Abstinence (fwd from NLP-TALK)
:Hey, that seminar for alcoholics sounds great! Congratulations!
:Just out of curiosity, does the seminar offer the alcoholic
:participant the outcome option of continued moderated drinking?
:Or does it require or promote abstinence?
:
:-- Kurt Luoto
Hi Kurt
You're asking *THE QUESTION*. My answer will depend at which
logical level we are speaking: in fact all this can be boiled
down to abstinence ? yes or not ?
- here in France as alcohol is part of the culture (ie when
someone is offering you drinking a good wine it's hard to say
no without offending him). So every (let's say most of them)
alcoholic is coming in our seminars with the secret (or not
secret) outcome of being able to drink moderately.
So at this time we answer NO to the abstinence question
(building rapport).
- as alcohol and all the addiction's substances are very very
*very* strong and powerful anchors our outcome is to change
our patient's outcome in -let's become abstinent for a time -:
that way the patient will convince his relatives he changed
dramatically. So the answer is abstinence YES.
- Richard Bandler gave us ways of building internal process
(he said "building a warning machine") to control drinking :
a former alcoholic could drink one glass of Champagne for
Christmas or for a Wedding or for a Birthday or so -no more
than a glass of alcohol each month. This kind of installation
is possible using deep trance and is more of DHE than NLP.
So the answer could be abstinence NOT completely.
- In chapter 6 of Reframming Bandler and Grinder wrote (I
guess that's Grinder) they used to bring their patients to a
bar 3 month after to test if they were still addicted or not.
They wrote that full recovery is reached when someone can
drink moderately as everyone else. In some ways we had tested
this and in France with the beliefs associated to alcohol,
it does not work ! So the answer is abstinence definetely YES.
- Working with our patients' decision making strategy of
drinking and helping them making big changes we discovered some
of them became able to drink in a normal way. Most of the time
after a period of abstinence followed by a period when they got
back to their habit for a while.
So the answer could be abstinence : it depends of the person.
Maybe YES maybe NO.
My answer is congruently incongruent ;-) but as addicted people
are very dissociated people it would be normal that any issue
about addictions would also be dissociated....
regards
-Bernard Frit