Look I get it. You wouldn’t have come to this page if you weren’t truly suffering from the damaging effects of alcoholism.
You are hurting. Your life may be in shambles. Perhaps you’ve lost your job because of your drinking, or maybe your relationships are crumbling. You might be in debt due to bad decisions made under the influence of alcohol.
You Can Fix Your Alcohol Problem
Yet, despite all that pain and suffering, there is some good news.
I can tell you that right here and right now all of those bad feelings about yourself can end. You can transform your life in a way you may not think is even possible right now.
If you have truly had enough of your current path, this can be your rock bottom. It’s all uphill from here!
You Are Not Alone
Listen, of the two billion people worldwide who consume alcohol, almost four per cent have an alcohol problem. That’s a whole lot of people.
On the upside, this means that a tremendous amount of research has been done over many decades on alcoholism and on what works best for treatment.
Most importantly, you are not alone.
Effective Treatment for Your Alcoholism
Help with your alcoholism can be broken down into three main areas. They are explained more fully in the next sections:
- Medication (prescribed by your family doctor or from a clinic)
- Group Help (can be available directly without referral, especially Alcoholics Anonymous)
- Behavioral Therapy (can be available directly without referral)
It is important to remember that effective treatment can be administered through a variety (or sometimes a combination) of settings.
Whatever path of treatment you ultimately decide to follow, remember that you have just made the best decision of your life!
Medication to Help Ease Alcohol Withdrawal
Physicians and other care providers can prescribe medication to help alcoholics while they are reducing their drinking. Those approved by the FDA include:
- Disulfiram (Antabuse®)
- Oral Naltrexone
- Extended-release Naltrexone (Vivitrol®)
- Acamprosate (Campral®)
- Topiramate was approved to treat epilepsy and migraines but has also been effective for some cases of alcohol abuse
Group Help Support for Alcoholism
The most common type of alcoholism intervention is Group Help, where two or more people with alcoholism get together to provide help and support to the group. This is the most accessible form of help and people can attend for as long as they want to or need to without worrying about cost.
The most famous of the Group Help models is Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), a 12-step program that is free of charge and offers regular scheduled meetings in many countries around the world.
Two important aspects of this model of treatment are reinforcement and behavior modeling.
Reinforcement is the act of learning positive coping actions for alcoholism from a sponsor, who has already completed treatment successfully.
Behavioral modeling is the act of looking to more senior members of the group who have been through the situation already and can offer guidance.
Behavioral Therapy for Short-Term and Long-Term Improvement
The Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (or Behavioral Therapy) model teaches strategies for self-change that can be applied in the short term and/or the long term.
These strategies usually focus on goal setting, self monitoring of drinking, analysis of drinking situations, and learning alternative coping skills, and can even be done online in the privacy of your own home.
Web-based therapy can be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Combining A Few Methods of Treatment
It should be noted that Medication combined with Behavioral Therapy tends to show more positive results than just Medication alone. This is because the combination works on psychologically changing the drinker’s behaviors and expectations around alcohol while the drug helps with the physical symptoms of withdrawal.