are 12-step programs really the only way to long-term successful good recovery
that's a question we get in our office like all the time and it's a good
question which is why in this video we're going to
explore many of the options that are out there as far as pathways to recovery
we're going to look at the pros and cons of each of those options
now you may have even heard me say before that at hope for families
we are what i like to call non-denominational recovery
meaning we like all the pathways we just want to help people
find the pathway that fits for them best hey if it gets you there it gets you
there and we like it that's my simple straightforward
answer to that question but of course i do have a lot of
thinking about the different methodologies out
there right now i do love that there are all these
different pathways but let's take a closer look at
12-step programs versus some of this sort of what i call like this
newer school thinking and let's see what each one of them
brings to the table hey if you're new to this channel
welcome to put the shovel down i'm amber hollingsworth and this youtube channel
is designed to keep you five steps ahead of addiction
at all times by helping you understand the science and psychology of the issue
so you can make strategic decisions and ultimately
so you can get your life and your family back on track
you get back to living the life that you actually want to live
okay so back to our topic about this old school versus new school
recovery situation so in my mind when i think about it when i really drill down
into it i think that there's a key philosophical
difference going on with the different ways of thinking
and what it comes down to is all school recovery
kind of centers around this idea that there's
something wrong with you as a person that is either causing the addiction or
triggering the addiction or something and so in
old school recovery it's about fixing this inside thing
newer school recovery is more focused on the addictiveness of the actual
substance it focuses on you put the chemical in
and this is what happens and honestly i think i kind of believe
both so let's take a look at each of these
ways of thinking because they both bringing something
very very important to the table now in a new school recovery
i'm going to include some different types of programs but i'm also
in that thinking including medication-assisted programs like
suboxone buprenorphine all that kind of stuff so that is also included
but the focus of those new school recoveries
is all about the chemical substance the brain changes that occur
the thinking around those substances in fact there
are lots of different youtubers i follow podcasts i listen to and
honestly i like to listen to a lot of different perspectives because
there is something to be gained from all of it
right now there are three youtubers that i really like and follow
and each of these three different youtubers have their different
programs for stopping drinking but they're all very similar i'm going to
tell you who they are one is called sober leon he's this guy i
think he's british but he lives in thailand
there's annie grace who has a book out called this naked mind
about how to stop drinking or how she did it and i really like that i highly
recommend it i'll put the link in the description
and there's this other guy out there you may have seen um he's pretty popular
and he his channel i think is called the stop drinking
expert all three of them seem to have this similarity
in their process at helping someone stop drinking and the similarity i see is
that they spend most of the time focused on
the actual messages that you're believing
about alcohol particularly but really you could apply this you could watch
their videos and apply it to other substances but their focus is on
alcohol but they're looking at you know trying to help you confront
your irrational thoughts about you know is alcohol really adding something into
my life why do i think that i like alcohol why does
everyone around me think alcohol is so great
it really all three of them confront and help you see the truth behind
what's going on with alcohol and their process is all about not saying
there's something wrong with me it's not about saying i'm an alcoholic
it's about saying why do i believe these things why do i keep going back to this
substance thinking it's going to fix this thing or
provide me with this benefit when it's really not
and everything that all three of those youtubers say i totally 100
believe now i don't think that any of them
are like therapists or anything like that but they all
are in recovery and they all are saying something that is very true and that's
if you put an addictive chemical in your body long enough you become
addicted it's kind of like with cigarette smoking you know
that's an addiction but we don't tend to think oh like that person had this
underlying condition and that's why they became addicted although we do think
that about alcohol and other drugs so in that respect as far as the biology
of the matter i really do think that that
is true the whole that i see in that sort of new school thinking is that it
doesn't address what you might think in old school
thinking these underlying conditions which i don't even know if i would call
underlying conditions because it's not like
you got to fix these things inside that were there that made you
become addicted we'll get to that in a minute but more
there are these other problems that are created and exacerbated
along the way as your addiction was developing
other than your thoughts around the substance
you see with those three people that i named
just a second ago they are all sort of coming out the concept of
when you start thinking about alcohol differently and you start really
understanding that you don't like it you're not going to miss it
you're just going to not want to drink anymore which i kind of agree with
absolutely think it's true it's kind of like the house of cards falls and you're
like i don't like that it doesn't help me i
don't know why i was believing that the whole time anyways because the truth of
it is like that's not true so it kind of
crumbles that house of cards pyramid of thinking which
then takes away your desire to want to drink which like
i said i absolutely agree with but here's the thing on this youtube channel
we talk a super ton about the psychology behind addiction and that's not just the
psychology behind your thinking about the substance
because most of the content on this channel most
of you know is about the thinking around the families the manipulation
the self-pity the resentment you see there are
all these psychological processes that could have been there before but even if
they were there before are now magnified into giant
sort of monsters of their own as a person has developed an addiction
because we all do this but when we do things
that we know inside of our heart is wrong that
we feel sort of guilty or shameful about we start to justify and rationalize
those decisions we start to shape the environment in such a way
that makes it okay for us to do what we're doing we surround ourselves
with people who tell us that that's okay and that's normal
we split family against each other we lie to ourselves not just about the
substance use but about why we had to do it and
most of the time that involves a lot of victim
thinking now you may have heard this before
i don't know but i guarantee you as you've developed an addiction you have
developed this sort of problematic thinking pattern
not just about the substance but about your life and that's the way you've made
yourself feel okay about continuing to make bad decision after bad decision
after bad decision and just like the habit of drinking or
drugs doesn't go away immediately the habit of these thought processes
don't go away immediately either you see in old school
recovery they might say well addicts think this
way and alcoholics think that way and i do think that there's some truth
in that sometimes when i hear that though i feel
like what the 12-step program is trying to say is like
those were inherent things in the person which i guess could have been but i kind
of think those characteristics those addict or
alcoholic qualities character defects or whatever you want
to call them if they weren't there the process of the addiction created
them so what i like about this old school recovery
process it's not so much that i think you should buy into the fact that
there's something wrong with you you're inherently broken
actually i kind of think we're all inherently broken i think that's our
spiritual journey it's just that if you have an addiction
drugs or alcohol that's just the way you've been managing that
broken feeling so it's not the so much that i think that you should sort of buy
into this there's something wrong with me philosophy
but you need to understand that it doesn't necessarily mean something wrong
with you but there are some processes other than just
about the substance that have gained momentum and these are unhealthy
thinking processes that if you don't address
are very likely to lead you to relapse those thinking processes have to do with
how you manage your emotions how you manage your relationships do you
tend to fall into victim thinking do you get angry and run over other
people in the process and in a lot of the new school recovery
thinking philosophies none of those things are addressed
because they're going from this different point of view that it's always
just about the substance i kind of think it's both i kind of
think that's the beginning and the other stuff is the fallout but i
think that the new school stuff doesn't necessarily address some of that
fallout stuff as adequately as 12-step or older school type programs do
now they don't really point it out to you that way so you don't even really
realize that that's what you're doing necessarily when you're working these
programs but that's essentially what's happening
it's teaching you how to manage your emotions it's teaching you how to
make your relationships better it's teaching you how to live with integrity
and it's sort of the byproducts of those old-school recovery processes that help
you become a better person not that you were a bad person but you
thinking probably got bad along the way somewhere and help you live a life in a
way that's going to make you like yourself better which is ultimately
going to make you need drugs and alcohol so
much less now do you have to work a 12-step program to get that
no you don't you can get that through counseling you can get that through
coaching or even life coaching but you've got to do some
more deep down work on the inside of who you are
it's not just about deciding that you were wrong about this chemical and you
don't like it anymore and therefore you put it down i do think that's part of
the process love that i think that that's more
appealing to people in a lot of ways than some of this thought process that
there's something wrong with me have you guys ever heard people say this i've
said it i know i've heard many other people say it but that's
the thing that everyone can benefit from a 12-step program
i totally agree with that some of the biggest roadblocks to why people
don't work 12-step programs is because they don't like the idea of labeling
themselves addicts or alcoholics or saying that
they're bad or corrupt type people so there's such a
stigma attached to that even if it's just in their own mind that
they resist that and so they're more likely to sort of buy into
these newer school concepts but there are some things that happen in
that process whether it's in a church program
a counseling program treatment program or 12-step program
that addresses some of these underneath things that some of these newer school
programs just don't quite get to and they may seem separate than
addiction but they're really not separate it's all
intertwined in there together there are a lot of reasons why i like
12-step i don't think it's the end-all all i think that there's a lot of
different ways to get there but there are some
core things and factors happening that are in place
in the 12-step program and if you watch this video next
it'll highlight for you exactly what those core functions are
so that you can either get those through the 12-step process or through any other
process it's just important that you get them