Sober Senorita: Interview with a Recovery Blogger
Next up in our top-blogger interview series is Kelly Fitzgerald, of Sober Senorita. We’ve been following Kelly’s blog for a while now, maybe 2-3 years. Her personal and professional growth, as well as that of her blog, have been nothing short of inspiring. What started out in 2014 as a blog about Kelly’s personal recovery […]
Avoidance is Addiction’s Best Friend
by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. Avoidance and Fear Nothing feeds fear like avoidance. Substance use itself often becomes problematic because it is such an effective method of short-term avoidance. Eventually, the repetition compulsion of avoidance builds up so much unaddressed residual byproduct that the costs of continued avoidance outweigh the potential costs of facing what we […]
Canada Legalizes Cannabis
by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. The abating cannabis prohibition was dealt a stifling blow this week as Canada became to first G7 nation to legalize the plant. President Trump recently said that he would back a bipartisan bill for federal cannabis legislation reform in the United States. The U.S. bill stops short of federal legalization, but […]
Moderation: Recovery’s Best Kept Secret
by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. The greatest trick the puritanical tyranny of abstinence ever pulled was convincing the world that moderate drug use doesn’t exist. For over a century addiction recovery, despite the facts, successfully fought and relegated moderate substance use to the shadows of quackery. As is often the case, we only fight what we […]
The National Recovery Study
by Tom Horvath, PhD, ABPP The US media often presents stories about substance problems. However, there are fewer stories about how individuals resolve these problems. The National Recovery Study (Kelly, Bergman, Hoeppner, Vilsaint, & White, 2017) was an effort to estimate how many in the US have resolved substance problems, and how they did so. […]
Changing Addictive Behavior: The Perils and Promise of Perfectionism
By Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. For many, perfectionism is a guilty pleasure – we know it isn’t good for us but we can’t seem to let it go. Well, difficulty in letting something go is almost always a sign of that thing being beneficial in some ways, and perfectionism is no different. When it comes to […]
Recovering from Recovery: An Interview with a Recovery Blogger
The online recovery community has exploded in the last decade with several resources, from apps to forums to blogs. These resources have become integral to the recovery process for millions of people affected by addiction. Over the next few months, we will be interviewing some of the top-rated recovery bloggers of 2018. These bloggers play […]
Dirty Talk in Addiction
by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. Here at Practical Recovery we’ve done a number of pieces on the language of addiction. I personally consider the article It’s Time to Clean Up The Language of Addiction, by Anne Fletcher, MS, RD, to be a foundational cornerstone to quality addiction treatment. In recent weeks a particularly common term in […]
Addiction Treatment Can be Harmful
by Tom Horvath, Ph.D., ABPP. Clients often attempt to choose addiction treatment carefully. Typically, they search for a “program” suitable to their problems, at least as they understand their problems. Unfortunately, most clients are uneducated about addiction. They are not professionals, and the addiction treatment industry and media often present inaccurate information. Consequently, clients can […]
What Experts Are Saying About Outpatient Rehab
by Thaddeus Camlin, Psy.D. Outpatient Rehab: What the Experts Say Anyone who encounters the US addiction treatment industry is likely to experience a ‘hard sell’ on inpatient. The idea that addiction problems are resolved by ‘going away for 30 days’ is as pervasive as it is uninformed. Lasting change may be initiated in four weeks, […]