Articles

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

For some reason, the clients paid little attention to his advice. Most of the time, they treated him like a visitor from Mars.

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.

Many of us have deliberately set the bar too high to encourage ourselves to jump. Obviously, we don’t always reach it.

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.