Program Week 4

As in weeks two and three you should be repeating some of the tasks from week one. Specifically you should be carrying out the Areas of Concern assessment, completing the Drinking Diary and also completing the Drinking Thoughts Tool. This will give you a new entry in each of the graphs and further build a picture of the extent of your progress. You should also export the previous weeks entries for all of these tools into the blog. As before you should make comments on all of these assessments. You will now have 4 weeks of data in the graph and it should be very obvious to you how much or little you are progressing. (See note at bottom of page)

You should be continuing to read and post in the forum, and generally be an active member of the 24/7 Help Yourself community. You will continue to receive messages with motivational statements and meditations on a daily basis and occasional messages with suggestions all of exercise these and activities.

You should of course continue to use some of the resources and read the articles on the site. Also you should be continuing any off-line recovery exercises. It is hoped that your offline activities, especially involving your family and friends, are going well. If you are having particular success or failures then it may be a useful to share these on the forum, as they may help others going through similar circumstances.

Note (It would be expected that the graphs are all in a downward direction by now. If they are not then it might be sensible to look and see why that might be the case. The first and most obvious question is, what direction is the Drinking Diary going? If this is not reducing, then neither of the others will. If this is the case then you need to think what you are going to do about it. It may be wise to go back to the beginning and this time aim for abstinence.)

 

Pros and Cons of Drinking Tool
Your main task of this week is to use the Pros and Cons of Drinking Tool. This is another very important tool as it begins to show you what drinking means to you.

In this tool you look at the positives and negatives for changing and not changing. For example if you decide that abstinence is your goal then you would list the positives and negatives of drinking and not drinking. Of course these are purely subjective because they are your positives and your negatives.

As usual there is a video to walk you through how to use this tool and how to interpret it.  Again it’s important you do this with care and attention because it sets you up for next week’s task which is to use the decision tool and decide what your drinking goal is for the future.