control your drinking or to cut down your drinking, then again the ABC analysis will give you very important information. For example it will show you what people, situations and feelings that tend to precede heavy drinking. Therefore,as we will work through later, it will show you who or what to avoid, or situations that need to be planned for if you are not going to return to your previous drinking behaviour. So whatever your goal the ABC analysis is a very important tool.
Once you have carried out your ABC analysis you should write the results and your feelings about them in your Blog. This is a good habit and you should develop it so that every time you carry out an analysis you record it for future reference.
