Addiction
The research is clear that family involvement in recovery improves outcomes. Not because family saves the person but because belonging to something, being accountable to people who matter, having somewhere to come home to, makes the long work of recovery more sustainable.
Addiction
Recovery is the reconstruction of a self. Whether that rebuilding works depends on whether the community waiting on the other side was built with you in mind.
Addiction
The research on how AA works points to one mechanism above the others: social network restructuring. Who you spend time with, and what those people expect of you, shapes recovery more than almost anything else.
Addiction
Many people approach treatment with expectations shaped by everything except firsthand experience...and that picture rarely matches what they find. Sometimes, it's considerably better than imagined, and sometimes it fails to meet expectations.
Recovery Curriculum
We tell people addiction is a disease. Then we treat them like moral failures. We talk about community, connection, and peer support as the foundations of recovery. Then we place the entire burden on the individual and call it personal responsibility and accountability.