If you struggle with addiction then I am glad you have found this site! It’s purpose is to help you make wise decisions about treatment and intervention. You already know it’s a challenging problem because you likely have struggled with it for years, so I don’t need to tell you that. Instead, I want to focus on helping you understand a few key ideas that I believe can assist you in developing a successful plan out of addiction.
Each of these ideas I have written about in blog posts listed below. Going through them all should take you no more than a half hour, but I believe you will find it time well spent.
Learning about addiction can take you a long ways
First, download my free eBook about Understanding Addiction where I provide an overview of how addiction is a problem that impacts your relationship with your self, other people, and your faith. Then check out these blog posts:
- Addictions are about relationships
- Three relationships: All, Other and Self
- Autism expert can help those who struggle with addiction
Of course addiction is about more than relationships. Most who struggle also have co-occurring mental health issues (depression, anxiety), physical health problems, and often legal and financial challenges. Among the most significant factors that contribute to ongoing addiction are unresolved adverse childhood experiences, also known as traumatic events.
If you are to successfully overcome addiction, you will need to delve into the past and resolve issues that continue to stoke the flames of your addiction.
Addiction videos on “What are addictions about?”
By now you have hopefully learned a few new things about addiction and are ready to move on to the solution. If I were to ask you to guess at the answer, I bet you might say addiction treatment! It has become the knee-jerk answer when addiction is the problem. But before we go much further, I have a few more blog posts for you to read. And trust me, if you have been to treatment or are planning on going, these are posts you will want to read.
Addiction treatment can help, but it needs to be used wisely
- Investing in addiction treatment
- Addiction treatment system 14 years later
- Find addiction treatment
- Why treatment often fails patients
If you got through these posts – and I hope you did – then you now know a lot more about treatment and why it often fails to produce lasting results. But you also know that treatment can be an important component of a long-term intervention plan when used wisely. At this point I have saved the most important information for last.
Overcoming addiction can feel like climbing your own Mt. Everest with no easy route to the top. While treatment can provide help getting up the mountain, often the end result is a couple of steps forward followed by a few steps back (relapse). At times you may see the summit, only to be frustrated because no matter how much effort you put into changing your behavior, you never get there.
For years I worked at a community-based addiction treatment program and witnessed many clients successfully complete treatment, only to return within weeks or a few months later because they had relapsed. While I know they were frustrated to be back, I was equally disappointed that treatment had not been more successful. Such common outcomes over time got me very interested in research and wanting to find a better way to help people.
Two decades later I have evolved an approach to overcoming addiction that I call the 5 Actions. It’s an intervention framework designed to help you understand how all the various treatments and evidence-based practices work together over time to deliver good outcomes. Like a good map, it will show you how to successfully navigate up the mountain on your own terms, and get to the top.
The wise say that knowledge is power. I sure believe this and hope that after reviewing the information above and on this site, you are now in a better position to know how to proceed.
Overcoming addiction is challenging, like climbing Mt. Everest. But unlike getting to the top of a mountain and experiencing a fleeting moment of success, your efforts will pay off the rest of your life in unimaginable ways.
If you need more help, please contact me directly and I will do my best to point you in the right direction.