Gregory L. Ph.D. Jantz - Healing the Scars of Addiction: Reclaiming Your Life and Moving into a Healthy Future

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Endorsements

Dedication

Introduction: The Questions of Addiction

The pathway of addiction is littered with questions. Should I stop? What will happen if I do stop? What will happen if I dont stop? Why should I stop? Why cant I stop? What have I done? When will this end? This book is written to give voice to these questions and provide hard-won answers gained from more than thirty years of working with courageous, addicted people. Those suffering from addiction need answers, but so do those who suffer alongside them.

1. Am I an Addict?

A dictionary definition of addiction is simple: a strong compulsion to have or do something harmful. Simple, or is it? Who defines what is harmful?

2. Why This?

A strong compulsion to have or do something harmful covers a vast field of possibilities, given human invention and the capacity for denial. When even good things become harmful, the range of harmful things can multiply like mice. Besides the age-old options, people are addicted today in ways past generations couldnt have imagined.

Addiction is intensely individual, but there are some common threads. Genetics, personality traits, and family dynamics and history may help explain the roots of certain types of addiction. Where a person is can often be traced to where a person came from.

4. Why Cant I Just Learn to Live with This?

The definition of harm, left to an addict, can be highly fluid. What stands out as harmful in one setting may appear less so in the next. Addiction has a way of eroding resolve, with never again slipping into just once more.

5. Who Am I without This?

Once you give up a future where your addiction is manageable, you must contemplate a future without the addiction in any form. The question then becomes, Who am I without this? The addiction has been such an integral part of your life that you have difficulty imagining what life could be, who you could be, without it.

6. Why Cant I See What This Is Doing to Me?

To be an addict is to live in a state of altered reality. Emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual consequences are filtered through the lens of the addiction. Harm is reduced to a singular focus, with harms narrow definition being that which threatens the addiction.

7. Why Cant I See What This Is Doing to Others?

In an addicts altered reality, relationships take on different value within a corrupted hierarchy of needs. People cease to be mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, friends, children, or loved ones and become means to an addictive end.

8. Why Is the First Step So Hard?

An addiction is a fixed position. Somewhere else can be a frightening unknown. I know where I am now. If I move, where will I end up?

Healing from addiction is not a single step but a process of steps, mostly forward but some back, to achieve the distance necessary to move from addiction to recovery. This process requires mental and physical healing, which takes time, patience, and perspective, gained step by step by step.

10. How Can I Put My Life Back Together?

Addiction twists and breaks a persons life connections, at the same time weaving their own addictive stranglehold. Healing happens when the person reintegrates healthy connections to self and others, to actions and life itself.

11. Do I Deserve to Put My Life Back Together?

Those in recovery can find their resolve to heal weakened by feelings of worthlessness and regret. To move forward, they must find ways out of these personal prisons, even when thoughts of shame, blame, and guilt threaten to block their path.

12. Who Am I Now?

Addiction changes a person, as does any traumatic life event. An addiction, unchecked, seeks to define the scope of that change. To heal from addiction means taking back control. I cannot go back to who I was before the addiction; I am no longer who I was when I was addicted. Who am I now?

Ending Thoughts

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Authors

Other Books by the Authors

Back Ads

Back Cover