How to Talk so Someone With Addiction Will Listen (clinicians)

There are many concepts in clinical psychology that are not science-based, but are nonetheless still of use in therapy.

Patients are often afraid to ask, but when they do, they seem to want the truth.

Complex behaviors often require complex explanations.

Stats are something we impose on them when there’s already another client waiting in the corridor and the charting still isn’t done.

The challenge is to develop that relationship quickly enough to engage the client and create an environment that promotes success.

From the beginning, it was designed to be a program for living… a grass-roots approach based not on scientific research or professional practice but on the direct experience of recovering persons.

Sending somebody to meetings without some prep work is like making a referral for therapy without bothering to find a therapist.

Most communities provide both options for opioid patients, and lacking a methadone for alcohol or cocaine, use a more traditional abstinence-based approach for those addictions.

What underlies these defenses is anxiety. We’re afraid of what we might find out.

Our longstanding practice of branding anyone who drank again a ‘failure’ kept us from recognizing very real success right under our noses.