Still Here...

Nope, the Live Sensibly site is not dead, contrary to all outward appearances.

But it’s certainly been dormant, eh?

My brain is often binary. It is either off, or on. Hyperfocused on one thing, or taking an expansive astrological/anthropological view of everything. Dissecting tiny details, or painting visions of grand vistas.

A year ago, while creating this web space, I floated between the grand visions — what I wanted Live Sensibly to be — and the nuts-n-bolts details of building a website.

I’d hoped to leverage this venture into one that would add income soon, but that turned out to be much a more complex process than I envisioned, so I branched out. I got lucky, landing on a couple of quirky but uniquely fitting opportunities to cover the rent, though not immediately.

That stuff is starting to play out… a little more income is flowing in, and I’m gradually inching my way out of crisis management and into ordinary living.

My passion for wellness, harm reduction, and thoughtful, evidence-based approaches to dealing with compelling, compulsive, and addictive behaviors remains. I wish I had all sorts of time and energy to dig into those kinds of topics TODAY, but of course this is my real life, not the Cinderalla version of it.

Stay tuned, if you wish… the most important part of any journey is its future, not its past, and I’m committed to making this part of my journey meaningful.

Sidebar Item: Furled Links

One of the internet-based tools I’ve found to be tremendously helpful is Furl. Furl takes the place of bookmarks in my browser: When I find a webpage that I want to come back to later, I press one button to save it to my personal Furl archive.

In addition to saving the address of the page, Furl captures the content of the page. So, if it is a newspaper article that will expire after a week, I’ll still be able to get back to it. Handy, eh? And, best of all, it’s free!

Today, I figured out how to put links to my Furled pages in the sidebar here at . If you look under latest links furled you’ll see the last ten webpages that happened to catch my eye. There will often be overlap between the Furled links and what I’m talking about in the main blog, but sometimes you’ll get a glimpse of what I’m working on for a future article.

Please note, though, that some of the links there will be to stuff I’ve not yet read. I’m not vouching for the credibility or value of the material there — think of it as a wicker basket of newspaper clippings I’ve cut out and saved to read some other day.

You can also follow the more link at the bottom of that box to see all of the odds-n-ends that have accumulated in my clippings basket since I started using Furl in January. You’ll find that some of the links are now dead, but let me know if there’s a page you’d like to read, and I’ll see if I can at least dig up excerpts.

Pioneer?

We talk a lot about drinking, we talk about drinking a lot, we talk about other people’s drinking problems but not about our own. Until we quit, that is. Then we talk a lot about our old drinking problems. And, if we drink again after quitting, we either talk about quitting again, or we quit talking about drinking again.

I’m here to break a couple of those traditions. I have caused myself real problems with my drinking in the past, but I turned it around by taking responsibility for my behavior. I didn’t do it alone, but the control was mine to seize. Today, I am unabashed about relishing a couple of cold beers on a hot summer evening, and I am content with — even empowered by — the fact that more than half of my days are comfortably alcohol-free.

I need your help: Prove how wrong it would be for me to think I’m the first person to put up a personal website where I talk about solving a drinking problem without quitting. Post links to folks who are have already done it here in the comments, or drop them in an email message to me.

2004.08.12 Update

Neo makes a great point in a comment at Showcase.mu.nu (emphasis mine):

I can relate, in general, to the stopping drinking so much, too much, too often. Abstinence was not the answer to my problems because if you tell me not to do something — well, you get the picture. I won’t focus on it, however, because I know you become what you fill your mind with. I prefer to fill my mind with more positive, helpful aspects of life. I doubt that you’re the pioneer in this matter, as the resources listed on your website/blog/forum indicate.

2004.08.15 Update

Here’s the answer to my question: I’m not the first.

Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald are already online from Scotland with their site, Alcoholics Can Drink Safely Again. I corresponded with them and got a friendly email back. They are shopping a book ‘round to publishers and have posted several articles about themselves from the U.K. press at their site.

Live at Last!

I’ve been building content here at Live Sensibly (with alcohol) for several months already, tweaking templates, researching, brainstorming, but hanging on to it, not quite ready to let it go and be officially public.

At last, if still a tad reluctantly, the time has come to let it loose.

I’m not writing this website because I’ve got answers, I’m writing because I have questions.

I want to dig up answers to questions about drinking, culture, addictions, and experiences. The evidence gathered by experts matters to me, but so do the day-to-day lives of all of us. I want to challenge folks, myself included, to think things through, discussing and debating thoroughly.

I’m convinced that good answers are out there, that good options are available for us to live sensible, healthy lives. I really think we can prevent some of our personal challenges from escalating into huge problems, and at a cultural level we can do a better job of demystifying the passages from problematic to healthier behaviors, and valuing abstinence, moderation, and general balance.

Take a look around. Tell me what you think! Leave lotsa comments! Come back again soon!

—Bose

Background Image

What’s the splotchy stuff hiding behind the text boxes at Live Sensibly?

Here it is, without anything getting in the way.

It started as the picture of a path through some woods, on the right. I messed with it to create the two-color image in the background.

Here is a larger (115K) copy of the original.

I chose a picture of a path, with twists and turns, sun and shade, because living sensibly with alcohol is a lifelong journey, not a one-time destination.

The original photo came from Pixel Perfect Digital’s free image archive.

Updates Policy

Some blog writers keep their sites chronologically intact, seldom altering their content after publishing it.

I’m using blog software here at Live Sensibly but I don’t plan on leaving every entry exactly as it was first posted.

Since my goal is to develop a knowledge base related to alcohol, drinking and addiction, I’m expecting better knowledge to be revealed in the process of building the site. To the extent that it works, I’m going to go back to old entries that include less-than-optimal information and tune them up. In the lower right-hand corner of each post, when you see only a date and time under “posted by Bose,” the entry has not been changed since the day it was created. If there are separate “created” and “last updated” dates, something has changed since the initial post date. (Note, though, that I don’t control that date directly. Sometimes the update will have been to an unseen portion of that entry, not to the content.)

When it turns out that an initial posting was completely off-base or has become obsolete, I’ll mark it as such, create a new one, and link the old to the new.

Comments Policy

I reserve the option to manage the content of the Live Sensibly site as I see fit, including deleting, moving, quoting, and editing comments.

My goal is to nurture open and unfettered communication, respecting diverse perspectives, encouraging others to practice respect as well.

If you’re interested in making positive contributions to Live Sensibly with your comments:

• Be personal. Reveal some small part of your life which has led you to the thought you’re expressing.
• Own your own stuff. Use “to me”, “for me”, “it seems to me”, IMHO (in my humble opinion), “in my experience”.
• Cite evidence.
• Offer an original thought.
• Keep it simple and concise.
• Be curious. Simple questions can open conversations as readily as know-it-all pontificating (a temptation for me) can shut discussion down or fan ugly flames.

If you want to take a shot at getting your comments edited or deleted, try any of the following:

• Use generalizations and stereotypes.
• Demean your fellow commenters.
• Post spam (related to alcohol or not).
• Reveal nothing of yourself.
• Post material in violation of the author’s copyright.

Comments found at Live Sensibly reflect the opinions of their authors only. Their appearance here should not be construed as being approved or agreed to by me.

‘Nuf said.

Accessibility

Being new to web development, this has been an eye-opening journey for me! I’ve hit these points related to accessibility:

• Skip-to-content links for text browsers and those which don’t support stylesheets.
• Navigation button links for prev/next, home, glossary, and others for Mozilla, Opera, and <LINK> bar users.
• Accesskeys: Next on my accessibility to-do list. (Has anyone suggested standard uses of key values? I haven’t found any yet.)
• Hover titles: Hovering over a link will let you know where the link will take you:
  • Glossary: The Live Sensibly glossary entry relevant to the linked word.
  • Live Sensibly: Links to another page within the site.
  • External sites: Domain name will be listed first.

I’m interested in real-life feedback from folks using text browsers, screen readers and other adaptive technologies. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Tech Info: Under the hood at Live Sensibly

My background

I started mucking around with an IBM PC in 1984 when my employer bought an 8088 with a 10MB hard drive. Migrated from there to mainframe COBOL and CICS, and rode the consulting boom through the 90s.

This is my first real web development project. It’s been a fun trip (or flying leap off a cliff, sometimes).

I’m still a hand-coder, just like the COBOL days, for building my Movable Type templates. I’ve seen Dreamweaver, HomeSite, and StyleMaster in action but I like the simplicity and direct control I get from cranking it out myself.

Framework

Coming from a mainframe background, it astounds me that an application as robust and customizable as Movable Type is so accessible for a guy like me. Thanks, Ben and Mena. I’m running it on a Windows server with MySQL.

Pages and stylesheets validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS2.

I love my web host. UpLinkearth.com has given impeccable service at a very decent price. They are responsive and helpful, even getting things done quickly during hours when they had announced holiday closings.

Development Tools

• Code editor: SPF/SE 3.5.
• FTP tool: WebDrive 6, handy access to my web server.
• .bat files: Crude but lifesaving little self-built version-control system for archiving each update to my templates, and creating complete site backups.
• Testing tool: <LINK> Bar, adds Mozilla- or Opera-like navigation buttons for prev/next, up/down to Internet Explorer.
• Validation/accessibility tool: Accessibility Toolbar Beta v0.95 (promising tool, though it seems to interfere with JavaScript on some pages).
• MySQL client: SQLyog v3.63, easy access to data & backups
• MT entry client: Ecto 1.0, an still-developing, but very promising tool.
• Graphics: Macromedia FireWorks 4, just a bit of dabbling

Plug-ins

Movable Type plug-ins I’m using, developers I’m indebted to:

• MT-Blacklist, from Jay Allen, handling comment spam.
• Compare, from Kevin Shay, increasing the reusability of template includes.
• Excerpt_words, from Stepan Riha, for displaying excerpts of comments (hacked slightly to prevent long words or URLS from busting CSS divs out of their intended boundaries).
• LastModified, from Kevin Shay, after MT 2.661’s tag refused to cooperate with me.
• MTEntryIfComments, from Stepan Riha, customizing comment and trackback handling.
• MTRelativeURL, from Stepan Riha, making nearly all of my internal links relative. (I fixed a bug in this code, as described here.)
• MTTagInvoke, from Stepan Riha, allowing MT tags to be used inside the entry body. (Vital for using the RelativeURL plug-in on links within posts.)
• NumberMunging, from Jason Tamez, adapted the convert_to_roman code to convert numbers up to 20 to words.
• OptionalRedirect, from David Raines, to preserve MT 2.64 comment author link logic.
• ShortTitle, from Dave Dribin, to create short, readable permalink URLs. Also the patch to define each page as the index in its own directory.
• SmartyPants, from John Gruber, creates typographically friendly quotes, dashes, ellipses.
• Textile 2, from Brad Choate, which implemented Dean Allen’s Textile, simplifying the writing of standards-compliant blog entries.

People and sites

The folks who have helped me get moving and whose sites I have used as tutors, examples, and tools:

• Mike Airhart, my partner, who demonstrated the ability to shake the world up a little with the Ex-Gay Watch blog.
• Stephanie Sullivan, who pushed me towards standards-compliance and CSS when I built the MM FAQ pages in mid-2003.
• Molly Holzschlag, whose CSS book gave me a jumpstart, and whose site showed the way.
• Shirley Kaiser’s Brainstorms and Raves, leading the way in explaining and implementing accessibility and readability.
• Eric Meyer’s CSS/edge and its explanation of CSS basics.
• Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility primer on the hows and whys of designing for all people.
• Jon Hicks’ demonstration by example of a clean, tabular, comment entry form.
• WASP: The Web Standards Project “buzz” blog has linked to helpful summaries and tools.
• Real Live Preacher demonstrates the power of embedding a great story in a beautiful frame.
• Pixel Perfect is the source of the photo I used to create my background image.
• Furl proved to be invaluable in tracking and sorting my links to the resources above.

A blog? What's that?

Blog is short for web log.

It’s estimated that over 4 million people worldwide have set up weblogs of one flavor or another. A million are reasonably active, a hundred thousand or more updated weekly or more often.

The biggest creators of blogs are young (90% under age 30). Some of the most influential have been politically-oriented folks. Blogs have created a sense of community among techno-geeks.

And yet, among folks I’ve talked to, there’s no shortage of confusion about them.

Some basic questions and answers if you’re new to the blog concept:

The blog format ends up being extremely flexible, making it easy for its authors to publish stuff regularly. So, Live Sensibly may change daily, or even minute-by-minute, when I’m posting new material or folks are adding comments.

Comments

One of the fun things about a blog is that you can be as much a part of it as a reader and commenter as its author.

Many paths through the site

Another handy thing about a well-structured blog is that it gives many paths for wandering through the site. You’ll see the newest stuff on the home page and from there you can check out specific categories, see what sorts of conversations have been active lately, use the Search box at the right to dig up something specific, or see a map of the entire site.

Once you find something interesting, you can wander through it by category, sequentially, or alphabetically.

Building a knowledge base

My goal is to build up Live Sensibly as a knowledge base on alcohol-related issues. Folks coming here should be able to expose themselves a broad range of scientific evidence, perspectives, and experiences related to drinking, moderating, abstaining, preventing, and solving drinking problems.

Because of that, new material will be added on a regular basis. I’ll also go back to past entries to expand and clarify them when better information becomes available.

Copyright, Reprint Info

The material I’ve developed for Live Sensibly is copyrighted by me.

Please feel free to make personal use of it as you see fit. I’ve designed it with accessibility and printability in mind.

Contact me if you’d like permission to reprint, duplicate, distribute, make commercial use of, or create derivative works from the material you find here. I’m sure we can put something together that will work for both of us.

Also feel free to link to and quote small passages with proper attribution.

Getting Acquainted

Welcome! Here are pointers to some basics about the Live Sensibly site:

• An intro to the site: Why do this?
• An intro to me: What’s my connection?
• Disclaimers: What I’m not.
• A blog? What’s that?
• Neighborhood signposts: Finding your way around.
• Accessibility info
• Comments Policy: How to fly, and how to flop, making comments at Live Sensibly.
• Updates Policy: Live Sensibly is not like every other blog.
• Tech info: Under the hood at Live Sensibly.
• The background image: What is it?
• Welcome Mat: August 9^th Live at Last message.

Enjoy! Let me know what you think, via a comment or email.

Neighborhood signposts

These signposts will guide you

around the Live Sensibly site:

• The logo tops the page wherever you go. Clicking on it will bring you back to the home page.
• Clicking on my headshot will launch an email message from you to me.
• The building blocks for the site are entries (also called posts). Each entry is assigned to a category.
• The other building blocks for the site are comments made by readers, each attached to a specific entry.
• The home page shows the 15 most recent entries. Clicking on the title of any entry takes you to its single entry page, where you can see comments folks have made and leave one of your own.
• The first date on the home page is when the most recent entry was published. On a single entry page it the date that entry was published.
• A page description blurb tells you what type of page you’re looking at, such as the home page, a single entry page, category listing, or table of contents.
• On a single-entry page, the blurb tells you how many comments folks have made. You can click on the comment count to drop down to the comments or on “add a comment” to post your own thoughts.
• Next on a single-entry page, this bar shows you titles of the previous and next entries and lets you navigate to them.
• Clicking on the title of an entry takes you to its single entry page. Clcking on the category (like What Works) brings you to a page showing that entry with others from the same category. (Warning to dial-up users: The category page can be large, and might be slow to load.)
• The site search box gives up-to-date search results on any entries posted to the site.
• Hovering over any link will tell you what happens if you click the link. Try it out here.
• Hovering over the links at the right tells you a bit more about what’s there.
• You get to decide how you want to wander through the site. Maybe you like seeing everything in chronological order. You can start with the very first entry (get there by selecting site contents followed by master list by date, or by following monthly archives backwards to February, 2004) and page forward, or start with the most recent entry on the home page and work your way backward.
• The comments page summarizes what other folks have had to say here. You can list either the entries on which comments have been posted most recently, or a full list of comments beginning with the latest.
• The glossary lists commonly-used terms within Live Sensibly.
• If you’re most interested in a single category, like personal journeys, click that category in the side bar. From there (or any other category page) you can open individual entries or you can use the navigation bar like the one shown here to look at the entire category’s entries from the last to the first, first to last, or in alphabetical order.
• For summary-level looks at the site, check out the site contents. You’ll start out looking at a list by category and date; from there you can use the navigation bar at right to switch to views by category and title, or a master list by date, or an alphabetical master list.
• Dial-up internet users: Individual entry pages and tables of contents will load more quickly than pages labeled “Full Posts”.
• Printing from the site has been set up to give you only the content, dropping the right column, as shown in this downsized sample. (Test it out by looking at a print preview in your browser.)

I want you to feel at home here, especially if the internet or this site feels strange to you at first. It is important to me that Live Sensibly use easily accessible language and technology. If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t be shy! Let me know what you think in an email or by leaving a comment.

What I'm NOT: Disclaimers

I’m a layperson,

even though I’ve never played one on TV.

I freely admit numerous flaws and foibles.

I dreamed that getting a handle on my drinking would propel me organically into losing 40 pounds, doubling my income, becoming a fitness buff, and writing a bestseller or two, but it ain’t happened!

A few things I’m not, and that I don’t do:

• I don’t work in the substance abuse field.
• I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert.
• I am not a therapist, or a professional researcher.
• I don’t tell anybody else what to do or think.
• I am not offering a program, a plan, steps to follow or a treatment approach.

I am here to listen, to gather and share information, to offer a layperson’s feedback, to tell my story, give peer-to-peer support, and develop my voice as a health care consumer advocate.

Importance of professional care

I do encourage folks to get good professional medical care, psychosocial care, and spiritual care. I’m a firm believer in the self-sufficiency that can come from studying primary sources, reading self-help materials, and getting peer support.

The reason that those things have worked well for me, though, is that I have also gotten help from experienced professionals as needed to figure out how to apply the information I’ve gathered to my unique life.

Not an AA-basher or an anti-AA guy

It’s not hard to find folks who would like to see Alcoholics Anonymous fail. I’m not one of them. I’ve known a lot of people who have found exactly what they needed via AA or other 12-step programs, and my respect runs deep for anyone who has gotten on top of a drinking problem or helped others to do so.

The thing I question related to AA is its frequent promotion as the one-and-only solution to drinking problems despite evidence which also supports AA alternatives.

In the world I’m helping to create, I want AA to be robust, healthy, and accessible to folks. Same goes for SOS, SMART, WFS, MM, and every other option that proves itself capable of preventing, tempering, and treating drinking problems.

Most of all, I am promoting a vision for cultural change that encourages folks to be pragmatic, proactive, visible, and vocal about living sensibly with alcohol.

I speak for myself only.

I’m a supporter of, and participant in, Moderation Management. Not a spokesperson, not serving in any capacity other than cheerleader and encourager of that organization.

My perspective is not that MM, or any other single approach, is the solution for everybody that has had a drinking problem. There are many things that work for different folks, including permanent abstinence and 12-step programs. I want folks to get good health care, complete information, and support, all of which includes access to options.

Weird funny bone.

And I’m convinced that humor is critical to our survival and quality of life. I’m a bit of a screwball. Scatterbrained. Klutzy. Quirky, even morbid, humor trips my trigger.

(Case in point: I love the unapologetically irreverent satire by the writers of Modern Drunkard Magazine.)

That doesn’t mean I’m flippant — not an option after losing friends to alcoholism and suicide — I just find humor to be a necessary antidote to a world that otherwise gets too black and serious.

Introducing Bose

My friends call me Bose,

short for my last name, Boese (rhymes with Rosie). I’m Steve, and I’m in my mid-40s.

I’m a freelance writer based in Washington DC. I spent my adult life in Iowa until 2002, working mostly in technical areas (computer analysis and programming) mixed with tech writing and training delivery. I dabble in a bit of music (piano plunking, songwriting), enjoy dialoguing on challenging personal and cultural issues, and love to travel as my budget allows.

In 2000, my drinking habits had moved into uncomfortable territory. Too many mornings found me waking with dry eyes, a pasty mouth, a fuzzy brain, and 6-8 (occasionally more) empty beer cans stacked in the kitchen. I’d resolve to cut back, or skip a few days, but converting that morning resolve into evening results was another story.

It wasn’t for lack of warning or trepidation on my part:

• My dad’s quarter-century of heavy daily drinking had cost him — and my relationship with him — dearly.
• My best friend, Brian, had struggled with the effects of 6-10 severe binges per year for a decade.
• I had attended a few Al-Anon meetings years earlier, and didn’t want my drinking to escalate any further.

And yet, attempts to change my drinking patterns hadn’t really gotten me anywhere, either. I didn’t feel powerless — I took full responsibility for my choices, even though they weren’t all working for me — nor was I in denial about this not being a healthy long-term pattern.

I had found the tools and techniques I needed previously to deal with everything from episodes of depression to building my own kitchen. It seemed to me that the tools and techniques for changing my drinking patterns ought to be out there, too, but I wasn’t finding them.

Discovering Moderation Management

In June of 2000, I learned for the first time about Moderation Management (MM). I met a lot of folks in MM’s online groups who were exploring pragmatic, self-directed options for making substantive changes in their habits.

One of the MM recommendations was that abstaining for 30 days could open the door to fresh insights. MMers had used that time to look at what triggered their desire to drink, as well as develop new skills in situations where they were accustomed to drinking.

Thirty days without a beer sounded OK, but long. I had done one- and two-week stints independently (usually intending them to be longer), but found abstaining to be a challenge.

After listening to folks in a couple of MM email groups (this one and this one), I decided to take a stab at it.

There were challenges along the way, but a couple weeks into that first abs I was finding it easier (a relief of sorts) to be leaving alcohol behind for a while. The 30 days stretched into more than 3 months.

A beginning, not a cure

I’ll talk more about my journey as we move forward, but for me that period of abs was an important beginning. It’s not that being abstinent for a while was a magic bullet that erased the challenges I faced. It’s not that it prevented me from doing not-so-smart things forever afterward. It was a start, and a very important one.

Prior to July 2000 when I started that abs, I had relatively few alcohol-free days and not too many light (1- or 2-drink) days.

Since then, well over half of my days have been alcohol-free and when I drink, the majority of my days and weeks have fallen within reasonable limits.

One of many options

Even more significant than finding MM was finding out out that it was just one of several great options.

Moderation Management promises that it won’t work for everybody, noting that some 30% of the folks who try it ultimately opt to pursue long-term abstinence.

Not knowing whether moderating would ultimately be a good fit for me, I found it reassuring in my early days knowing that I could shift to abstinence if I needed to later. I wasn’t ruling out a 12-step option, but for me the 12 steps run counter to my intuition and the sorts of problem-solving techniques that had worked for me.

Ultimately about living, not drinking or abstaining

The changes that I’ve made run deeper than merely drinking less. I have more energy and ability to do things that matter to me. I relax and celebrate in any number of ways that don’t require a drink.

The words “Live Sensibly” in the site’s logo are splashier than “with alcohol” for good reason. For folks reading this site with a text browser, I use parentheses: “Live Sensibly (with alcohol)”. It could just as easily say “without alcohol”.

My goal is to live, and live well, first. To the extent that alcohol fits in with a balanced and healthy life, great! And, to the extent it gets in the way of having a decent, sensible life, I’m determined to leave it behind.

Introducing Live Sensibly

Welcome!

A friend of mine once quipped to a buddy who teaches English as a Second Language:

I do English intuitively. Why don’t you just teach your students to follow their intuition?

Silly, eh? Skills aren’t honed solely by following our intuition. And yet, a lot of us have heard a parallel recommendation for living sensibly with alcohol:

Use your intuition to drink moderately! If you can’t do that (or abstain) on autopilot or by self-directed willpower, you have a problem.

With any other self-care habits — diet, exercise, grooming — we assume that good health comes from gathering information, setting limits, developing discipline, getting support, and testing a range of options. Sorting all of this out leads us to simple options that work best.

Drinking stands alone, though, as an area in which asserting ourselves is branded as proof of a problem. A black-and-white dichotomy is used by experts who say that only two options are available for being healthy with alcohol:

• Having a natural ability to moderate or abstain without coaching or self-imposed rules
• Abstaining with the support of a 12-step-based support group.

Beyond the 12-step-or-willpower dichotomy

Regardless of misinformation to the contrary, we can assert ourselves with alcohol:

• The first option is as simple as what we do with diet and exercise: Educate ourselves on healthy limits. Make personal rules for our drinking. Prevent problems when possible, and resolve problems proactively as needed. Do it independently as a preventative measure, or use the tools and support from a therapist, a coach, or a group like Moderation Management to prevent or scale back problems.
• Another option, of course, is to abstain. (To me, that’s still a matter of living with alcohol since it’s virtually impossible to wall myself off from the influence of alcohol.) Abstinence can be framed sensibly:
  • As a self-guided process;
  • With a 12-step program like AA;
  • Using pragmatic approaches like SMART Recovery® or SOS: Secular Organizations for Sobriety; or,
  • With support geared to our needs as women (like WFS: Women for Sobriety) or based on our faith (like Alcoholics Victorious, for Christians, or JACS, Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons, and Significant Others.
• Reducing harm offers a third option which is helpful as a first step or as a fallback plan when our primary, but as yet unattained, target is abstinence or moderation.

Whether our primary goal is healthy drinking, abstinence, or harm reduction, use of these additional tools and concepts has been developing since the early 1990s:

• Prescription drugs, like Naltrexone, which may decrease the urge to drink, and even temper the intoxicating effects of alcohol.
• Therapy focused more on increasing self-direction and personal motivation than traditional interventions to break down denial.
• Solutions based on evidence of how people create long-term change, highlighting the fact that change generally occurs as part of an extended process more often than as a result of a single decision.

The options matter

It’s crucial that we talk about these options as laypeople, ordinary folks who are responsible for our own well-being and consumers of health care services.

I’d like to think that public awareness would have grown in sync with the evidence since former first lady Betty Ford got treatment in 1978. Anecdotal evidence from the April 19, 2004 episode of the Oprah Winfrey show tells me otherwise. Much of our public awareness remains stuck in concepts that were innovative in the 1930s, oblivious to a lot of evidence gathered since.

Too often, this lack of progress has blocked the flow of information, preventing us from learning about the options when we have needed the information most.

We’ll be talking with experts, as well — I welcome their input. There are a number of people in the substance abuse field who have been doing great work for years, and yet have been undervalued.

Asserting ourselves as laypeople

The key to Live Sensibly is that it will be driven by and for laypeople who are interested in options. A critical mass of evidence and personal experiences has been assembled by smarter folks than me, and their findings merit much more attention and discussion than they’re getting.

As health care consumers, we must hold our health care providers accountable for delivering evidence-based care and information. As with the history of other health care issues, much-needed change may not happen until enough voices insist on it.

It’s not only about advocacy. A two-pronged approach is needed:

• Put life back in balance. If we’ve gotten stuck in not-so-smart drinking patterns, we need to push our lives back on track: Fill our personal knowledge gaps, get appropriate professional care, support each other, and take whatever steps are necessary to achieve health and balance.
• Develop sensible public voices. Too many folks are struggling in the quest for health and balance because support for viable options is not readily available. As consumers, we need to spread the word that the options exist, they are viable, and supporting them is a matter of good health care.

Ambitious stuff, eh? But, essential stuff. Life-saving stuff. Life-giving stuff.

Let’s talk about it!