Help your loved one drink less, reduce your stress, save your relationship
In a world that glorifies alcohol—from signature cocktails to craft beer—helping a loved one with a drinking problem feels like a losing battle. You’ve begged, bargained, and demanded they stop, only to see consumption ramp up and your relationship break down. This approach enforces a vicious cycle of confrontation, shame, and more drinking. 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 conventional abstinence-only mindset to one that encourages positive change and harm reduction. She interviews world experts who’ve created successful tools, techniques, and resources to help reduce or stop drinking entirely. Her twenty practical, science-backed strategies operationalize compassion and empathy—and healthy boundaries—to help your loved one drink less.
With refreshing candor, Palmer shares her hard-won experience to debunk powerful myths that breed shame and secrecy and lead to relationship-killing conflict. This is the road map out of combat into collaboration and reduced consumption: harm reduction for the relationship too. Whether drinking less is a shared goal, or you want to influence your loved one in that direction, this book shows you how.

Maureen Palmer spent two decades as an award-winning producer at the CBC, where she held senior positions in both radio and television production. She left in 2000 to produce series for TLC and the Discovery Channel. Shortly thereafter, she co-founded Bountiful Films, which has produced a string of critically acclaimed documentaries.

Maureen Palmer's profile page

"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."

New York Times best-selling author of Her Best Kept Secret

"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."

Journalist and author of Light Up the Night

"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."

New York Times best-selling co-author of The Myth of Normal

"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."

Co-founder of SHE RECOVERS Foundation

"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."

Co-founder of Families for Addiction Recovery (FAR)

"What makes her message so unique is the addition of permission: the permission for caregivers to believe, contrary to the dominant message that “people are powerless to change their loved one’s behavior,” that they can, indeed help."

Blueink Review

"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

"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."

Co-president and CEO of the CMC: Foundation for Change (CMC:FFC) and author of The Beyond Addiction Workbook for Family and Friends

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

Booklife (Publisher's Weekly)

"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."

Chief communications officer of the Canadian Alcohol Use Disorder Society