Bottled Up Tools for Families

In this section you will find the tools that will help you to change your situation.  The three main tools you will find here are LOVE, SHARE and the Intervention.  All tools are unique to Bottled Up.

LOVE is basically a strategy that helps you to formulate a way of interacting with your drinker that is more effective.  It is designed to reduce the stress for you and reduce the tensions in the marriage.

SHARE has two aims.  First to provide you with a way of looking at your family member’s drinking that is more informative than the usual black and white assessments – alcoholic/not alcoholic or drinks too much/doesn’t drink too much.  This will give you a way of assessing exactly what are the consequences of drinking in your life.  The second aim is to help you be more specific in your discussions with your drinker and reduce the likelihood of these black and white  arguments.

The Intervention is a powerful tool to help you have a meaningful discussion with your drinker.  It draws from both SHARE and LOVE above.  This tool is interactive and has been designed to be used with your drinker.  It will give you a visual record of your discussion, highlighting the areas where you disagree.

Important

It is very tempting to go straight to these tools and try and get your drinker to sit down and go through the Intervention with you.  No matter how tempted you are or how desperate e urge you feel, please don’t do that.  Instead spend some time on the program and helping yourself.  Living with a drinker takes its toll physically, psychologically and emotionally.  You need to give yourself a bit of a rest and look after yourself.  So that when you do start using the tools, you do so from a position of strength rather than weakness.  We can’t stress this piece of advice strongly enough.