7 Tools to Beat Addiction: A New Path to Recovery from Addictions of Any Kind: Smoking, Alcohol, Food, Drugs, Gambling, Sex, Love - Softcover

Peele, Stanton

 
9781400048731: 7 Tools to Beat Addiction: A New Path to Recovery from Addictions of Any Kind: Smoking, Alcohol, Food, Drugs, Gambling, Sex, Love
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1400048737 ISBN 13: 9781400048731
Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Whether you are battling drugs, nicotine, alcohol, food, shopping, sex, or gambling, this hands-on, practical guide will help you overcome addiction of any kind.

If you or a loved one are struggling with addiction but do not find that twelve-step or other treatment programs work for you, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction can help. Internationally recognized expert Dr. Stanton Peele presents a program for addiction recovery based on research and clinical study and grounded in science. His program utilizes proven methods that people actually use to overcome addiction, with or without treatment.

7 Tools to Beat Addiction offers in-depth, interactive exercises that show you how to outgrow destructive habits by putting together the building blocks for a balanced, fulfilling, responsible life. Dr. Peele’s approach is founded on the following tools:

• Values
• Motivation
• Rewards
• Resources
• Support
• Maturity
• Higher Goals

This no-nonsense guide will put you in charge of your own recovery.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STANTON PEELE, Ph.D., J.D., is the author of the groundbreaking books Love and Addiction, Diseasing of America, and The Truth About Addiction and Recovery. An adjunct professor at the New York University School of Social Work and a senior fellow at the Drug Policy Alliance, he has won the Mark Keller Award from the Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies and the lifetime scholarship award from the Drug Policy Alliance. Visit his website at www.peele.net.

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DO YOU WANT A LIFE WITHOUT ADDICTION?

Whether you are battling drugs, nicotine, alcohol, food, shopping, sex, or gambling, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction is a hands-on, practical guide to overcoming addiction of any kind. If you or a loved one are struggling with addiction but do not find that twelve-step or other treatment programs work for you, this book can help.

In , internationally recognized expert Dr. Stanton Peele presents a program for addiction recovery based on research and clinical study and grounded in science. His program utilizes proven methods that people actually use to overcome addiction, with or without treatment. 7 Tools to Beat Addiction offers in-depth, interactive exercises that show you how to outgrow destructive habits by putting together the building blocks for a balanced, fulfilling, responsible life. Dr. Peele’s approach is founded on the following tools:

•Values
•Motivation
•Rewards
•Resources
•Support
•Maturity
•Higher Goals

This no-nonsense guide will put you in charge of your own recovery.

Aus dem Klappentext

DO YOU WANT A LIFE WITHOUT ADDICTION?

Whether you are battling drugs, nicotine, alcohol, food, shopping, sex, or gambling, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction is a hands-on, practical guide to overcoming addiction of any kind. If you or a loved one are struggling with addiction but do not find that twelve-step or other treatment programs work for you, this book can help.

In , internationally recognized expert Dr. Stanton Peele presents a program for addiction recovery based on research and clinical study and grounded in science. His program utilizes proven methods that people actually use to overcome addiction, with or without treatment. 7 Tools to Beat Addiction offers in-depth, interactive exercises that show you how to outgrow destructive habits by putting together the building blocks for a balanced, fulfilling, responsible life. Dr. Peele s approach is founded on the following tools:

Values
Motivation
Rewards
Resources
Support
Maturity
Higher Goals

This no-nonsense guide will put you in charge of your own recovery.

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1

Values: Building on Your Values Foundation

Values play a critical role in addiction—and your values are likely to be the key to your escaping addiction. This is a matter of both considering what your values are and sometimes refocusing on dormant values or even developing new ones. When you can truly experience how a habit is damaging what is most important to you, the steps out of your destructive habit often fall readily into place.

While you can utilize any of a wide range of values in your fight against addiction—and to a certain extent you can go with whatever works for you—it is not true that all values are equally useful in this fight. Some values even support continued bad habits and compulsions.

In this chapter we will examine values that are the most antiaddictive and that support your independence, and how you can use your own values as a tool to fight addiction. Exercises geared toward identifying and utilizing your values are provided at the end of the chapter.

What Are Values? Do They Really Matter?

Your values are your beliefs that some things are right and good and others wrong and bad, that some things are more important than others, and that one way of doing things is better than another. Values are usually deeply held—they come from your earliest learning and background. Values reflect what your parents taught you, what you learned in school and religious institutions, and what the social and cultural groups you belong to hold to be true and right.

It is impossible to maintain that values don't matter in addiction or its cure. The best predictor of whether college students will have an alcohol problem is their attitudes toward drinking—that is, whether it's okay, even good, to binge.1 On the other hand, what makes some people join AA and quit drinking? It is because they have decided their drinking is wrong, even beyond its negative health impact for them. For people in the United States who have a drinking problem—or are told by others that they have one—treatment consists mainly of convincing them that their drinking is bad and harmful, and that they should quit.

Values are important to all addictions, and not just addictive drinking and drug taking. If you compulsively gamble, shop, or have affairs, then your values are on display. Many people feel good and get a boost to their self-esteem from shopping. However, most of these people don't consistently spend beyond their limits. They refrain from overspending because they don't think it's right. They recognize that overspending would keep them from upholding other important values, like paying their debts or providing for their children, and so they curtail their expenditures.

The same principle applies to pursuing sexual opportunities to the exclusion of productive activity. Most people enjoy sex, but they avoid compulsive or random sex because they feel it's wrong. If you engage in indiscriminate sex, then you are signaling either that you see little wrong in it or that the other values in your life are less important than the good feelings you derive from such sex. If you are willing to accept this picture of your values, then so be it. If, on the other hand, you have other values that run against compulsive sexual activity, eating, or shopping, then these values can serve as an important tool with which to root out your addiction.

Many people find that alcohol is tremendously relaxing, sexually exhilarating, or provides some other powerful, welcome feeling—but they do not become alcoholics. They simply refuse to go there. Have you ever heard someone say, "I know that when I have more than one drink, I throw all caution to the wind"? Most people who react so violently to alcohol say, "That's why I limit myself to a single drink" or "That's why I don't drink." But alcoholics regularly override this realization about their reactions to alcohol and continue to drink. Some people who are tense by nature find that smoking is one way to relax. Yet many such people still refuse to smoke. Many simply rule it out of their lives for any of a variety of reasons—health, appearance, or their general feeling that it's bad.

Values do not simply dictate whether you do or don't try a drink, a cigarette, or a drug. They also influence whether you continue to indulge in an activity or substance and how much you will allow your indulgence to affect your life before you limit or quit your involvement. Finally, at a deeper level, values determine how intensely and how irreversibly you become addicted. They also play a major role in whether or not you choose to quit after your become addicted.

Constructive Involvements

Some values directly contradict addictions. If you have these values, they help you to fight addiction. And if you don't, developing such values is potentially a critical therapeutic tool. (This occurs through involvement and success in positive activities, which I describe in later chapters.)

Values can be expressed by statements about what you think is right and wrong, or about your preferences, such as "I value our relationship," "I value my health," "I believe in hard work," "Nothing is more important to me than my children," or "It is embarrassing to be out of control of yourself." All of these values oppose addiction. Other values, or an absence of values, can reinforce addiction. For example, if you don't think that it's wrong to be intoxicated or high, if it's not important to you to fulfill your obligations to other people, or if you don't care whether you succeed at work, then you are more likely to sustain an addiction. The exercises at the end of this chapter will give you a chance to explore how your values contribute to or oppose addictive involvements.

VALUING THESE THINGS HELPS COMBAT ADDICTION

*ACHIEVEMENT—accomplishing constructive and socially valued goals, such as participating in athletics, running for office, getting an education, succeeding at work, or providing for your family

*Consciousness—being alert, awake, and aware of your surroundings; using your mind to make sense out of your life and experience

*Activity—being energetic in daily life and engaged in the world around you

*Health—eating well, exercising, getting health care, and choosing an overall healthy lifestyle

*Responsibility—fulfilling your commitments as well as doing what the law obliges you to do

*Self-respect—caring for and about yourself and, by extension, all people

*Community—being involved in the communities of which you are part (your town, school, work organization, religious group, neighborhood, political party) and contributing to the welfare of these groups—and the larger world

How Do Values Fight Addiction?

To say that your values influence your desire and ability to fight addiction is to say that you act in line with what you believe in and what you care about. Such values can be remarkably potent. For example, I heard a woman say, "I used to smoke, and sometimes I think of going back to it. However, now that I have small children, I would sooner cut my fingers off with a kitchen knife then start smoking again." Even if this woman fell to temptation and smoked one cigarette, it is highly unlikely that she would relapse entirely.

In her memoir, Room to Grow, actress Tracey Gold described her life-threatening anorexia. When she appeared on the Today show to discuss the book, host Matt Lauer asked her the standard disease question: Was she over the disease, or was it still with her? "It's my Achilles' heel," she said, "but I have two small children, and I could never fall all the way back."

Observing this new sense of identity and resolve in new parents should make you think, quite sensibly,...

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Verlag
Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400048737
ISBN 13 
9781400048731
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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