Six Essentials to Achieve Lasting Recovery


Book Description

This book offers six guiding principles that are key to lasting recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs. It will help you understand why they're important, how they relate to the Twelve Steps, and why they work.

Anyone who has recovered from addiction to drugs or alcohol knows that getting sober is only the beginning. Working the Steps, patching life back together, and living sober are where the real work lies. While the Twelve Steps provide a program of lifelong recovery, recovery experts Sterling Shumway and Thomas Kimball have identified six essential values, or principles, that reinforce the Steps and that are key to achieving lasting recovery:

  • • Hope: A reawakening after despair; to live with greater confidence
  • • Healthy Coping Skills: Managing the pain and stress of life
  • • Sense of Achievement and Accomplishment: Moving beyond the limits of addiction toward personal goals
  • • Capacity for Meaningful Relationships: The positive support and connection with family and peers
  • • Unique Identity Development: The emergence of a unique positive identity
  • • Reclamation of Agency: The internal knowledge that you have choices in your behavior

Using their research, personal stories, and guided journals and exercises, Shumway and Kimball thoroughly unlock these complex principles for recovering addicts and their families, and provide practical steps for applying them to a long-term recovery program.




What Addicts Know


Book Description

New York Times bestselling author Christopher Kennedy Lawford revisits addiction in his latest book, What Addicts Know, this time framing the discussion in an entirely new way—the lessons addiction and recovery offer to those of us who haven't battled addiction. For too long, society has considered addicts as an unfortunate group that faces incredible and unique challenges. The reality is that the challenges of the addict are faced—to a greater or lesser extent—by all of us. In a “more is better" society, it's indisputable that we've all experienced cravings and denied the truth about our destructive behaviors—traits shared by addicts who've successfully overcome them. What Addicts Know offers the coping and wellness skills necessary to overcome life's obstacles and self-improvement tips for everything from conquering an unhealthy consumption of junk food, to overcoming toxic relationships. These techniques are not just for addicts; they are for all of us. No one until now has related the lessons and life skills that can be drawn from the collective experience of people in recovery from addiction, particularly the ways those lessons or principles can be used by those in the broader non-recovery community. In What Addicts Know, Lawford recounts the inspiring stories and wisdom of recovering addicts, combining them with cutting-edge scientific findings to give hands-on, practical techniques for recognizing unhealthy impulses and managing them. If you're ready to change for the better your habits, your frame of mind, your relationships, your community, and your life, What Addicts Know is the resource that will educate and inspire you along the way.




The Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy, Systemic Family Therapy and Global Health Issues


Book Description

Volume IV of The Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy considers family-level interventions for issues of global public health. Information on the effectiveness of relational treatment is included along with consideration of the most appropriate modality for treatment. Developed in partnership with the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), it will appeal to clinicians, such as couple, marital, and family therapists, counselors, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists. It will also benefit researchers, educators, and graduate students involved in CMFT.




Understanding Forgiveness and Addiction


Book Description

This book integrates and synthesizes numerous empirically supported positive psychological constructs and psychotherapeutic theories to help understand addiction and facilitate recovery through the lens of forgiveness. Proposing forgiveness as an alternative and critical tool to understanding the process of addiction and recovery, whether in the context of substance use, compulsive behavior, and/or suicidal behavior, the book discusses multiple theoretical points of view regarding the process of forgiveness. Additionally, foundational theories underlying the process of recovery, the psychological and spiritual nature of forgiveness, and the nature of the association of forgiveness with health all receive detailed coverage. Considerable attention is also paid to the extant empirical support for the association of forgiveness with addiction and recovery. The text’s comprehensive integration of theory, research, and clinical application, including guidelines regarding forgiveness as a treatment for recovery from addiction, provide a roadmap forward for addiction counselors and other recovery specialists.




Addiction and Spiritual Transformation


Book Description

This study explores the relationship between addiction and spiritual transformation. More specifically, it examines how recovering drug addicts employ testimonies of conversion and addiction to develop and sustain a sense of personal unity and create meaning from varied experiences in life. Drawing on 31 original autobiographies, the book analyzes conversion and addiction testimonies in two European contexts: Serbia and The Netherlands. (Series: Religion and Biography / Religion und Biographie - Vol. 22)




The Group Therapist's Notebook


Book Description

Following in the footsteps of the successful first edition, The Group Therapist’s Notebook, Second Edition offers an all new collection of innovative ideas and proven interventions that will enhance any group therapy practice. Seasoned and up-and-coming experts provide field-tested activities, easy to reproduce handouts, and practical homework assignments for a variety of problems and population types. Each chapter is solidly grounded with a theoretical foundation and includes materials to gather for implementing the intervention, detailed instructions for use, suggestions for follow-up in successive meetings, contraindications for use, and resources for the client and therapist. With an added emphasis on instruction, real-world examples, and extension activities, this new resource will be a valuable asset for both beginning and established mental health practitioners, including counselor educators, social workers, marriage and family therapists, guidance counselors, prevention educators, peer support specialists, and other group facilitators.




Strengths-Based Approaches to Crime and Substance Use


Book Description

Although there is a strong and growing literature in the two areas of desistance and addiction recovery, they have developed along parallel pathways with little systematic assessment of the empirical evidence about the co-occurrence of the relationship or how one area can learn from the other. This book aims to fill that gap by bringing together emerging literature on the relationship between offending and substance use. Instead of focusing on the active period of its onset and persistence, this book examines the mechanisms that support desistance, addiction recovery, and the common themes of reintegration and rehabilitation. With contributions from a wide range of international experts in the fields of desistance and addiction recovery, the book focuses on a strengths-based, relational and community-focused approach to long-term change in offending and drug-using populations, as well as the shared barriers to effective reintegration for both. This book will be highly informative for a wide audience, from academics and students interested in studying desistance and recovery to those working in addiction services and the criminal justice system as well as policy makers and the people undertaking their own journeys to desistance and recovery.




12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery


Book Description

In addition to staying connected to our support systems and avoiding opportunities to use during the coronavirus pandemic, we can also keep confronting and conquering the self-destructive things we think and do that undercut our health and sanity. Concise advice on hunting down the personal culprits that sabotage sobriety and personal happiness. To grow in recovery, we must grow up emotionally. This means getting honest with ourselves and facing up to the self-defeating thoughts and actions that put our sobriety at risk. Although there are as many ways to mess up recovery as there are alcoholics and addicts, some general themes exist, which include: confusing self-concern with selfishness; not making amends; using the program to try to become perfect; not getting help for relationship troubles; and believing that life should be easy. In simple, down-to-earth language, Allen Berger explores the twelve most commonly confronted beliefs and attitudes that can sabotage recovery. He then provides tools for working through these problems in daily life. This useful guide offers fresh perspectives on how the process of change begins with basic self-awareness and a commitment to working a daily program.




12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone


Book Description

The author of the classic 12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery offers a fresh list of "smart" things to do to attain and sustain emotional sobriety. Learn the attitudes and behaviors that are key to attaining and sustaining emotional sobriety and developing a deeper trust in the process of life. Dr. Allen Berger draws on the teachings of Bill W. and psychotherapy pioneers to offer us twelve hallmarks of emotional sobriety. These “right actions” help us develop the confidence to be accountable for our behavior, to practice asking for what we want and need, and to cultivate a deeper trust in the process of life. Dr. Berger’s list of smart things includes understanding who you are and what’s important to you learning not to take others’ reactions personally trusting your inner compass Through practicing these twelve things, we find release from what Bill W. described as an “absolute dependence on people or circumstances. Freed from the emotional immaturity that fueled our addictive personality and hurt ourselves and others, we can develop the tools to find strength from within and continue our successful journey of recovery.




Being Sober


Book Description

The disease of addiction affects 1 out of 10 people in the United States, and is a devastating—often, fatal—illness. Now, from the physician director of the renowned Betty Ford Center, comes a step-by-step plan with a realistic “one-day-at-a-time” approach to a disease that so often seems insurmountable. With a focus on reclaiming the power that comes from a life free of dependency, Being Sober walks readers through the many phases of addiction and recovery without judgment or the overly "cultish" language of traditional 12-step plans. It also addresses the latest face of this disease: the "highly functioning" addict, or someone who is still able to achieve personal and professional success even as they battle a drug or alcohol problem. Dr. Haroutunian tackles this provocative issue head-on, offering new insight into why you don’t have to “bottom out” to get help. Dr. Haroutunian is himself a recovering alcoholic and knows firsthand the challenges of sobriety. His background and expertise in the field of alcohol and drug treatment give him a powerful edge and perspective that is unparalleled in his field. Using clear, straightforward language, Being Sober offers a proven path toward an emotional sobriety and a rewarding new life based on gratitude, dignity, and self-respect. Including a Foreword written by Steven Tyler.