Addiction, Progression & Recovery: Understanding the Stages of Change on the Addiction Recovery Learning Curve

This entertaining and practical book points out a basic fact about changing harmful addictions - that many people need to develop a devotion to a healthy, positive addiction - to which they can cheerfully just say yes Based on thousands of observations made by the author during 23 years of active participation in the addiction recovery and treatment field, this ground-breaking new book describes five naturally-occurring stages of change on an Addiction Recovery Learning Curve that many people with the most serious harmful addictions will usually have to go through on the long road to lasting recovery. Addiction, Progression, & Recovery illustrates how harmful addictions often develop gradually with many identifiable signs and symptoms emerging over time in a series of progressively worsening stages, and it clearly describes the lifelong learning process normally followed by people who successfully make the difficult transition from active progression into permanent recovery. In this pioneering work, Dale Kesten introduces readers to the FACE to FACE Unified Addiction Recovery Model. This promising new developmental learning model offers a realistic and individualized approach to addiction treatment. It can help clinicians simultaneously assess, educate, motivate, and empower clients to eventually control or stop harmful addictive behavior by reframing their past, present, and future experiences as an honest and open-minded series of Formal Addiction Control Experiments and Failed Addiction Control Experiments. This innovative new model is not based on any abstract, academic, scientific, or partisan theory about how people might or should be able to change harmful addictive behavior. Rather, it accurately describes the natural and readily observable process by which most people actually do change or ultimately fail to change such behavior in the long run