Articles
Tragic and Costly: DUI/DWI
Public perceptions of how we should and shouldn’t treat offenders often result in less than optimal solutions both for the addict/alcoholic and for the victims and the larger society that must pay.
Topics: criminal courts, DUI/DWI, legal problems
Gaining Compliance
With ‘coerced’ clients, it’s easy to fall into a little game with the client striving to appear in compliance while covertly doing whatever he wants.
Topics: client engagement and motivation, clinician skills, compliance and noncompliance, counseling skills
Setting Boundaries: Understanding Your Client’s Agenda
An agenda refers to the client’s underlying plan or program. Not just what he hopes to accomplish, but the things he’s determined not to do.
Topics: boundaries, counseling skills
Setting Boundaries: The Initial Meeting
For some clients, particularly those with problems with rules and authority, their experience with boundaries is probably as important as anything that happens in counseling.
Topics: boundaries, counseling skills
Why Addicted People Manipulate
Takes a while to become really good at it, but most do. Addicts are not always great manipulators — that would be somebody so skilled you never realized you were being manipulated — but they’re bold, persistent, and creative when it comes to getting what they want
Topics: counseling skills, resistance manipulation ambivalence
The Professional as Target: Being Manipulated
As a professional, you have an agenda to fulfill. So too does the addict. His agenda is very different, but he’s even more committed to it.
Topics: boundaries, counseling, physicians, resistance manipulation ambivalence
Establishing Credibility
For some reason, the clients paid little attention to his advice. Most of the time, they treated him like a visitor from Mars.
Topics: counseling skills, establishing credibility
Counseling Skills Toolkit
Maybe you’ll find an idea or two that you can put to use doing what you do best: Getting the suffering alcoholic or drug addict safely through that doorway to lifetime recovery.
Topics: counseling skills
Recovery With Co-Occurring Disorders: Step Ten
Many of us have deliberately set the bar too high to encourage ourselves to jump. Obviously, we don’t always reach it.
Topics: co-occurring disorders, Recovery Tools, Recovery With Co-Occurring Disorders, tools for recovery
Recovery With Co-Occurring Disorders: Steps 8 & 9
The point is to foresee predictable traps and make changes to reduce your vulnerability to slips – defined as an unplanned use of drugs or alcohol that results from a weakness or flaw in your program of recovery.
Topics: co-occurring disorders, Recovery Tools, Recovery With Co-Occurring Disorders, tools for recovery