Peps

Alcohol gets tangled up in our emotions, amplifying both positive and negative feelings, and it unbalances our mental equilibrium so much that separating natural from alcohol-influenced feelings becomes difficult.

The mind garden is a well-used metaphor within the recovery community. When I first heard it, I rolled my eyes and thought, ‘here we go’. But over time, I’ve riffed with it, and it has become a valuable tool I return to. Try it and see what you think. Hopefully, it can do the same…

Peps are not here to change you; they’re here to change your drinking. They simply encourage you to scratch through the veneer alcohol creates to enable you to reconnect with your genuine self.

At the top of the last Pep, I said, “Peps are not here to change you; they’re here to change your drinking.” But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evolve. After all, we’re not the same people we were as children or teenagers, and we’re unlikely to remain the same forever. So, now you’ve changed your…

Planning your new life and contemplating who you are becoming is exciting and a powerful motivation for change. However, when we visualise it in our mind’s eye, we tend to position ourselves at the centre of something and imagine a linear direction of travel towards our future. Here’s an exercise to help you experience it…

As you progress through the Peps, you’ll probably notice that your drinking has changed or is changing. This Pep looks at how planning each day will protect our gains, build resilience and move us closer to the life we want to live.