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How to Raise Your Self-Respect: The Ultimate Guide
I once worked as a drug counselor at the Mt Diablo Medical Center in Concord, Ca. The hospital offered a thirty-day treatment program for alcoholics and drug addicts.
Moving people to stop drinking and using might seem like a fools’ errand. It is. Failure is often the outcome.
I showed how to gain sobriety: drop your using friends, no booze in the domicile, and banish self-pity.
My chief interest was protecting addicts from relapse, which remains a big problem in the treatment world. Only about 8% of addicts and alcoholics obtain permanent sobriety.
I had designed a program called the Life Enhancement Training Program or LETS, which was another attempt among many to cope with the relapse problem.
Evidence suggests approximately 90 percent of alcoholics are likely to experience at least one relapse over the four years following treatment. No controlled studies have demonstrated any intervention or program that predictably prevents relapse.
My program emphasized strengthening resilience and self-esteem, but it didn’t stand much of a chance, and in fact, it never got off the ground. The rhetoric of this sort fell on deaf ears.
I tried pitching the approach to a community of pot growers in Northern California…