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Outwardly smiling, inwardly churning.. He held the whiskey a long time before he drank it. It was a quiet night in a friend's lounge room, no occasion to speak of, and the friend had poured two glasses without asking. He wasn't thirsty. He just didn't want to be the one who said no. He told me about it weeks later, still turning it over. "Saying no felt like disrespect." That sentence piqued my curiosity, it felt like something he'd known for years and never said out loud. "S

I spent a long time asking myself whether I had a problem with alcohol. Not out loud but in my head. It usually started in that window between waking up and getting out of bed, then in the shower, at my desk over coffee, on the drive home. I was good at thinking things through, solving problems. I’d built a career on it. So I thought this through, thoroughly and continuously. I solved precisely: nothing. That was the loop. I’ve since heard versions of it from almost every man

There is a conversation most men in their late 40s, 50s are not having. Not with their doctor, not with their partner, not with their mates and certainly not with themselves. If it did it would sound like this: “I don’t know, something feels different. My energy seems lower than it used to be. My body is getting flabby despite not eating that differently. My motivation comes and goes. Sleep is not what it was. And intimacy, what intimacy?” The default explanation is age. Yo

You started the day with a clear intention. Not drinking tonight and you meant it. By mid-morning it still felt on track. By lunch, manageable. Then five o’clock arrives and you’re cooked! You pack up, amble to the car and somewhere on the drive home you pass the friendly drive-through. The one you’ve pulled into more times than you remember. Oh yeah, today is a hard no. But this night, a small voice surfaces. "A drink would be good right now..." You push it down and keep dr

Are you like a moth to a flame with alcohol? Back in 2007 when I first stopped drinking, I used willpower. Conditioned my mindset, stopped the behaviour, and then spent the next eight years arguing with myself about staying stopped. Whenever I hit a bump in the road, I countered any desire for a drink with the internal rhetoric of a crazed temperance advocate. That internal rhetoric was on and off for the eight plus years I was not drinking. At times it was barely a whisper,

There are two ways to try to change your drinking. I know this because I tried both. The first is behaviour based. You decide to stop, you white knuckle your way through it, and you use willpower to hold the line every time the urge surfaces. I did this for nearly nine years. Then I caved and drank again. The second is different. You stop trying to stop. You dig into understanding what alcohol actually does, how it works, why it has the hold it does. You change the way you fe

Don't let drinking be the sneaky future thief! What if the choices you make around drinking today are quietly stealing from the person you desire to become? Most of us make short term decisions without much thought for how alcohol affects our future. We act on convenience, push through, do what everyone else is doing. Rarely stopping to ask what the cumulative effect of those choices might actually look like ten or twenty years from now. Twenty years ago if you had asked me w

Some roots are stubborn and buried deep. much like our subconcious thoughts about what alcohol does for us! I tripped over the old hibiscus stump for a final time, the eyesore been dead for a while and it was time to dig it out! You could say it it was definitely no longer serving us in that corner of the garden. I went to work on removing it, the surface roots were pretty easy to break away. Being an Alcohol Freedom Coach I'm often thinking about parallels between my alcohol

Never underestimate the power of the subconscious mind. You might think your conscious mind and subconscious are on an even keel, however when push comes to shove the subconscious can make itself known in amazing and sometimes scary ways. One Thursday afternoon on my way home from work I pulled into the supermarket carpark to pick up some milk and bread. Since the local liquor store entrance was right next door to the main entrance I had an internal conversation about getting