Breaking Addiction: A 7-Step Handbook for Ending Any Addiction

182 Pages·2011·0.79 MB·English

by  Lance Dodes

BREAKING
ADDICTION
A 7-Step Handbook
for Ending Any Addiction
LANCE DODES, MD
For Connie
Contents
Cover
Title Page

Introduction

- A New Way to Understand Addiction
PART I

- The Steps
PART II
Step 1 How to Know If You Have an Addiction
Step 2 How to Think about Yourself If You Have an
Addiction
Step 3 Recognizing the Key Moment in Addiction
Step 4 How You Keep Yourself from Seeing the Addiction
ahead of You
Step 5 Understanding What is Happening at the Key Moment
in Addiction
Step 6 Short-Term Strategies for Dealing with Addiction
Step 7 How to Deal with Addiction in the Long Term
Test Yourself

- Living with Someone Who Has an Addiction
PART III

- For the Professional
PART IV

Index
Acknowledgments

About the Author
Praise for Breaking Addiction
Also by Lance Dodes
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
It was one o’clock and Ron Golding returned to his desk from lunch to find
a manila envelope sitting there, laid on top of the papers he’d been
working on. He looked at the outside of the folder. It was from Accounting.
“E-mail isn’t good enough for them?” he said with annoyance as he
opened the envelope. Inside, there was a thick stapled pile of forms with a
cover sheet. He glanced at the forms. They were filled with questions and
boxes to be checked. He dropped them on his desk and read the cover note.
“Dear Ron,” it began, “We need to have these filled out by 5 PM and
returned, signed. It’s for the quarterly report and the legal people say it
has to be in their hands today. Sorry! Beth.” Now he dropped the letter and
picked up the stack of forms again, stared at them, and finally sat down.
Turning the pages of forms, he shook his head. “Damn,” he said.
“Hey Joey,” he called.
Joey was at his own desk only ten feet away. “Yeah?”
“Hey, did you get a pack of crap to fill out for Accounting?”
Joey made a gesture at his own desk. “Yep, I got it.”
“Well I can’t do it,” Ron said. “I’ve got too much to do.”
“I know what you mean.”
“No,” Ron said, “you don’t understand. I mean I really can’t do it.
Larry is on my back to get a draft to him by tomorrow morning.” He leafed
through the forms again. “There’s at least an hour of work here. And look
at it! It’s idiotic.” He shook his head again. “It’s just a damned waste of
time. My time, your time, everybody’s time.”
“I’m with you,” Joey said, but he turned back to his computer and
seemed done with the exchange.
Ron ran his hand through his hair, and then picked up the
phone.“Ginny,” he said when his wife answered, “I’m going to be late
tonight . . . I know, but I have to stay and get this done . . . Probably about
seven . . . Just tell the kids we’ll make the fort tomorrow . . . I know . . .
Yeah, see you then.”
He leaned back in his chair. At that moment he knew what he was going
to do when he finally got out of there. Ginny didn’t like him coming home
and drinking, but he sure as hell was going to get a drink tonight. At the
bar on the way home. Maybe more than one. He looked down at the pile of
forms. Yeah, definitely more than one. He sat forward. Now that he’d
decided to go drinking he felt less stressed. Now he could get to work.
What is addiction? We are barraged with theories that attempt to answer this
question. If you suffer with an addiction or care about someone with an
addiction, you may already have found that a lot of people are not able to get
well with the usual treatment approaches. This book describes a new way of
understanding and managing addiction that I have been writing about in
professional journals for the past twenty years, and summarized in a previous
book, The Heart of Addiction (HarperCollins, 2002). As the director or
psychiatric consultant for four major addiction treatment programs, and as a
therapist in private practice for over thirty years, I developed my ideas not by
telling people what they should do, but by listening carefully to them to
understand the reasons why they had an addiction, why it became so hard to
control, and why it overwhelmed them when it did. Over time, I came to see
addiction in a new way, one that is very different from older approaches. Indeed,
if you are used to those older ideas you may find these new concepts a bit
jarring. But since the publication of my first book these ideas and methods have
been utilized by therapists and treatment centers and taught in educational
programs around the country.
Breaking Addiction is the result of feedback I’ve received indicating the need
for a more hands-on, step-by-step blueprint to make this new approach more
accessible—for people suffering with addictions, for those who live with them
and care about them, and for those who treat them. This book is also intended to
help you if you are unsure whether or not you have an addiction, or if your
interest is just to better understand the nature of addiction.
HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED
In Part One I will summarize how addictions work, continuing the story of Ron
(above) to illustrate this. I’ll turn, in Part Two of the book, to the individual steps
in the mastery of addiction—from the beginning to the end of the process,
illustrating each step with case examples. The final chapter of Part Two is
entitled “Test Yourself”; it’s designed to give you the chance to apply what
you’ve learned to the stories of several people suffering with addiction. Part
Three is a guide for family members and loved ones of people with addictions.
As you’ll see, once you understand how addiction really works, you are in an
excellent position to repair relationships and families that have been damaged by
addiction. Finally, Part Four specifically addresses professionals who treat
addiction, describing ways this new approach can serve as the foundation for
professional treatment.
Part I
A New Way to Understand Addiction
Everyone knows that addictive behavior is not good for you. People who suffer
with addictions may know this best of all, because they’ve lived it. But addiction
persists. Strange as it may seem, it must serve some purpose. In fact, its purpose
must be so great that it is even more essential than avoiding the bad
consequences of the addiction. It has to be more important than losing marriages,
families, friends, jobs, and health. It has to be more important than losing your
license to drive or to practice in a field that you care deeply about, more
important than the pain of hurting people you love. What could possibly be
worth all of that?
In terms of the outside world, the world of careers, family, and success, there
is, indeed, nothing worth losing it all. The purpose of addiction must lie in the
inside world, where what is at stake are feelings central to emotional survival
itself. If this is the case, then nobody would be surprised to find that it overrules
even the most important external causes. Let’s return to Ron, from the
introduction, to see how this works.
R
ON
When Ron was seven years old he was playing in his room (that he shared with
his older brother) when he heard shouting between his parents. This happened a
lot. He caught many of the words when they were loud, but most of it meant
nothing to him. Something about money, usually. But he felt the familiar sense
of torn loyalties and he wished his parents would just stop. The noise ended and
a moment later his mother came into the room.
“Ron, I have a headache and I’m going to lie down. Company is coming over
and I need you to straighten up the living room. And put the bathroom towels in
the laundry, please.”
“I’m in the middle of building a Lego castle, Mom.”
“I really need you to do this for me now.”
“Can I just finish this part? Look, see—I’ve got the wall all up on this side,
and . . .”
“Ronald, I need you to do this right now.”
“Can I just show you?”