Helping the Addict You Love: The New Effective Program for Getting the Addict Into Treatment

By Laurence Westreich and M.D. Westreich

Book Overview

It's okay to love them. It's your right to help them.

Addiction destroys people and can even end lives. When you know or suspect that someone you love is suffering from addiction you have two goals: getting your loved one into treatment and turning that treatment into full-fledged sobriety. Many addiction experts tell you that you have to disengage or risk being an enabler, a codependent bystander, in the wreckage of an addict's life; that you have to cut all ties or be taken advantage of financially and emotionally; that you have to protect yourself from your loved one, who isn't the person you used to know. But many friends and family members find it unnatural, even impossible, to turn away from a person they love who is at his lowest point, and refuse to believe that their addict is lost to addiction.

Backed by his years of experience, Dr. Westreich guides you through the process of getting the addict you love on the road to treatment and recovery. He provides detailed scripts to lead you through pivotal conversations with the addict in your life, highlighting the words that he's found to be most effective and the words to avoid. With this book in hand, family and friends will know, for example, how to motivate their addict to recognize his problem based on the addict's own definition of what addiction looks like; how to "raise the bottom" that addicts so often must hit to a more acceptable level -- such as embarrassment, job loss, or ill health; and when to use gentle disagreement, quiet listening, or forceful confrontation to move the addict toward treatment, while managing and protecting their own emotions. Dr. Westreich also shows you how to engage a therapist in the process and provides methods for combating an addict's defense mechanisms. By outlining several treatment options, he helps you to weigh what each can and cannot accomplish, which is the most effective treatment for the kind of addiction you are dealing with, what each treatment requires of the recovering addict and the friend or family member, and how successful each is. Dr. Westreich also takes care to discuss the kinds of special situations you may face when the addict in your life, in addition to having a substance abuse problem, is a minor, is pregnant, has mental or medical diseases, or has other issues that are likely to affect recovery.

Helping the Addict You Love is the guide that so many loved ones of addicts have desperately needed. Dr. Westreich supports you through the emotional process of helping the addict you love, tells you it's okay to want to help, and teaches you how to do so.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743292146
• ISBN13: 9780743292146
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Touchstone
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Makes getting an addict to treatment a doable thing

Addiction is an "equal opportunity" illness that afflicts people in all walks of life - and us - the friends and relatives who love them. Dr. Westreich's book offers innovative yet practical approaches to help these people we care about in a way that anyone can understand and implement. Dr Westreich has 15 years of experience treating addicts. With encouragement and compassion, he coaches you through a variety of ways to overcome what is often the toughest obstacle: getting the addict you love to admit the problem and seek treatment.

Worth Rereading

Those of us in the helping professions often deal with addicts of various types, to say nothing of those affected by another's addicition. Dr. Westreich illuminates the concept of addiction, while providing sensible, sensitive and highly useful advice on how those close to an addict can help. Refreshingly, the book is based in utter reality, and is highly pragmatic. I intend to reread it periodically to ensure the advice it offers remains fresh in my mind.