7 Steps to Addiction Recovery

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Guest 1

Dr. Suzette Glasner addiction workbook, 7 Steps to Addiction Recovery

Dr. Glasner integrates the most effective addiction therapy techniques to bring you the Seven Steps to Changing Addictive Behaviors, an approach that takes the best of addiction science and explains it in user-friendly terms.

Dr. Suzette is an associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and she is also the author of “Addiction Recovery Skills Workbook”. Dr. Glasner wrote the book originally for the patient, she feels like people talk a lot in circles about addiction science about all the things that are most helpful for patients but then she did not really see that he resources were being explained some of these science based therapy techniques, but Dr. Glasner also found that it is very helpful working through these exercises and the workbook with a therapist if you have one.

One thing that Dr. Glasner is involved in is methods of screening people for substance use issues when they’re in primary physical health care settings rather then waiting until they get somewhere where there in need of help for a severe addiction. The screening method has been used to help conduct an amount of questions about a person’s recent alcohol and drug use and then if they appear to be at risk you would do a brief motivational interviewing process with them and then refer them to appropriate care.

Dr. Glasners subtitle of her book is “Changing Addictive Behaviors using CBT Mindfulness and Motivational Interviewing techniques”. CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which can be broken down into two components, the cognitive piece which is the things that go through our heads and our thoughts which can make people vulnerable to relapse or continuing to use drugs and alcohol in destructive ways. Those thoughts can be ways people justify or minimize it in our minds, or sometimes things people tell their selves like saying “I can’t control my addiction” or “this will never get better”. Those are a part of a wide range of things that can interfere with recovery. In CBT professionals look at the links between the way you think the way you feel and the way you act.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing techniques are used at all stages of recovery but it is certainly used when people have mixed feelings  or ambivalence about coming into treatment, it has been very widely used for a way of interviewing and therapeutic technique for helping people to really examine the pros and cons of the way they’re living their life and getting the client to see for themselves that change is necessary to get them to their life goals and that is a useful way of getting people into treatment when they are unsure if they want to get help with their drug or alcohol addiction or not.

You can purchase Dr. Glasner’s book “The Addiction Recovery Skills Workbook: Changing Addictive Behaviors Using CBT, Mindfulness and Motivational Interviewing Techniques”  here.