Problem Drinking cases
How you can end your problem drinking
Alcohol misuse is usually an attempt to self medicate. These Problem Drinking cases show that the problem is not alcohol itself. In every case the drinker has issues from childhood that they just cannot deal with. It is easier to numb the feelings with drink.
Problem Drinking Case – the apprentice

This young man came in because he was drinking too much. He was drinking to oblivion four nights a week, and getting hangovers that didn’t clear until 2 o’clock in the afternoon.
When I asked him why he drank, he said “I really didn’t know why I drink”. He wasn’t violent, he just drank until it was time to go to bed. Then he would swear off it for a month and somehow start back again.
He looked forward to Friday nights to relax with his mates. And then it all got out of hand. He would wake up with a hangover and no memory of the previous night. Lately he had been missing days from work due to feeling too ill in the morning.
I tried to find the source of the problem but he said that there was no sort of trigger, no particular time. His parents broke up when he was five. He shuttled between them. At age fifteen he was taken out of school because of anger issues. Now he worked in his dad’s firm as a plumber. He felt he was stupid, he could not retain information. His drinking was threatening to stop him completing his apprenticeship.
Exploring the issues
I couldn’t find a way in to him. He didn’t seem to have any emotional issues. He felt that he had got over his upbringing. I suspected that he had not, and the anger was a feeling of injustice from childhood. I got him to think about his problem.
As soon as I started talking about his feelings he went into trance on his own. Twitching, REM movements, all the spontaneous indicators of trance. I have always wondered if highly susceptible people made their problems worse, or whether susceptibility is unrelated to emotional problems.
I asked him to get in touch with his feelings but it took a long time for him to feel anything physical.We started with Metaphor therapy. He experienced his anger as something that was burning with a lot of smoke. I got him to put the flames and smoke of his anger/disappointment into a chair. And eventually got him to put a wet towel over it and extinguish it. I then woke him up but neither of us was convinced that we had fixed it.
Removing the source of drinking problems
I started teaching himself hypnosis but decided to go for Regression instead. To go back in time to the initial sensitizing event you need an emotion to start from. He had no open emotion to work with.
So I started without an emotional target. I put him into trance and kept talking about ‘that feeling‘ without specifying exactly what he should be looking for. I then did the normal regression technique and took him back in time. He got a memory of his dad holding him by the arm and pulling him away from his mother and trying to put him into the car. He felt lost and confused.
I did Inner Child work on that feeling and he started gently crying. Then as he rescued that frightened child he used to be, he started smiling. I worked through the rest of the technique and brought him out..
He said that he felt the most powerful bond when he went back to the child.
“It’s all right now.”
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