Narrative Means to Sober Ends

Working with clients with addictive problems can be an endless source of uncertainty and frustration - but also of exhilaration, insight, and hope. This volume illuminates the devastating power of addiction and describes an array of innovative approaches to facilitating clients' recovery. Demonstrated are creative ways to help clients explore their relationship to drugs and alcohol, take the first steps toward sobriety, and develop meaningful ways of living without addiction. Interweaving concepts and techniques from family therapy, psychodynamic therapy, and addictions counselling, the book is filled with deeply moving case histories, letters, and personal accounts. Topics covered include the role of AA in fostering healing, treating addicted survivors of trauma and abuse, problems that surface in family intervention and consultation, applications to adolescent and child therapy, working with overlapping substance abuse and food addictions, and issues facing therapists who are themselves in recovery.