Can I Keep Drinking? How You Can Decide When Enough is Enough (Book) - 10/21/2017 7:24:56 AM
Foolhardy or Realistic Approach to Dealing with Alcohol Issues? You Decide!
Can I Keep Drinking? How You Can Decide When Enough is Enough" presents a bandwidth approach to addressing what is alcohol abuse vs problem drinking and what you can do if you are a problematic drinker to prevent becoming the proverbial pickle (alcoholic) - how you can stay the cucumber (problem drinker) by adopting more judicious behavior around your drinking patterns.
True alcoholics with serious drinking issues may run with this book and use some of the information in it to add to symptomatic denial they don't have a problem, but the people who fit into this hard core alcoholic category are not vast. If the goal of this book is to reach people before their drinking escalates to the point they will be an alcoholic and must embrace total sobriety, the book does a beautiful job of giving information, provide change management, gives self-tests to rate one's drinking habits, and shares useful tips on how to drink more responsibly and use alcohol moderately and not as a coping technique against the stresses and strains of life.
As a adult child of an alcoholic parent who could not control his drinking and created a land mine living environment, I was at first a bit wary of the information the author gives about being able to control drinking. I prefer no way out for alcoholics and would hold them to total abstinence and sobriety! However, the author does a fair job of imparting information that helps one discern between alcohol abuse and being an alcoholic. She also speaks of mental health issues and traumatic histories that may induce drinking as a form of self-medication such as rape, incest, emotional, physical, and sexual violence.
The author provides many helpful resources to support problem drinkers to not cross the line into becoming a pickle who can't go back to being a cucumber again! If the overall intent of the book is to have people do self-examination of their drinking style, become aware of how their current drinking behaviors will take them over the line into becoming an alcoholic, to give guidelines on how to adopt healthy drinking habits and to take responsibility for one's use of alcohol, the author does a superlative job.
