Alcohol Use Disorder
If you've quietly been keeping count of your drinks for months, or hiding bottles, or saying yes to one and meaning seven — you're already doing the kind of accounting your body has been asking you to do. Therapy is the next part of that work.
Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) sits on a spectrum. Some people meet criteria after years of slow accumulation. Others cross over fast — a divorce, a layoff, a new role that came with too many client dinners. The diagnosis is less important than what you actually want different. We meet adults across Los Angeles, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, and the broader LA metro at every point on that spectrum.
What this can feel like
- You wake at 3:30am with the familiar tightness in your chest, replaying a conversation from six hours and four drinks ago.
- You've quit "for real" three or four times — Dry January, after a doctor's visit, after a fight — and each time the second week is harder than the first.
- The word "alcoholic" feels too big, but "social drinker" stopped feeling true a long time ago.
- Your spouse stopped pouring themselves a glass at dinner, and you noticed, and it bothered you.
- You can name the exact number of drinks it takes for you to feel "okay" — and that number has been moving up.
- You bargain with yourself a lot: only on weekends, only after work, only at restaurants, only beer. The rules keep getting rewritten.
- You find yourself doing the math on your phone calculator about how many milliliters you've actually had.
How therapy can help
The first thing therapy does is take the loneliness out of it. Most people we see have been having this conversation with themselves for years, late at night, in their own heads. Group therapy in particular gives people what no internal monologue can: a roomful of people who don't flinch at the parts you've been hiding, who know the math you've been doing, and who keep coming back the next week.
Clinically, we draw from Motivational Interviewing (which respects the part of you that doesn't want to stop), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (which works on the thoughts and triggers that drive drinking), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (which helps you do hard things even when the urge stays). For clients with co-occurring anxiety, depression, or trauma — which is common — we layer in trauma-informed approaches as appropriate.
Higher levels of care, including our Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP), are an option when weekly sessions aren't enough. Many clients begin in IOP for 6–8 weeks, then step down to weekly group plus individual sessions. We are an outpatient practice — we do not run a detox or residential program — but we coordinate referrals when medically supervised detox is the right first step.
You don't have to figure this out alone
The hardest part is usually before the first session. Once you walk in, the work is small and weekly. Reach out — we'll help you decide whether group, individual, or a combination is the right place to start.