You Don’t Have to Quit

20 Science-Backed Strategies to Help Your Loved One Drink Less.

Help Your

Loved One Drink Less.

Reduce Your Stress

Save Your Relationship.

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Maureen and Mike Talk You Don’t Have to Quit on CBC Radio’s The Current

The evidence suggests the road to a healthier relationship with alcohol doesn’t always have to start with total abstinence. CBC’s The Current host Matt Galloway’s challenging questions sparked a provocative discussion with Maureen and Mike about how to have a “Dry-er January.”

This Book Is For Anyone Who Loves Someone Who Drinks Too Much

In a world that glorifies alcohol – from signature cocktails to craft beer – helping a loved one who drinks too much is like swimming upstream. Conventional wisdom convinces us the only solution is abstinence. So we plead and nag and threaten while they barrel towards the bottom we’re told they may have to hit. That approach inevitably causes more shame which causes more drinking which causes more confrontation which causes more shame which causes more drinking. You get the picture. Author and filmmaker Maureen Palmer has been there and she’s found a better way.

In You Don’t Have to Quit, Palmer shifts the century of cultural conditioning that is our all-or-nothing mindset of alcohol consumption, to one that encourages positive change and harm reduction. Her twenty practical, science-backed strategies provide a framework that can be applied whether your partner drinks a few too many every night or suffers from an alcohol use disorder. Palmer interviews world experts who’ve created successful tools, techniques, and resources designed to support real and lasting behavior change. These tools will make you much more effective in one life’s most difficult conversations: the one about drinking too much.

With refreshing candour, Palmer debunks powerful myths about those who develop alcohol dependence. Those myths create the shame and secrecy that breeds the lies and conflict that kills relationships. Whether getting your loved one to drink less, or quit entirely, is a shared goal -or you want to understand how to influence them in that direction, this is the roadmap out of conflict, into collaboration and reduced consumption.

Praise for You Don’t Have to Quit

In You Don’t Have to Quit, Maureen Palmer melds compassion with practicality, generosity of heart with common sense, loving intention with research-based, nuts-and-bolts workability.

– Gabor Maté, M.D., New York Times best-selling co-author of The Myth of Normal

Palmer and Pond generously and bravely share themselves with the world and model what they teach...vulnerability, honesty, love, courage.

– Dr. Andrew Tatarsky, Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy

If you’ve ever been ashamed to admit your partner struggles with alcohol and even more ashamed to admit you help them, this book is for you. In You Don’t Have to Quit, Maureen Palmer delivers the modern, paradigm-shifting, evidence-based, shame- and judgment-free approach to help your loved one drink less. Mastering the tools in this book may help save your relationship and maybe even your loved one’s life.

– Gabrielle Glaser, New York Times best-selling author of Her Best Kept Secret: Why Women Drink and How They Can Regain Control

You Don’t Have to Quit’s mix of myth busting, evidence-based knowledge and practical advice makes it a must-read for those wishing to support a family member or friend who drinks excessively.

– DR BERNARD LE FOLL, Chair of Addiction Psychiatry at University of Toronto and Senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

With clarity, purpose, and invaluable personal experience, Maureen Palmer debunks myths around alcohol and provides a pragmatic guide on how to reduce drinking. By applying harm reduction to alcohol, You Don’t Have to Quit fills a massive void. It is a book that every problematic drinker’s friends and family will wish they had found sooner.

– Travis Lupick, journalist and author of Light Up the Night

Maureen Palmer writes with fierce compassion and personal conviction about supporting loved ones who struggle with alcohol use issues. Maureen (rightfully) questions the efficacy of trying to ‘make’ somebody quit drinking and instead illustrates that, with care and support, individuals can still heal and grow in the ‘liminal’ spaces between drinking, addiction, and abstinence.

– Dawn Nickel, co-founder of SHE RECOVERS

Thank you, Maureen, for skillfully doing what so few take the time, heart, and compassion to do: speak to families about how to help. The stigma of substance use is a crushing weight for those loved ones who want nothing more than to help, and Maureen lays out effective, non-shaming solutions for our most powerful force for change—the family.

– Dr. Jeff Foote co-president and CEO of the CMC: Foundation for Change (CMC:FFC) and author of The Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family and Friends

Imagine a future in which everyone understands alcohol use disorder as a treatable health condition, and everyone knows how to compassionately support those around them. Inside this well-researched and hopeful book, you’ll be amazed to discover that this future is entirely achievable. Right now.

– Heather Allen, chief communications officer of the Canadian Alcohol Use Disorder Society

If you love someone who is drinking too much, this easy-to-read and hopeful book is for you. Bolstered by research, it is full of practical advice and guidance from the best of sources: someone who has been there and understands.

– Angie Hamilton, co-founder of Families for Addiction Recovery (FAR)

You Don’t Have to Quit is a reasoned, candid, and caring alcohol addiction resource that proposes radical new approaches to recovery.

– FOREWORD CLARION REVIEWS

Palmer demonstrates effective methods of communicating with partners about alcohol dependence through empathy, compassion, and an emphasis on results.

– BOOK LIFE, Publisher’s Weekly

"I am afraid of going home because I’m not sure what or who will greet me.'' If you relate to this, this book is a must-read. Maureen Palmer offers a blend of cutting-edge research with real-world application, providing readers with a fresh, hopeful approach to harm-reduction. If family and friends could learn to have compassionate, effective conversations with heavy drinkers, I suspect we’d see a lot fewer substance-use related disability claims. And with less drinking-related stress, family members’ mental health will improve too.

– STÉPHANIE CLÉMENT, M.Ed, Manager Training and Development, Disability Management Institute

“You don’t have to quit” is a beautiful guide to understanding harm reduction and how it can help people to drink less or lead to abstinence, but most of all, this is a lesson in compassion for the person suffering from excess drinking. It lovingly describes situations where you can take action and help your loved one through one of the most difficult things a human can go through, dependence on a substance.

– Claudia Christian Founder/CEO C Three Foundation

About Maureen

Having spent my entire career in communications, first as a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then as an independent filmmaker, I thought I was a pretty good communicator.

But the longer I was in my relationship with Mike, I realized when it came to substance use, I did not communicate effectively at all. In fact during and after Mike’s rare bouts of drinking, how I spoke to him about alcohol probably made things worse. And I’m not alone. When it comes to talking about alcohol use, most of us struggle. We end up having angry conversations, mostly when dependence has become deeply entrenched. Or because we don’t know how to talk about alcohol, we say nothing at all.

Yet researchers have created effective, evidence-based therapies proven to sustain behaviour change. And so few of us know about them. That’s why I wrote this book: to put these potentially life-saving tools directly in your hands. To get us all more comfortable talking compassionately about alcohol, so we’ll intervene early when we can be most effective. With science confirming no amount of alcohol is safe, with drinking increasing during and since the pandemic, with dramatic jumps in alcohol-related deaths, I wanted to help more of us learn to drink less.

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