Dean,
Have you looked at any of Tony Robbins methodologies? He has been very successful at stopping people from smoking. My understanding is that nicotine is more addictive than alcohol - although I cannot speak from personal experience.

Dean, congratulations on making your first steps and reaching out for support.

I'm new here. Found you linked through someone else. Anyway, Astrology is interesting and can help with self-understanding. At this point however, I think you need to focus on your battle with alcohol. Astrology might get you off track. In any case, I looked at your hypnotist's site and see she charges the typical very high fees. Two options to present:-

1. www.astro.com

2. http://www.cainer.com/

Astrology is intensive and you want someone good but certainly shouldn't be paying hundreds of dollars at this point. (Good educational site is www.astrologycom.com too)

Focus on your family and beating the main problem, that's most important.

I'm about to go send you mail. Stuff too personal/weird to put in comments.

Yeah, THAT ought to get your attention after some of the stuff I've put out there :)

I'm more of a libertarian 12-stepper than most. By that I mean if it ain't in the books, then I really don't want to hear about any additional rules or regulations or other such nonsense. Where we're living now it's "appropriate" to wear a suit and tie to meetings. Where I got introduced to A.A., it was very very inappropriate. Clean jeans were considered dressed up. It's all a matter of perspective I guess.

One of the biggest mistakes that I think the old boys ever made was to start reading Chapter 5 at the beginning of meetings. Without the Dr.'s Opinion, Bill's Story, There is a Solution, More About Alcoholism, and We Agnostics to lead into it, Chapter 5, How it Works comes off as just how you described it. Pretty damn hopeless. Not to mention that Bill and the originals were dealing strictly with very desperate low bottom drunks. The KNEW they were going to die and they drank anyway, because they literally could not stop. Guys like us who see a problem and do something about it didn't go to A.A. back then. We weren't really sick enough for them. (grin)

The best defense against folks in A.A. who want to sell you a bill of goods other than A.A. is to become very familiar with the literature. Especially the Big Book and the 12x12. And I mean get to know the LONG form of the traditions, not just the short form that most groups read.

What you call hypnosis, most of us call an 11th Step. Meditation, self-hypnosis, tomato, tomahtoe. You're doing a directed meditation, very cool if you can afford it. Me, I prefer Tai Chi and Taoist meditations. I have a friend who uses a catholic rosary.

There are jerks and weirdos in every aspect of life. A.A. has quite a few more just because of the nature of the illness. Ya do what we do to ourselves for as long as we did it and you tend to screw up some of your brain...which is why it kind of becomes useless to our sobriety at first. Act. Do something. Go to a meeting. Call someone you've met. Read the literature. Ask questions about what you read.

Trust God, clean house, help others. It's that freaking simple and some folks want to mess it up with a bunch of other crap. Some folks don't like the fact that maybe your house wasn't too dirty to begin with and try to tell you that you're hiding something. Some folks have tried to turn A.A. into their own little cult and then tell you that it's your own fear that makes you not like the way they're doing things.

They can bite me.

Dean, I'm really glad that you've found something that seems to be working for you. I've heard of hypnotherapy being effective in the past, although, to be honest, I've always been at least a tiny bit sceptical, but, whatever, if it works, it works. No comment on astrology.

It's very gratifying indeed to see you keeping sober. It's a good thing, as a recent convict would say.

Right on, Timmer! Well said! About the best advice for Dean I have read on here. I wish people would stop berating AA. Especially those who don't know shit about it.

hey dean,

i'm another newbie around here...but i can relate, it will be 19 years sober on March 17.

yup, i'll second what timmer said. the steps work, the books give direction and ultimately YOU decide to stay sober - which i am certain you will!

drop me an email if you need a far-removed voice to talk with & i'll give you my 800 number...sometimes you just need to talk.

Peace...PJ

Glad to see some wise old hands lending a hand. Judy and I are relative newbies - I'll celebrate 10 years on Thursday and she's got 9 years May 5. Naturally we think the Hawaiian brand of AA is superior - I've heard people say you can't get sober at beach meetings, but the informality worked for me. I don't know how I'll deal with Mainland meetings - suits? I don't own one. Keep up the good work Dean. Aloha, Hunt

Wow there are alot os sober people out there. You know there are the depressing stories and then there are the folks that recognize a problem before it gets really big. Either way each individual has their own story and they are there to tell it so that it may help someone else with the same problem.

Now my cognition was not so good when it came to recognizing that I was having a problem with......um how do you say....ah yes...my mind. I go to meeting and I see folks that say well I had a high bottom and things hadn't gotten so bad yet, I didn't lose my job, I didn't end up locked up and I didn't end up dead, or close to it.

Well screeeeew you! High and mighty, I guess that makes you better than the rest of us! No I am just joking.

The real thing I am trying to say is every person there has a message, a story and some hope to pass on. I feel good to just share the presence of an individual that attended Harvard and Princeton and share their company as a friend not as a patient or a client, I feel good to go out for coffee with my brain injured native american friend and talk, but then you don't have to like everybody you meet AA is just too big. I agree with Timmer too literature is necessary and opinions are like assholes some just talk out of theirs.

You better sober up or "your going to be like me living in my van by the river"
-ChrisFarley inspirational speaker skit

Timmer says he doesn't like people talking down AA when they don't know shit about it.

I can dig it.

I just wish AA people would stop talking down other programs, other alternatives, and claiming AA is "the only thing that works" when they don't know shit about some of the other approaches. ;-)

It looks like I'll be staying out of AA, and will be persuing the Rational Recovery model with the assistance of a therapist. The more I see of AA, the more I realize it's not for me, even though I can tell it's helped a lot of people. Everything about the 12 steps feels wrong to me, and the more I read the Big Book, the more I go to AA meetings, the more wrong AA feels.

10 days sober now, and I haven't changed my mind. I hope you AA people can respect the possibility that I just may be right about that, and will spare me any dire predictions. If I'm wrong, we'll probably find out soon enough.

You go Dean!

While AA can indeed be very valuable to many people, I find the conceit implicit in the all too often repeat canard that "anything else doesn't work and is denial" very off putting.

I think that so long as you 1) Don't Drink and 2) work on the underlying issues that caused you to start in the first place, that you'll be fine.

Rational Recovery sounds like a much better place for you, from what little I've heard about it, than AA. You're not the kind of alcohol abuser they are for.

How you get better would depend on what depth of hole one has dug themselves into, no?

Actually I think it's two or three things.

Yeah, I think the depth of the hole probably matters. See the story I told today about the second AA group I met. Some of those people, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind, AA was the answer, was their salvation, and nothing else likely would have been. Some had been in and out of traditional rehab many times before getting sober with AA. It saved their lives.

But I also think it's a personality thing. I see one thing over and over again with AA people: most of them had issues with anger, resentment, that often led them to drink. Almost all the successful ones I've talked to speak as if they were at war with life and humanity for much of the time before getting sober--and continued that war for a while after getting sober.

That's not actually who I am. I was at war with myself and humanity for a long time, but I conquered that battle (more or less) by the time I was in my late 20s. The drinking didn't get out of control until well after that.

I may be an ornery cuss at times, but I learned long, long ago how to confront myself, how to back down, how to admit to being wrong. That kind of denial no longer dominates me.

I've mentioned her before, but Jean Kirkpatrick was an alcoholic who couldn't get it under control for well over 20 years. She went to AA for many years and kept falling off the wagon and was constantly miserable. She also noticed that women tended to fail at AA at about twice the rate as the men. Her theory was that many people, including a disproportionate number of women, drank for the exact opposite reasons that most AA success stories did.

Her theory was that many drunks drink because their lives are filled with a sense of powerlessness, guilt, and dependence upon others. They drank not to feel powerful, but simply to numb the fear, the sense of hopelessness, the sense of neediness. They drank because when they drank, it didn't make them feel powerful, but it made them stop feeling powerless. They were numbing those emotions out.

Thus AA could be tragic for them, because AA taught them that to get away from booze, they had to accept feeling powerless, accept feeling dependent, and spend time going over and over again the things that made them feel guilty. They'd leave AA meetings crying and feeling worse than ever.

Thus she constructed a radically different sobriety program with 13 affirmations that look almost (almost) like the "evil twin" version of AA. Everything is about empowerment, affirmation of the goodness in yourself, affirmation that you are deserving of accompishment, deserving of praise, worthy as a human being, and so on. No taking inventories, no making amends, no admitting you're powerless, and so on. It helped Kirkpatrick sober up, and now there's a whole national organization using her methodologies.

They're a more secretive organization than AA because they won't publish their meeting sites. Mostly, I think, because men are not allowed to come to them, and probably partly because they want to avoid abusive spouses showing up. So they only way to find your way to a WFS meeting is to be female, call them up, and ask them where to find a meeting. Or go to their web site.

But the point is--and I've made it before but it deserves repeating--what this most strongly illustrates to me is that not all drunks are alike after all, and what some people need to help them is pretty different.

I would, by the way, urge some of my AA friends to watch in your meetings to see if you spot any women like this. The women who show up meeting after meeting, cry a lot, or who are usually silent, even though they keep showing up and showing up, and seem even after long periods to still need a whole lot of support. You guys might want to hand those women this web site url:

http://www.womenforsobriety.org/

Or give 'em this phone#:

(215) 536-8026

Just consider the possibility that when you encounter such a person, even though AA has saved you, it's just possible you've run across a woman who is in the wrong place and just doesn't know it. These WFS folks have been around since the 1970s and are still growing, and the more I read about the, the more convinced I am that they're doing good work that does not necessarily have to be seen as conflicting with AA.

alcohol addiction depends on the reasons why the individual uses it. psychological reasons can be as addictive or more addictive than many 'hard drugs'. tobacco addiction however is as addictive or more addictive than heroin, according to some studies many years ago. and since some tobacco companies boost the content, it could easily be much worse.

there was a small study done in which a group of doctors -- and i wish i could remember the name/location of the study -- found that people with certain kinds of glandular dysfunction were more likely to be self medicating with alcohol or tobacco. when the hormone imbalance was addressed and treated, then the need to self medicate disappeared.

to be successful and permanent, treating any addiction requires addressing the root cause. hypnosis can do that.

astrology. you get what you pay for. to be accurate, it needs a combination of techniques which are not typically provided by most automated software products. if you want a basic interpretation program, matrix provides an excellent program. but this only addresses natal charts -- and that's as useful as looking at a snapshot of a baby and knowing that the baby is cute or not, caucasian, african american, indian, etc, clean and so on. if you want relevant information, you need address to the secondary and tertiary progressions as well as ingress charts -- and those do not come cheap. they shouldn't -- because no software package provides them in a 'report' format -- it's not easily possible and it takes more than 3 or 4 days working as much as 8 hours a day to assess and write such a report, depending on the complexity of the chart. a professional's time is easily worth $50 an hour, not $1.50 or $5.00. stariq.com provides free notices for aspects to the close planets and some of the distant ones, but it ignores position in the chart and again, it doesn't address progressions. while these tend to be far more accurate, they're still quite often off the mark. aspects which aren't angular, for example, tend to make little or no impression whatsoever.

and most of the free or cheap reports use the software which Matrix created -- it IS expensive, not cheap, but it is good. Matrix is based in a tiny town outside of grand rapids, michigan.

there is a difference between a hypnotist and a hypnotherapist as well.

a hypnotist gives you 15 to 20 minutes of their time, puts you under quickly without interviewing you other than to find out what you want to change, tells you not to do that behavior in hypnosis and brings you back up. this can work for a day or so and in some rare cases, it works for a few months. but it is not typically a permanent solution. and most of these folks will charge you $45 to $80 for that time -- figure their hourly rate yourself.

or they fill a hall with 200 to 500 people and charge them $45 each -- say they give a guarantee -- which is typically not your money back, but a second or a third session of the same thing -- no one-on-one. spend alot of time talking about themelves or what they've done and then spend -- again, about 15 to 20 minutes providing 'you will do this' hypnosis.

a hypnotherapist either does a thorough interview BEFORE doing hypnosis or asks you to complete a questionnaire which is just as thorough which you bring to the session. they then take the time to interview you and flesh out some of those Q/As BEFORE doing any hypnosis whatsoever, then they do hypnosis which allows you to find the root cause, treat the root cause and identify the solution which works best for you. this takes time and it can have a permanent effect. additionally, it takes 3 weeks of daily reinforcement to make the changes habitual -- permanent -- in other people, it can take as much as 4 to 6 weeks. and no one should be permitted to drive or use any kind of equipment for at least 30 minutes following such a session as the reflexes slow down dramatically during the session. and most of these folks do not provide follow up tapes to reinforce the material used/discovered during the session.and these are always one-on-one.

I never said anything about people talking down A.A.. That was Jack. Although I have to agree with him.

And I was going to pursue this further, but the more I read your posts, the more I realize that you're going to try to think your way out of this thing.

Best of luck to you.

Best of luck, Dean.

AA is supposed to be the Last Exit before the Abyss, anyway. That's all. Next stop, death/wet brain. This stop, AA. Choose wisely. You're not at the Last Exit, nor are you near the Last Exit. And the good news is you know where to find AA now if you ever feel like you're at the Last Exit.

If you choose to return, great. Believe it or not, the AA program is based on a policy of attraction, not promotion. If you want what we have, come see us. If not and you find something else, great. The enemy is Alcoholism and the Abyss, not one program or another, or one method or another.

I was so much like you Dean it's not funny. Man, it's all coming back ... thanks. For those of us with a few 24s, that's a blessing.