Category: Self-Help Publisher: Morgan James
ISBN-10: 1630479896
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 200
Copyright: January 10, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781630479893
Price: $16.95 (eBook)
Can I Keep Drinking? How You Can Decide When Enough is Enough is a self- help guide for people struggling with alcohol but are not sure if they need to give it up completely.
Can I Keep Drinking? How You Can Decide When Enough is Enough is for the 90-million-plus people who struggle with alcohol in the United States. Most will avoid getting help for fear of being labeled an alcoholic, forced into treatment, made to attend 12-step meetings, and have to stop drinking completely. Only about 6 percent of the population is alcoholic yet more than 80 percent of treatment programs require total abstinence from alcohol. Cyndi Turner challenges this traditional belief and teaches you how to have a better relationship with alcohol.
As if you and Cyndi were sitting in her office, she provides you with easy-to-follow tools, checklists, and quizzes to guide you through the process of answering the crucial question: can I keep drinking? Included throughout are experiences of people who have struggled with drinking. The “How Do I Know If I Can Keep Drinking? Quiz” gives you positive and negative predictors for whether you are a candidate for moderate drinking and prepares you to develop and implement a Moderate Drinking Plan.
Take the quiz and get the tools to get balance back in your life!
Excerpt
This book is written as if you were sitting in a nonjudgmental therapy session with a twenty-year expert in the field (me!) who realizes that one size of treatment does not fit all. While all people share certain universal experiences, there are many ways to look at and solve the problems that arise in the human experience. I believe, in one sense, that you are the expert because it is your life, but in another sense, I am the expert because it is not my life. My emotions are not involved, so I am able to have a better perspective. I have no agenda other than helping you be the best version of yourself that you can be—healthy, happy, and balanced.
“Can I keep drinking?” you may ask. This is a very complicated question to answer. My goal is to share with you the steps that I take my clients through in order to figure this out. You may be wondering if your drinking is out of control, or you may have a family member who is unhappy with your current drinking patterns or behavior. Basically, in these following pages, you are getting a lot of the information that I would share with someone during six to nine months of group and individual therapy.
I have developed the “How Do I Know If I Can Keep Drinking? Quiz” to help you answer this very question. It is personalized to your
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specific experiences and goals. Based upon your answers, you can determine whether or not you can safely keep drinking. I will also help you understand the various predicators for success or failure. You may be tempted to skip ahead and take the quiz, but I recommend that you get some information first. I believe that my job as a therapist is not to make the decision for you, but to give you information so that you can make the best decision for yourself.
What you will get from me is all the book knowledge I have learned over my twenty-year career (yawn), but more importantly, the examples, trials, and successes of many people who have tried to moderate their drinking. You are not alone in this struggle. Once you have completed this book, you will have a better sense of whether you have a drinking problem and whether you are able to safely drink again. Most of the data provided in this book concerns adults over the age of twenty-one in the United States, but I have also provided information about the impact of drinking in adolescence as well as in other countries around the world.
When a client or family member calls and asks me if their spouse, child, family member, or friend can keep drinking, I tell them honestly that I don’t know. It would be wrong for me to make the assumption that just because someone is having a current issue with drinking, they are therefore an alcoholic and can never drink again. Anyone can keep drinking—it’s a matter of whether they should keep drinking.
I want you to have pertinent information so you can decide if it is time to make a change in your life regarding alcohol. I am giving you tools to find solutions that work for you. Your goal will be to turn your insights into action. Read ahead to find out how to have a better relationship with alcohol.
Professional Reviews
Tom Horvath, PhD, ABPP
The dominant US perspective about drinking problems — that abstinence is the only genuine solution — gets a thorough re-examination in Can I Keep Drinking? If you're looking for a fresh and evidence-based perspective on drinking problems and ways to cahnge them, everything you need to know is here.
— Tom Horvath, Ph.D., ABPP, President, Practical Recovery
Author: Sex, Drugs, Gambling & Chocolate:
A Workbook for Overcoming Addictions
Gabrielle Glasser
Can I Keep Drinking? is a fresh voice in the emerging field of moderation treatment programs, and offers readers evidence-based alternatives to the abstinence-only, “one size fits all” model that does not fit all problem drinkers. It offers practical, real-world answers that will help guide those who worry about their drinking into having a healthier relationship with alcohol, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of severity.
— Gabrielle Glaser
Author: Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink—
And How They Can Regain Control
Moderation Management
Cyndi Turner explains the foundations of moderate drinking empathetically and intelligently. This book is an excellent addition to the harm reduction canon, one that will certainly help readers navigate a healthier relationship with alcohol.
— Kelsey Osgood
Moderation Management facilitator
Author: How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia
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Reviews for "Can I Keep Drinking? How You Can Decide When Enough is Enough"
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.
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