6 years ago, I took my first job out of graduate school in a rehab center in the heart of San Francisco.
There, we'd ask all our new clients a set of questions to understand their relationship with alcohol as a part of the initial assessment, such as:
-
How much and how often do you drink alcohol?
-
When was your last drink?
-
What are some negative impacts alcohol has on different areas of your life?
As someone who has had my own intimate struggles with alcohol, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something important was missing from the assessment, but for a long time, I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing.
It took me months to realize that nowhere in the initial assessment did we ask these two important questions:
Why do you drink?
And,
What do you like about alcohol?
Because people drink for different reasons:
-
Some drink to fall asleep
-
Others drink as a way to deal with stress
-
Some drink to cope with anxiety
-
And others drink to socialize
In what has become an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, most of the time, alcohol serves a function in a person’s life. Only by knowing the why behind a person’s drinking can we better understand what they need in order to stop.
Without these questions, we miss the mark on the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to helping a person break free.
That’s why, over the past years, I've dedicated my work to creating simpler ways to help people identify the specific driver behind their drinking pattern.
One of the tools I created is the 10 Most Common Drinking Loops That Keep People Stuck self-help guide.
If you’d like to know what they are and which one may have been playing out in your own relationship with alcohol, You can download the guide below:
