To change your drinking, you need to know WHY you drink.

If you want to change your relationship with alcohol, it’s critical to understand the reasons why you drink in the first place. What is alcohol actually doing for you? How is it helping you? What are the root causes that drive you to drink? What are you using alcohol to escape from? What parts of yourself or your life do you feel you need relief from? What are the pain points that you’re using alcohol to soothe?

Dr. Gabor Maté asserts that the driving force behind problematic substance use is always pain. So, ask yourself – why am I in pain?

As I learnt in AA, alcohol was not my problem, it was my solution to my particular root causes. 

Once you identify and bring the things that are driving you to drink into your awareness, you can systematically work on addressing these reasons in ways that don’t involve drinking. You can actively work on addressing the root causes, so you no longer feel compelled to drink over them.

This work can be hard. No one is excited about finding new and healthier ways to unwind, socialise, have fun, build genuine confidence and so on. No one is thrilled about taking away their quick fix and learning to manage their internal emotional landscape in slower but more effective ways. And it can really suck to face childhood trauma, the reality that your marriage is over, or that you need to quit a job you’re not happy in, or do more therapy.

But if you want your relationship with alcohol to change, you have to change. As the saying goes, if nothing changes, nothing changes. And that includes you and your drinking habits.

This is the roadblock that I believe holds many people back from reaching their alcohol-related goals. They think they can quit or cut back and change nothing else in their lives. Like simply making the decision to stop drinking or to drink less is enough. It’s not. There are years, if not decades-worth, of ingrained thinking and behaviour to shift. Is it daunting? Hell yes. Hard? Sometimes, fist-bitingly so. Worth it? A thousand times YES.

Addressing my root causes was one of the most important parts of my alcohol-free journey. It wasn’t until I had the courage to really deal with what had been driving me to drink, that long-lasting transformation began to happen.

Once I learned healthier coping mechanisms, I was able to see how truly ineffective alcohol was as a solution. It’s a crappy quick-fix that comes with a huge price tag, and it’s often the drinking itself that creates more and more reasons for you to drink.

Our 8-week course is designed to hand hold you through this root cause work and give you all the tools, strategies, support, and accountability you need to make sustainable, lasting changes.

You might feel like it’s impossible now, but as Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done”.