Addiction & Recovery For Dummies book cover

Addiction & Recovery For Dummies

Authors:
Paul Ritvo ,
Jane Irvine ,
M. David Lewis ,
Brian F. Shaw
Buy on Amazon

Overview

No matter what your road to recovery looks like, Dummies is on your side

Addiction and Recovery For Dummies gives you the tools you need to identify and face addiction in yourself or a loved one, while working towards a healthy and realistic approach to recovery. This book offers a compassionate, unbiased, and non-judgmental guide to evaluating and overcoming addiction. You’ll learn to identify the range of addiction levels, the various types (including substance and non-substance), and the possible causes of addiction. An expert author guides you through the range of addiction treatment philosophies and approaches, including twelve-step programs, other in- and outpatient programs, and teen treatments. We’ll also look at common recovery roadblocks, so you’re prepared to overcome whatever hurdles your recovery process brings. Medications, therapeutic communities, self-help groups, long-term recovery strategies—it’s all in here.

  • Learn the signs of addiction and identify the most appropriate treatments
  • Gain advice on offering help to friends or family members struggling with addiction
  • Discover available recovery supports, including groups and medications
  • Understand the media and cultural factors that encourage addiction, and how to avoid them

Updated with the latest treatment options, Addiction & Recovery For Dummies is a valuable resource for those on a recovery journey, and a support guide for the 45 million people who are directly impacted by addiction.

No matter what your road to recovery looks like, Dummies is on your side

Addiction and Recovery For Dummies gives you the tools you need to identify and face addiction in yourself or a loved one, while working towards a healthy and realistic approach to recovery. This book offers a compassionate, unbiased, and non-judgmental guide to evaluating and overcoming addiction. You’ll learn to identify the range of addiction levels, the various types (including substance and non-substance), and the possible causes of addiction. An expert author guides you through the range of addiction treatment philosophies and approaches, including twelve-step programs, other in- and outpatient programs, and teen treatments. We’ll also look at common recovery roadblocks,

so you’re prepared to overcome whatever hurdles your recovery process brings. Medications, therapeutic communities, self-help groups, long-term recovery strategies—it’s all in here.
  • Learn the signs of addiction and identify the most appropriate treatments
  • Gain advice on offering help to friends or family members struggling with addiction
  • Discover available recovery supports, including groups and medications
  • Understand the media and cultural factors that encourage addiction, and how to avoid them

Updated with the latest treatment options, Addiction & Recovery For Dummies is a valuable resource for those on a recovery journey, and a support guide for the 45 million people who are directly impacted by addiction.

Addiction and Recovery For Dummies Cheat Sheet

To overcome an addiction, first you need to recognize addiction in yourself or a loved one. Then, explore addiction recovery programs and treatment methods and decide how to deal with your addictive behavior, or that of a family member or friend.

About The Authors

Brian F. Shaw, PhD, Paul Ritvo, PhD, and Jane Irvine, DPhil, are all university professors with more than 20 years' experience in private consulting.

Articles From The Book

7 results

General Addiction Articles

The Three Phases of Compulsive Gambling

Gambling involves the betting or wagering of valuables on uncertain outcomes and takes many forms — from games of chance to skill-based activities. People have many motivations for gambling, but all involve the hope of gaining more. Gambling is sometimes a rite of passage by which people discover more about themselves and how to compete with others. It is sometimes a way of life (for people such as casino pros and escape gamblers). It can be, in its healthiest form, a way of socializing and having fun. Pathological gambling is a progressive disorder that involves impulse-control problems. The consequences of pathological gambling are severe and may be devastating to the addicted person's family and career, but the disorder can be treated. As with all addictions, pathological gambling has personal, familial, and neurochemical aspects. Pathological gamblers may even have a genetic vulnerability, although such complex behaviors are unlikely to be traced to one specific gene in the same way some medical conditions, like cystic fibrosis, have been. Problem gambling pioneer Dr. Robert Custer identified three phases to a progressive gambling problem: a winning phase, a losing phase, and a desperation phase.

Winning phase

In the winning phase, you may experience a "big win" or a series of smaller wins that result in excess optimism. You may feel an unrealistic sense of power and control and you're excited by the prospect of more wins. ("Hey Doc, this is a sure thing. I'm betting the farm.") At the same time, you can't maintain the excitement unless you're continually involved in high-risk bets. Your bets increase, and ultimately, the increased risk puts you in a vulnerable situation where you can't afford to lose . . . and then, sure as the sun rises, you do lose.

Losing phase

In the losing phase, you may brag about past wins; how you had the casino or track or bookie on the ropes. But in the immediate situation, you're losing more than winning. You're more likely to gamble alone, and when not gambling, you're more likely to spend time thinking about how and when you'll gamble next. Most importantly, you're concerned with how you'll raise more money, legally or illegally. You may have a few wins that fuel the size of your bets. But the dominant pattern is that of losing. Moreover, making the next bet becomes more important than the winning of any previous bet. As the losing continues, you start lying to family and friends and feeling more irritable, restless, and emotionally isolated. You start borrowing money that you're unsure about being able to repay. As your life becomes unmanageable, you may be developing some serious financial problems. Your denial of the huge financial pressures that are building may seem unbelievable to some people: You're also likely to start chasing your losses, trying to win back what you lost. ("Doc, I'll stop, but first I've got to get back to even.") If you don't change your pattern, however, you'll be engaging in more and more self-destructive behavior.

Desperation phase

The next phase, the desperation phase, involves still another marked change in your gambling behavior. You may now make bets more often than is normal, in more desperate attempts to catch up and "get even." The behavior that's now out of control is associated with deep remorse, with blaming others, and with the alienation of family and friends. You may engage in illegal activities to finance your gambling. You may experience a sense of hopelessness and think about suicide and divorce. Other addictions and emotional problems may also intensify during this phase and drag you down.

General Addiction Articles

Effects of Psychedelics and Hallucinogens

Direct from the Age of Aquarius, with a history going back thousands of years, hallucinogens take people on far-ranging trips inside their own minds. Hallucinogens (also called psychedelics) cause your brain to generate experiences that are profound distortions of reality.

We have five senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. Hallucinogens distort these senses, and particularly change your impressions of time and space. Hallucinogens specifically disrupt the neurotransmitter serotonin and interfere with the way your neural cells interact. Serotonin can be found in many places in the central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord) and assists in the functions controlling mood, hunger, body temperature, sexual behavior, muscle control, and sensory perception.

The trips caused by hallucinogens can last for as long as 6 to 12 hours. Some trips are good, some are bad. A good trip is dependent on your mindset when you take the drug. Your reaction may differ from time to time, even though you take the same amount of a drug. A good trip often involves visual hallucinations (seeing things that aren't really there or that are distorted). These images may be seen as funny or inspiring, or just odd. Colors may be especially intense and intriguing patterns may emerge on surfaces, like tables or ceilings. Distortions of objects, faces, and other body parts may be experienced. A heightened sexual drive — an aphrodisiac effect — has also been reported. A bad trip on the other hand, may be set off by similar doses of drug that in the past provided a good trip. A bad trip is a frightening experience with surging anxiety and fears of being out of control and vulnerable. Terrifying images and hallucinations have been reported. At different times, under controlled conditions, hallucinogens have been used in experimental forms of psychotherapy, because they seem to bring underlying conflicts to the surface. The bad trips may be linked to these conflicts surfacing, especially when they take symbolic forms and distort reality (these distorted thoughts and images are like a very bad nightmare). Some hallucinogens come from plants but most are synthesized and manufactured. Mescaline comes from the cactus plant called peyote. Psilocybin comes from certain mushrooms often referred to as magic mushrooms or shrooms (for short). LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as acid) and a dissociative anaesthetic, PCP, (phencyclidine or angel dust) are widely available synthetic hallucinogens. Taking LSD may make you feel several emotions simultaneously and may merge senses so that you see sounds and hear colors. LSD itself, is a clear or white, odorless, water-soluble material synthesized from lysergic acid, a compound rye fungus. The potential of LSD for abuse is fairly high because the experiences are exciting to some people and they want to re-experience their excitement until, of course, they have a bad trip. If you value self-control, it's unlikely that you'll want to gamble in this way about having a good versus a bad trip.

If you use LSD, you may experience flashbacks — a repetition of earlier LSD experiences. A flashback often has an unsettling effect, because it is something that is frequently beyond your control. Flashbacks can occur later in your life and seem to be set off by past associations. People with post-traumatic stress have reported similar experiences as they relive their trauma. In a flashback you have to redirect your attention to the present and get out of your head. Flashbacks are a significant concern if they occur when you're driving or in other situations where distractions can result in elevated risks.

General Addiction Articles

Considering the Cost of Addiction to Families

The degree of distress experienced by families affected by addiction is usually underestimated. In all normal situations, families try to take care of each other, especially in times of illness. What happens when you refuse your family's help, and then appear to go out of your way to upset them? Most people in this situation will try even harder to get the result they want — and most family members want their loved one to stop the drinking or using drugs. It's one of life's ironies that the harder the family members try to help you, the worse your problem sometimes seems to get.

The blame game

In the early stages, the family, especially the person closest to you, doesn't want to believe what is happening to you.

Some very normal personalized beliefs come into play for your loved one, including the following:

  • If I were a better wife (or husband, son, daughter, mother), you would love me enough to stop drinking or using.
  • As a parent, I must have done something wrong to make you feel so bad that you have to take these drugs.
  • I need to work harder to make sure you love me, and then you'll stop, and everything will be okay.

Believing they're to blame, the family members begin to bend over backward to make things better for you and to keep the family functioning. Meanwhile, you tend to blame someone for your need to drink or use and you likely pick on those nearest you, your family. No one can talk about what's really happening — after all you may get angry or you may leave.

Communication begins to break down, and the vicious circle goes around and around, with all players locked into their own very private pain.

The consequences to you and your family

The addiction problem of a family member can lead to all sorts of harmful consequences:

  • Socially: Through embarrassment and shame, families decline invitations, stop inviting friends to their home, and start to ignore friends and hobbies. The family becomes gradually more and more isolated — unable to tell anyone what's happening.
  • Psychologically: When family members have been lied to many times, they find themselves furiously searching for evidence to support their suspicions.
  • Emotionally: Living with you and your addiction is like being on a roller coaster. The family members feel angry, frustrated, helpless, confused, hopeless, desperate, guilty, and ashamed.
  • Physically: The stress of living in a chronic state of chaos, being on edge all the time (constantly worrying as to what your next phone call will bring and what they'll find when they open the door to your room) eventually takes a toll. Family members of addicts have more than the average prevalence of anxiety, depression, headaches, migraines, digestive disorders, and heart problems. It's not unusual to find close family members of addicts admitting to feeling periodically suicidal.

In short, the family becomes so focused on your behavior that they're distracted from all but essential matters. The family develops its way of coping; the family becomes so hooked on helping you that contemplating no longer helping you is as difficult for them as it is for you to stop drinking or using. A huge fear of making changes builds up, and this eventually becomes counterproductive for you and for them.

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