Addiction-Free: How to Help an Alcoholic or Addict Get Started on Recovery - Hardcover

Hawes, Gene R.; Hawes, Anderson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312251823 ISBN 13: 9780312251826

Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

A practical and supportive guide offers a wealth of information on facilitating recovery, including the warning signs of addiction and what to expect in terms of time, money, compliance, and success rates; provides six proven ways to get help; and features a detailed list of people and places that provide help.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gene Hawes is the author of many books and articles. Among the most recent is Rx for Recovery: The Medical and Health Guide for Alcoholics, Addicts, and Their Families (with Jeffrey Weisberg, M.D.). In addition to his publications on addictions, Gene Hawes is well known for his guidebooks to colleges and careers. He lives in a small town just north of New York City.

Anderson Hawes is a licensed professional clinical counselor (LPCC), a licensed social worker, and a certified chemical dependency counselor in private practice near Akron, Ohio. He was formerly the director of counseling for the Community Drug Board in Akron and has more than twenty years of experience treating addicted individuals and their families.

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Praise for Addiction-Free

"I have spent twenty-five years working with drug addicts, alcoholigcs, and ex-convicts, and I have a doctorate degree in clinical psychology. No amount of experience or education prepared me for my closest relative going back into addiction. This book is a step-by-step guide on how to detach with love and how to find sanity while you're trying to help your loved one." -- Teri Lynch DeLane, Ph.D., director of Choices Program for Incarcerated Men and Women

Addiction-Free is a complete, up-to-date, one-stop guide to recovery, including information on:

--Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
--Professional help (intervention, detox, rehabilitation)
--Workplace programs
--Law-enforcement programs
--Therapeutic communities

Easy to read and user-friendly, Addiction-Free provides answers to questions about what to expect in overcoming addictions in terms of time, money, and treatment success.

Aus dem Klappentext

CONGRATULATIONS!

If you're one of the people this book is intended to help, then you've just taken an important step that could save the life of someone you care about. This book could end that person's misery and help that person find his or her way to a truly wonderful, whole new life.

And it could end worry and heartbreak for you.

You've seen the person you care about slowly getting worse and worse. When he or she has been drinking alcohol or taking drugs, or both, some pretty awful things have started to happen, like car accidents and bad fights and falls and rages and disappearances and job losses.

You're baffled and hurt and angry. You hope that the person--lover, close family member, key employee, or wonderful friend--will snap out of it. But it doesn't happen. there's a good chance that he or she has become one of the more than twenty million persons who suffer from what is now scientifically recognized as the disease of alcoholism/addiction.

But Addiction-Free helps you find a solution. Now you can learn about all the possible ways in which you can help.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

The AA Way: Carrying the Message (After Having Invented It)

Alcoholics Anonymous—widely termed simply AA—is the most widely available means for helping someone to recover from alcoholism/addiction. It is also very economical—it costs nothing. You’ll find in AA people who know a great deal about addiction and how to get (and stay) clean and sober. These are also people who stand ready to help others start recovery and stay in it.

How AA Can Help

Each year, many thousands of women and men who have become addicted to alcohol and drugs start in recovery through AA. They’re in all parts of the United States, and in many foreign countries. Those continuing in recovery as AA members now number some two million, according to AA reports at the time of this writing (May 2000).1

(Statistics about AA are approximate and estimated for reasons explained later. That they are approximations should be unimportant to you. The main point is this: Since AA helps millions of alcoholics/addicts start and stay in recovery, there’s a good chance it may likewise help the person who is worrying you.)

If AA is effective for your alcoholic/addict, you’d of course feel very relieved. You would both be very fortunate. Aside from his or her recovery, though, AA can help you learn the truth about addiction.

As important, the companion (but separate) organization Al-Anon, which is described thoroughly in chapter 3, could help you recover from the ravages of your involvement with the alcoholic/ addict. And you could thus be helped to recover whether or not the alcoholic/addict does.

Finding AA, Especially for a Crisis—Anywhere; Everywhere

You need only look in your local phone directory to reach AA throughout the United States. You’ll find AA or Alcoholics Anonymous listed in the business section of the directory’s white pages. An AA phone number may also be listed in the directory’s yellow pages (classified phone directory listings), under a heading like “Alcoholism Information and Treatment Centers.”

Outside the United States, try local phone directories or use the telephone numbers, mailing addresses, or World Wide Web home pages or e-mail addresses given in the “Sources of Help and Information” section of this book. (Of course, if you’re in the United States, you can also use these additional phone numbers or addresses.)

Local police also often could tell you where and when nearby AA meetings are held.

• AA in Your Neighborhood

Very likely, groups of AA members are ready to help right in your locale. AA is a huge nonprofit society with chapters (called “groups”) almost everywhere in the country. Some sixty thousand AA groups operate throughout the United States and Canada, as do forty thousand more groups in other countries around the world.2

It may surprise you to find AA groups nearby. AA’s carefully observed principle of anonymity keeps it far more obscure than its size and importance would otherwise suggest. AA almost never advertises or publicizes.

• Denial

In all likelihood, you’d start to seek out AA in the midst of some crisis caused by the alcoholic/addict about whom you’re worried. If so, you’d have been kept from calling before by denial. Unbelievably strong denial about the addiction is universally suffered by alcoholics /addicts and those involved with them. (It is also very familiar to AA members, who circulate the ironic saying, “Denial is not a river in Egypt.”) Denial is also no joke. It stands as the major roadblock to breaking free of addiction. If not overcome, denial can and does kill.

Try out your local AA phone number in advance—even if you think you might not really need it. Should you face a crisis, you’d find it helpful to have the number right at hand.

• AA in a Crisis

Suppose that you phoned your local AA number during a crisis. Perhaps your alcoholic/addict was in a drunken or drugged stupor—or had just had a car accident, or had smashed the furniture, or had stormed out in the night to get more liquor or crack cocaine. What would AA do?

In a best case, a volunteer would answer your phone call. This AA member would tell you how to get immediate police or medical help, should your emergency require it. If it’s not that kind of emergency, the person would give you the time and place of one or two nearby AA meetings for your alcoholic/addict to attend that day or night. In addition, you might be told that an AA member will phone you soon, if you wish, to offer to talk with your alcoholic/addict and offer to take him or her to an AA meeting.

AA custom calls for the person who offers to meet with a prospective new member to be of the same sex as the prospect (in line with a time-honored AA admonition, “men with the men, women with the women”). This is done to avoid any romantic or sexual distractions that intoxicated prospects are especially likely to seize on. Custom also dictates having two members go out on such missions, and having those members be long-experienced and fully active in the AA program. Such missions with a potential new member are termed “12th-Step calls.”

Sometimes when you phone a local AA number, you’ll reach an answering-machine message that may offer to have a volunteer call you later with information and help if you leave your number. The message may also tell you where else to phone for immediate aid if you need it.

• Get Medical Help

Alcohol and drugs are toxins—poisons—that damage the body in many ways, especially when abused by addicts. If the alcoholic/ addict who concerns you has reached late-stage addiction, she or he needs drugs or liquor simply to push away the tortures of withdrawal.

Such withdrawal sometimes starts with violent physical reactions if she or he tries to go without the alcohol or drugs for even as little as thirty minutes. The addict needs alcohol or drugs to keep from shaking and aching all over unbearably, being racked by fevers and chills and hideous nausea, feeling a nameless, enormous dread, and even experiencing horrifying hallucinations.

Withdrawal reactions can be so intense that they kill an alcoholic. Perhaps the most frequent way in which alcohol withdrawal causes death is from convulsions or nausea. With these, the alcoholics suffocate after partially swallowing their own tongue, or choke to death on their vomit.

In order to get through such withdrawal safely and with the least distress, alcoholics/addicts who have severe addictions need to enter a medically supervised process called detoxication. Detox treatment usually involves being in a hospital for three to seven days. During this time, the patient’s condition is carefully monitored and medicines and nutriments are given that counter withdrawal reactions.

• Finding Detox Treatment

If he or she has entered late-stage addiction, your alcoholic/addict would first need detoxification treatment before starting AA or another addiction-recovery program. AA members should be able to help you get your alcoholic/addict into a detox. (AA members know local detoxes well; some have been there, and many have helped prospects enter them.) So common is alcoholism/addiction that detox facilities are found in most hospitals today. How to find a detox and other help aside from AA is explained in chapter 2, which also tells more about the detoxing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martins Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312251823
• ISBN 13: 9780312251826
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 221
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar