Addiction and the Stages of Healing – full text version

Disclaimer:  nothing in this content should be taken or held as clinical instruction, clinical supervision, or advisory concerning patient care.

Regular readers of Recovery Review might be familiar with my 2019 series entitled “Addiction and the Stages of Healing”.

The content of that series is a single work outlining my wished-for innovations in our SUD field, focusing on research and clinical care with population-sized samples of patients – and how the information gained from such an effort could improve our work with individuals. The series describes an ambitious, future-focused, big-picture change-effort. And it also describes some very practical and immediate implications for what we do in our field today.

• Are the ideas held within the work too theoretical? Not to me.

• Are the ideas too far outside the understanding of most readers in our field? I don’t think so.

• Are the changes for our field described in the work simply not possible? Not only do I think they are possible, but I also think they are very practical.

I had recorded an audio version of a desktop lecture on this topic in the summer of 2018. I want to acknowledge April Martin’s work at then transcribing that audio recording into a text format in the Summer of 2019. In November of 2019 I transformed that raw text material into the full and final written version attached below. I never pushed that full text out to the public. Rather, I divided the monograph into sections and blogged the sections in order as a series here at Recovery Review.

Recently, some interest has been shown in the blog series as a single work, all in one place. With that in mind, I am attaching here a PDF of the work as a single monograph. (For those not familiar with the series, the monograph provides a convenient way to give the series/material a read).

See what you think.