Real Cases Studies: Changing a drinking problem
Bob Brewer
Bob's wife was at the end of her patience. Whenever he went out drinking with friends, he promised to be home by a certain time, but never was. 
She was unhappy and the marriage was under strain. Bob 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.
The origin of his problem drinking
Bob was 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 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 a 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.
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.
As an adult he became successful in business, never working for anyone else, because he disliked anyone telling him what to do.
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 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. He could not go home when he said he would because that meant he was being told what to do in his personal life.
He dreaded the phone calls from his wife reminding him to get home on time.
The more pressured he got, the more he drank, and the easier it was to stay out 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.
Stop Drinking Hypnotherapy
Bob learned how to visualise his feelings, and then how to create images that represented those feelings. He was able to overlay happy family images on top of his 'don't tell me what I can do' image. The new positive image gradually replaced the old one.
The conflict that had been driving his drinking suddenly made sense to him. After therapy his drinking changed dramatically and his marriage recovered.
Changing a Drinking Problem: Blackout drinking
Monique binge drinks to oblivion. She hates doing it, but every set back seems to trigger something deep inside. The result is she reaches for the bottle and drinks until she blacks out.
I 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.
Hiding inside the bottle
She wasn't able to explain why she felt this way. She just cannot handle disappointment and rejection.
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. Her mother was emotionally unstable and angry. Her mother frequently took out her anger on the children.
Reason for the alcohol abuse
She took a long time to connect to her real feelings about her mother. She gradually realised that every disappointment in the present stirred up the same feelings she had experienced as a child. Her drinking had become an attempt to silence those old emotions.
She continued working on the conflict between loving her mother and recognising how much that relationship had affected her.
