Fly With Me I've Crashed Before: Why relapse is not "part of recovery" and how NeuroBehavioral Learning is changing that belief.

By Dean Kraemer

Addiction treatment is experiencing a radical change due to neuroscience and a program called NeuroBehavioral Learning, which has proven to be far more successful at attaining positive results, ending the revolving door of treatment for many. If you ever need treatment, before you pay anyone, read this book!

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456601324

Book preview

first.

Who is an Addict or Alcoholic?

What is the image you have when you hear the words drug addict or alcoholic?

Many people still get very old images of slimy guys on skid row or drug crazed criminals sticking people up to get drug money. Yes, that still is a percentage of the people who are drug addicts and alcoholics. That will likely always be a part of it. But it is much, much bigger and far different than that today.

More than ever before it is anybody. It’s celebrities, housewives and soccer moms, executives, sports legends, cops, doctors (lots of doctors), lawyers, kids. It’s your neighbors. It’s you.

I mention this because too often the stigma attached to addiction, the shame, prevents people from getting treatment. They’re afraid of what others will think. You have a problem. You need help. It’s that simple. Twenty million other people in this country have the same problem.

Let me repeat that: 20,000,000 people in this country suffer from addiction. And that number is climbing.

It is often associated with another mental disorder, of which 20% of the American populace suffers. So, there also, you’re not alone. Get the help you need. Just make sure it is, in fact, the help you need rather than the beginning of a revolving door of treatment.

There are more people getting addicted to medications that have been prescribed to them than ever before. This is a fast growing segment of the addiction treatment field. These are hardly crazed junkies. They’re people who had pain, or anxiety, or some other ailment they got medication for and then became addicted to that medication. Sometimes the medication makes them feel better and they want to feel even better still. So, they increase the dosage -- on their own. Unfortunately, many of these drugs are easy to get addicted to. So, it isn’t long before some people are seeing two doctors to get two prescriptions for the same drug, or finding other ways of procuring more. This kind of thing happens all the time. But in many cases it’s merely someone who has taken the prescribed dosage for so long that they now have trouble when it’s cut off. Here’s a prime example – someone who has been in the hospital for months receiving doses of morphine or other such pain killers who, upon being released, is handed a few Tylenol. It happens.

Our pharmaceutically oriented healthcare system is making junkies out of us.

Moreover, the illegal drugs available today are far more addictive than the drugs from only a couple of decades ago. Methamphetamine has crossed over from a party drug at west coast gay clubs into kitchens in middle America, where moms and their kids and husbands are scoring and getting instantly addicted. It is one of the most addictive substances ever produced and it is an epidemic. There’s a huge problem with addicted or alcoholic soccer moms today, you may have seen news coverage of it.

There are behavioral addictions today, as well. People are addicted to porn, to food, to sex, to gambling, to stealing.

Then there are still your garden variety alcoholics and heroin addicts, huffers, shooters, snorters, pill poppers, smokers, etc. It’s a rapidly expanding field. There are more drugs to do and more ways to do them. As society progresses we come up with new kinds of problems, disorders, and drugs to deal with them. So, while addiction treatment changes, addiction isn’t going away. It most likely never will.

Unlike the past, there is a genuine hope of success and a normal life for anyone suffering from alcoholism or addiction today. I wanted to state that because for the entire time that there has been addiction treatment, success, real success, has been elusive. As well intentioned as the majority of people are working in the addiction treatment field, the numbers simply aren’t there to support claims of success. At least they haven’t been historically.

The addiction treatment field today stands on the precipice of a major transition. It is, in large part, a field that has given birth to itself, born of the desperate need of those suffering from the affliction. In the old days, no one