In March of 2020, three of the world’s most important addiction researchers (Dr. John Kelly from Harvard University, Dr. Keith Humphries from Stanford University, and Dr Marcia Ferri from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Alcohol Addiction) published the most comprehensive study ever done on the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). In this groundbreaking…
When my son went away to residential treatment, a central part of the treatment protocol was to educate the family about the disease and try to engaged them in the recovery process. Our son’s four older siblings dropped everything and our entire family attended the Family Education Program spending a weekend in a very remote…
At a social event, a mother came up to my wife and I and said: “Stevie changed my son’s life …. my son used to drink heavily all the time and now, because of Stevie, he is up early, he is playing sports almost every day and doing other healthy activities that don’t include alcohol….
I was part of my son’s problem. I was often a fixer, an apologist and an enabler for his transgressions and poor behavior. He was hurting so badly, and I wanted to be there for him. I just didn’t understand that I was protecting the disease and not him. He needed to “see” the problems…
What I now know to be “common traps” had my head spinning every day. Where did I go wrong as a parent? Why was my son, who was such a sweet and loving youngster, now so nasty and mean to me, my wife and other family members? I was so confused. How could I possibly…
The addicted brain is smart, it is clever, and most of all, it is relentless. Reasoning and logic most often don’t work with an addicted brain. The disease will fight to survive. This isn’t polite stuff. This disease plays hardball. There are no rules. A core strategy for the addicted brain is to attack YOUR…
An addiction counselor once told me: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it”. As I listened to those unsettling words I thought to myself: “Then what the hell can I do?” It turns out, a lot. Almost every addiction counselor will advise parents and caregivers that they are critical to…
Eleven months into Stevie’s outpatient treatment, he had five consecutive months without using alcohol and my wife and I had to make a tough decision: should we let him go on a once-in-a-lifetime overnight class trip? We were, of course, extremely nervous about letting him go but he had lived up to the promises that…
After that horrific Saturday night in March of 2014, my strong instinct was to lock my son down to protect him. In my gut, I thought that we should send him away to residential addiction treatment. Clearly, the most intense and comprehensive treatment for my son would be the most beneficial, right? Once again, wrong!…