This book was written for anyone who suffers from alcohol or drug addiction. Addiction is an illness that involves progressively losing control over your use. When you lose control of alcohol or drug use, devastating things begin to happen as a result, but you find yourself continuing to drink or use drugs anyway. Whether or not you have been formally diagnosed with an addiction, if you feel that you have lost control over your drug or alcohol use and you want to do something about it, this book can be helpful to you. Specifically, the techniques you will learn from this book can help you to strengthen your motivation to change your alcohol or drug use, and equip you with the knowledge about addiction and a variety of coping skills that will enable you to do so successfully. You will also learn about different types of treatment that are effective for your addiction, so that if you decided to pursue formal treatment, you will know what to look for and expect. This workbook focuses on alcohol and drug addiction, which is in the category of substance addiction. Other behavioral addictions, or compulsive behaviors that may require treatment (such as gambling), are not addressed in this book.
If you are already working with a therapist or treatment provider for your addiction, the exercises in this workbook can be a part of your therapy. Taking an active role in your treatment by bringing in concepts you are learning through self-help can be useful in many ways. First, it can help you focus your treatment on learning the therapy skills that you find to be the most useful or that you need to work on the most. Second, you can build confidence in your ability to master the techniques, since you will be practicing them in these workbook exercises in between your therapy sessions. Third, since we’ll devote a lot of time to working on motivation, and scientific studies have found that motivation predicts treatment success, you can improve your own prognosis by engaging in exercises to strengthen your motivation.
This workbook is not in any way intended to be a replacement for formal psychological or psychiatric treatment for addiction or any related health condition, but it can certainly be a tool for you to use while you are receiving treatment. Likewise, health care providers who work with patients who suffer from addiction may find this workbook helpful in suggesting exercises to increase motivation for change. It can also be an effective way to introduce cognitive behavioral relapse prevention skills, as well as mindfulness exercises for coping with uncomfortable emotions and cravings for alcohol and drugs.
Putting the Techniques into Practice
Thanks to the great scientific advances that have been made in addiction treatment over the past decade, there is now a broader range of skills and treatment approaches that can help you overcome your struggle with drug or alcohol addiction. Unlike other addiction workbooks, which typically focus on a a single therapy approach (such as cognitive behavioral therapy), this book features a range of research-based techniques drawing on three distinct yet compatible behavioral therapies to enable you to begin and sustain your recovery: (1) motivational therapy techniques, (2) cognitive behavioral therapy, and (3) mindfulness techniques.
Motivational therapy techniques will help you get on the road to recovery, commit to making changes to your drug or alcohol use, and, whenever you need to, revisit and strengthen your motivation when it naturally shifts. The recovery process, like the rest of life, has its ups and downs. Thus, it is entirely normal to have days when you see perfectly clearly why abstaining from alcohol and drug use is essential to living the life that you want, alternating with days when you question why you’re going to all of this trouble to live a life of recovery. Grappling with your ambivalence is a good way to strengthen your motivation, especially when you have the therapeutic tools to consider both sides of it in an intentional and systematic way. These are the tools that you will learn about in chapter 3.
Cognitive behavioral therapy will help you understand how your thoughts (or cognitions) can trigger addictive behaviors, and how to recognize and change the “addictive thinking” that makes you vulnerable to relapse. And finally, mindfulness techniques will help you to curb your impulses to drink or use when you are experiencing the discomfort of a craving or another emotion that you naturally want to “get rid of.”
To help you practice and get comfortable using the techniques, in part 2 of this workbook you will complete exercises that are easy, meaningful, and applicable to your daily life. If you use this book to help you through the daily challenges you encounter in your recovery, your experiences with the exercises will guide you to discover which strategies help you the most. This way, by the time you finish the book, you will have developed your own unique set of “go-to” skills. Not only will these skills help you to steer clear of alcohol and drugs, but you can use them to help you achieve life goals, strengthen your relationships, and live a healthier, happier life.
You may be wondering how the techniques you will be learning in this book may or may not be compatible with 12-step programs. The short answer is that they are completely compatible with the 12-step model and, in fact, attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or other self-help groups may even help you to exercise some of the skills you will learn (such as reaching out for social support when you’re feeling tempted to drink or use drugs). Studies have shown that people who attend 12-step groups and “work a program” by getting involved, finding a sponsor, working the steps, and giving back—by speaking, making commitments to help out at meetings, sponsoring others, or in other ways—tend to do well in their recovery in the longer term (Morgenstern et al. 1997). That said, 12-step meetings are not the best fit for everyone, and there are many people who recover successfully without being involved in self-help meetings at all. In short, you can effectively acquire the skills in this book without attending meetings, but if you are involved in a 12-step program, you will find that what you learn in this book is compatible with the 12-step principles.
By now you probably have a good sense of some of the things you are going to learn about as you read on. These are the main goals of working your way through the chapters and exercises in this book:
That may look like a long list of goals, but they are all interrelated, and you can achieve every one of them. It has happened for a lot of people—some of whom you will learn about when their stories are presented in this book—who have gone from feeling like their addiction was controlling and ruining their lives to achieving abstinence from alcohol and drugs and taking the control back. Regaining that control opens up a whole new world of possibilities, and many recovering addicts use this control as the core building block of a happy, meaningful life. This is not to say that it will be easy. Although each person’s struggles are unique, all addicts struggle at various points in their recovery.
This struggle is part of the hand you’ve been dealt in your life as someone vulnerable to the disease of addiction. To overcome it successfully, you will undoubtedly experience discomfort, frustration, vulnerability, tension, and—at times—even hopelessness. The key is to keep at it and never give up. Remember, it is not uncommon for an addict to go through treatment multiple times before achieving success. Likewise, many addicts relapse multiple times before they kick the habit for good.
If you work your way through this book, chapter by chapter; take the exercises seriously (that means practice them as many times as you need to in order to feel comfortable with each new technique); and make the commitment to work hard at it, you will get the most you possibly can out of it. While it is suggested that you complete the chapters in part 2 in order, you should not hesitate to come back to chapter 3 any time you feel that you need to revisit your motivation for recovery.
The therapeutic skills that you will learn in part 2 of this workbook can be used alone or in combination. These techniques are designed to arm you with a range of effective tools for managing your addiction, but you will not necessarily find each of them to be equally helpful. That is okay! There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to treating addiction. You will get the most you can out of this workbook by trying each step in order and evaluating which steps are the most helpful to you. If you have a therapist who can talk with you about each of the skills as you progress through the workbook, your therapist can help you to explore each concept as it relates to your personal, unique set of addictive behavior patterns. However, it isn’t necessary—this workbook can be helpful to you regardless of whether you are in treatment. So let’s get on the road to your recovery and begin this healthy new chapter of your life!