Problem drinking is never about the alcohol.
Problem drinking is never about the alcohol. That guy who rolls home drunk every night is trying to manage his feelings with alcohol. His behavior is a side effect of trying to self medicate.
A psychological problem needs a psychological solution. Hypnosis provides that solution. Dealing with the underlying problem will deal with the problem drinking.
The exact approach depends on why you are drinking. Alcohol abuse is the same as any other substance abuse. Heavy drinkers are not weak willed, or stupid or have an addictive personality.
He is unliving a violent father. She is more likely still suffering from sexual abuse. The lunchtime drinker tells jokes to avoid feeling lonely. That girl at the bar is hoping the cocktail will make her look glamorous. Find the reason and you find the cure.
Is your reason for drinking here?
Solitary drinkers have low self esteem and hate that feeling. They want to shut down the thing that reminds them they are no good. They want to feel normal, like everybody else. Just for half an hour. The drink does that, for a while.
Teenage girls binge drink and don't know why. Drinking makes them feel good until the next day. Then they feel bad for bingeing. They swear they will never do it again. So they save up the bad feelings until their next binge.
Social drinkers have never learned coping skills. They have come to believe that they need a drink to get through the day. Alcohol gives them the confidence to get over uncomfortable situations.
Life-of-the-party drinkers believe that others are judging them. They want to feel loved. wanted, accepted. Drinking lifts away that old feeling. When you drink, you don't care what anybody thinks.
After match drinking equals relaxing. The association is so strong some people cannot imagine relaxing without a drink. Racing drivers spray champagne around. Sports and advertising reinforces this.
Neglected people use drink as reward. You want to feel like those footballers drinking from an overflowing championship trophy. You celebrate with a drink. It makes you feel good. But then you can't stop drinking.
The drink gets associated with finishing anything - lunch, a phone call, getting through the day without drinking.
How to stop Problem Drinking
There is a strong psychological element to problem drinking. To get rid of it you need to uncover what triggers it, why it happens. Many drinkers do not connect their drinking with feelings. They are often surprised about the actual cause.
This kind of therapy removes the cause. Working with feelings avoids resistance and works more effectively. The therapy digs out the thing that was causing the problem drinking. The results may not be instant.
It may take several sessions to discover why you drink and how to correct it. When the need for the drinking goes away, your drinking behavior changes immediately.
Stop Drinking Case: Sabotaging yourself
I had a client today who binge drinks to oblivion. She hates doing it, but every disappointment seems to trigger something deep inside. The result is she reaches for the bottle and drinks until she goes unconscious. She does it about once a week.
My initial reaction was that she was drinking to try to avoid something. I got her to talk about her childhood and her upbringing. That was a mistake. She wouldn't stop talking. Words poured out of her.
I had real difficulty keeping her focused on what I was asking her. You get a lot of clients who just can't talk about their emotions.
With some clients, asking them to talk about themselves at all is like asking them to pull their teeth out. This client just kept talking and talking.
I finally got control of the monologue and asked her for a specific instance of when she felt she had to drink. She told me that she and her husband are trying to buy a new house. They found a house that seemed ideal.
She put an offer in on it, and then learned it had been sold to someone else. Her immediate reaction was to start drinking, and she couldn't stop drinking. Her husband is distressed by this, she is distressed by this, but she just cannot stop herself.
Hiding inside the bottle
She wasn't able to explain why she felt this way. She just cannot handle disappointment. I asked her about her feelings in general and it seemed to me that she had quite extreme black and white thinking.
Things either went the way she thought they should, or she fell off the wagon. In her case falling off the wagon means self sabotage and alcohol abuse.
She revealed that she hates the idea of others judging her for her drinking. She started crying and said "I just want to stop drinking this way. I don't want to end up like my mother". It turned out that her mother was a nasty drunk.
As a child she got verbal and physical abuse when her mother had been drinking. I asked if her mother also had black and white thinking. This opened up another torrent of feelings, memories, and opinions.
I was able to work out from that that her mother was almost certainly depressive and angry. All of the stories that she was telling were basically about her mother taking out petty spite on her own children when she was drunk.
Reason for the alcohol abuse
Despite an obvious abusive childhood she took a long time to open up to her real emotions about her mother. She finally acknowledged that her current behavior was really all about trying to cope with the stresses of her childhood.
Every time she felt disappointed, that something had happened to put her down, it triggered memories of the same thing happening when she was a child. Her problem drinking was actually an attempt to drown out those unhappy feelings.
I went on to do some inner child work with her, and that seemed to help. I think she's going to need a lot of help to deal with the conflict between loving her mother, and accepting that her mother is the cause of her problem drinking.
On the other hand, I learned something that I hadn't realised before. I learned why some people talk all the time. It is to stop them having to listen to their own anxieties.
Stop Drinking Case: Bob Brewer
Bob came to therapy because his wife insisted that he do something about his drinking. He didn't drink all that often, but when he did he couldn't just go home when he should. Instead he would stay out drinking to the last and then arrive home drunk many hours after he had promised. 
This upset his wife. She thought he was unreliable and disrespectful. She was unhappy and the marriage was under strain. Bob was also unhappy. He loved his wife and family and generally was a good husband, worked hard and contributed to the household.
But when he went out for a drink with his friends he just could not bring himself to go home at the time he had agreed to. He felt bad about his behaviour, he realised his problem drinking was upsetting his wife.
He did not want to upset her, but he did not seem to be able to leave the bar and go home when he was supposed to. He had thought about his problem drinking, tried to understand it, could not see any reason for it. He tried to change, but just could not go home at the right time.
The origin of his problem drinking
Questioning Bob uncovered the reason for his behaviour, why couldn't stop drinking. He had been born in Turkey but his parents left him with his grandparents while they went to Germany to look for work.
Bob had a wonderful childhood, living on a farm with his grandmother and dozens of aunts and cousins and cats, dogs, pigs and everything else that a young boy could love.
That all ended abruptly when he was five and half. His mother came to the farm one day and took him away. Suddenly he was in Germany, living in a tiny apartment, alone most of the day, with adults who were complete strangers and where he couldn't understand a word anyone said.
And instead of a warm loving circle of indulgent relatives, he now had these strangers pushing him around. So he rebelled. He decided that no one was going to tell him what to do. That frightened little boy decided that defiance was how to get control back into his life.
And so he grew up with a determination never to let anyone tell him what to do. He learned that he could happily obey some rules, but would not tolerate anything relating to his personal freedom. He did what he wanted. And this rule served him very well, most of the time.
It got him thrown out his family home at seventeen, but he became successful in business, never working for anyone else, because he would not have anyone telling him when to go for lunch or what time to get to work.
A marriage of alcohol abuse
But then he got married. And he could no longer have everything his own way. He had to make allowances for somebody else. Someone who had their own rights and expectations: who wanted him home by a certain time, and to stop drinking. So now Bob had a problem.
His internal rule was to never let anyone tell him what to do, but if he followed that rule he would make his wife unhappy which made him unhappy. So he found himself in a bind.
He could not go home when he said he would because that meant he was being told what to do in his personal life, but he actually wanted to go home, and he dreaded the phone calls from his wife reminding him to get home on time because that made him even more anxious.
The more anxious he got the more he drank and the easier it was to stay on and drink some more. Part of him wanted to leave and go home to a welcoming wife and family.
Part of him was determined to show that he wasn't going to be pushed around. Logically he knew what he should do, but his mind just wouldn't let him.
Stop Drinking Treatment
The treatment consisted of getting Bob to accept one part of the dilemma, and to reject the other. The way to do that was to get him to realize that he could control his problem drinking by controlling the way he thought.
Metaphor therapy is based on the idea that every feeling and memory is associated with a picture, an image that is actually a metaphor that represents that feeling or memory. Metaphor Therapy consists of changing the feeling by changing the image.
I taught Bob how to visualize his feelings, and then how to alter the images that represented the feelings. Then I showed him the Swish Technique and he was able to transfer images that represented success to the image that represented his problem. One cancelled out the other.
He was able to stop his problem drinking immediately and get his marriage back.
