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Privately Bridging the Gap between Addiction & Recovery

Welcome

If you’ve found your way here, you or a loved one is interested in effective addiction recovery that’s an alternative to a 12-Step program.  You are in the right place.  Please, make yourself comfortable.

About Addiction Alternatives

Alcohol Addiction, Biology and Behaviors

According to the National Institute of Health an addiction to alcohol depends upon the effect alcohol has on one’s life: “Generally known as alcoholism and alcohol abuse, alcohol use disorders are medical conditions that doctors can diagnose when a patient’s drinking causes distress or harm.”

Alternative Addiction Treatment Recovery Strategies

Alternative Addiction Treatments and Recovery Options

There are a number non-12-Step recovery options available for people who want to stop drinking, stop taking drugs and take control of their lives. After 30 years as an addiction specialist, I focus on strategies that have proven to be the most effective, empowering and long lasting.

AA Alternatives

Alternatives to 12-Step Programs are Proven Effective

Two key factors influence the high rate of failure among 12-Step programs. First, the immediate mandate to completely stop drinking – abstinence – as the only solution ignores the structure of alcohol addiction.

Self-Help Group Comparison Chart

To provide you with even more alternatives to stop drinking and gain control I’ve constructed a chart that outlines the key features of major programs. I am proud to have participated in the founding of two of these AA Alternative treatments – SMART and Moderation Management.

What is “recovery” from addiction?

First of all, the term “recovery” comes out of the 12-Step disease model notion. Recovery, of course, comes out of the medical model, where you’re in a healthy state, you catch a disease, and you recover from the disease. Now, that fits very nicely within the disease model of the 12-Step community. Within the cognitive-behavioral model, the recovery term is used rarely or substantially less. Again, it’s used more for practical reasons. I don’t use it at all. I think it has an implied presumption that you’re sick or you’re ill. I think it has a further implied presumption that the best outcome is to return to the prior state of pre-recovery. When you have an addiction, in my professional opinion, the best goal is not to return to this prior state. Generally speaking, people should never return to that prior state, because all that is doing is setting the stage for them to get back into the addiction themselves. People must not only get back to the state that they were in before they got into it, they’ve got to go higher. They’ve got to be functioning higher than they’ve ever functioned for them to really “recover” and go on to live a life without fearing the fall back into their addiction. So recovery is an illusionary concept. There’s even further controversy within the field. “Recover” versus “recovering.” In the 12-Step disease model, they call people “recovering,” implying they never get over it. Within a cognitive-behavioral model, they will talk about “recovered,” meaning the idea that they’re pretty much through with the worry and things like that. It’s a very empowering belief to believe that you can recover and not have to worry about this thing shadowing you for the rest of your lives. Yes, like anything that we’ve learned, like a bicycle, we’re never going to fully forget how to ride that bicycle. However, the notion that we’re constantly on the edge of falling back into that diseased state or addictive state is a very painful way to live life, and is living in a state of fear. I’ve worked with people who can’t take a little trip over to Catalina for the weekend because there’s not a meeting over there; because they’ve been taught that they should fear this disease that never goes away. They should fear themselves being on their own. They should fear thinking on their own. I think those are very destructive ideas and therefore I sort of avoid the word “recovery.”

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vis1lCu-zjM

How can addicts become motivated to change?

Propelling yourself, motivating yourself, is not an easy thing to do. Let’s start talking about motivating ourselves to change by acknowledging something called ambivalence. Okay, you have an addiction, or you’ve decided you think you have an addiction, and you know it’s not good for you, you know you’re spending too much money or spending too much time with pornography, even though you know all that. I’ve never met anyone with a behavioral addiction who is truly behind changing. I mean, the truth is we’re all ambivalent. We like it in some respects, and we don’t like it in some other respects. So part of the difficulty with getting motivated is accepting that ambivalence we have about the activity. It’s fun to look at pornography or it’s fun to gamble, and you’re going to deprive yourself of those fun things? You’re going to take that lollipop and purposely give it away? So motivation is very hard to generate within yourself. But the place I would encourage people to start is accepting their ambivalence. Ideally they would make a chart with a four by four square, and put the pros of stopping their addiction, the cons of stopping the addiction, the pros of not stopping the addiction, the cons of not stopping the addiction, and get some sort of reading on all the language you use to stay on the fence about this sort of topic. Beyond that, motivating yourself is leveraging yourself where it’s not comfortable. You’ve got to be somewhat off the edge, you’ve got to be willing to do something, but let’s say you went and told a lot of people about your behavioral addiction and asked, maybe not for their help, but let them know that you’re struggling with it. Well, you’re locking yourself in there. You’re closing the back door on your behavior, at least with these people. That’s a way you can motivate yourself. Other ways of motivating yourself include stopping for a while and seeing if there are any benefits, such as increased energy or optimism, self-esteem rises, things like that, and trying to capitalize on the outcome of that.

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaFkAz0aZo

Will I ever be cured of my addiction?

Cure is a very funny word. Cure also comes out of the disease model. Cure sort of says “Well I was healthy prior and then I’ve gotten sick and now I’m going to return to health.” In many respects, there are no real cures to addiction. Unfortunately as an addiction evolves, especially a behavioral addiction, you’re learning things. You were not born with a preoccupation to gambling but you learned over the course of time that playing the slots or going to card games made you feel better and it wasn’t sort of something you learn. What is learning? Actually, neurological pathways began to develop as a function of this learning, just like you learned how to ride a bicycle. You didn’t know how to ride a bicycle when you were born, but practicing and practicing actually changed your brain and actually there’s new wiring in there. Will you ever forget how to ride a bicycle? Not completely. Will you ever forget how to engage in your destruction behavior? Not really. You can learn to develop a new way from getting from point A to point B. Not using the old way, not using what I’m going to call a freeway; the way you used to engage in your addictive behavior. To make yourself feel good, you’re now learning how to go out and play games, sports, or something like that rather than engaging in your addictive behavior. We do not provide, we do not offer, neurosurgery that can go in there and clip neurologically generated synapses that were once there.

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwyKO_mGQCA

What skills do I need for a successful recovery from addiction?

The skill base for a successful recovery from behavioral addiction obviously depends on the skill base of the someone that came into the recovery room or came into the doctor’s office. Many people come into the recovery room and they really have very few life management skills; very few skills of how to cope with feelings, how to date, or how to obtain a job. Then there are others who virtually have almost all the skills necessary for a life except a few, and those few are generally about how to cope with uncomfortable feeling states. If that were to be the only skill I would recommend everyone acquire, that would be it, and that’s what I’m calling the development of emotional muscle. This skill is about “How do I learn to feel sad, depressed, lonely, or whatever, without reaching out to my magic elixir or magic behavior to sort of self-medicate that feeling away?”

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZwOWQAVVvE

How can a recovering addict build resilience?

As a recovering behavioral addict, you build up your resilience by first of all having the mindset that this is not about doing it, it’s not an event, it’s not a single “I’m going to do it once” and it’s going to be over. Resilience comes out of a model of, “I’m going to probably relapse, I’m probably not going to do it perfectly, and that’s okay. I need to understand that when I fall; when I relapse, or when I lapse, I’m going to pick myself up, get on the horse, and do it again. I need to understand that it’s a long-term process and the key issue is, of course, looking to gain as much as I can from a relapse; looking to see what I did wrong within the relapse that caused the relapse so I don’t do it again.” Of course, you need to keep a sense of optimism out of every relapse, rather than shaming yourself, blaming yourself, or saying, “I can’t do it”; realize that is about this resilience, or springing back and trying again, and again, and again. Many recovery programs could even be conceptualized as like the acquisition of an advanced sport, like tennis or golf or something. You can learn the rules of recovery in about a few minutes in the same way as you can learn the rules of golf in a few minutes, but it takes a lot of buckets of balls to really get good at it. If you conceptualize it as nothing more than an advanced skill like golf, tennis, or whatever it may be, you’ll have the right mindset to acquire that resilience and understand that it’s important to come back and do it again, and come back and do it again. It’s never going to be a single event; it’s going to be a process, and have fun with it even, to have the resilience that we would all hope for.

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=697ZDTVkQcw