Jessica’s Reviews > It Takes a Family: Creating Lasting Sobriety, Togetherness, and Happiness > Status Update

Chapter 11: Don’t Forget the Children

This section covers the following:

• Brain development and toxic stress
• Children need consistency
• Secrets and shame
• Children create off-base narratives
• Changing the family legacy

Chapter 10: Families Pay a High Price

This section covers the following:

• Impact of chronic stress
• Hopelessness
• Stress hurts learning
• Enabling in survival mode
• Learned helplessness
• “Families in crisis” (p. 103)
• Strength-oriented recovery

“As Leo Buscaglia so beautifully wrote, ‘Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around’” (p. 95).

Chapter 9: A New Look at Enabling Addiction

This section covers the following:

• Enabling to save ourselves
• Rooted in family survival
• Separation doesn’t guarantee an end to unmanageability
• Enabling definition
• Examples of enabling the disease vs. recovery
• Pink cloud
• Quality of our future determined by actions
• Leo Buscaglia quote (p. 95)

Chapter 8: Tiny Tasks

This section covers the following:

• Mistakes made when trying to change behavior
• Competing motivations
• Skipping recovery behaviors
• “Action before motivation” (p. 76)
• The process of change: 3 steps
• Family intervention
• Example of the bottom-line
• Learning from “those who lived it, lost it and regained it” (p. 84)

Chapter 7: A Closer Look at Relapse

This section covers the following:

• Relapse intervention planning in SFR
• Keeping recovery central
• Emotional unmanageability
• Quitting on their own: 96-98% relapse (p. 64)
• Rationalizations laying groundwork for relapse
• Recovery plans need family/outside support
• The story of Monica: Relapse and recovery
• Families can relapse

Chapter 6: Motivation Isn’t the Answer

This section covers the following:

• Motivation for the short-term
• 3 Myths about change:
• Education, attitude, and “knowing better”
• Positive and negative social norms
• Guilt vs. shame
• SFR to model recovery and behavioral expectations
• “What we do, not what we think” (p.55)
• The story of Greg: Motivation alone is ineffective

Chapter 5: A Misunderstood Disease

This section covers the following:

• Alcohol as a vice vs. addiction
• Disease vs. defect of character or loss of willpower
• Complex genetics and lifestyle
• Finding compassion
• Function of denial
• Reward and anti-reward centers
• Prefrontal cortex and limbic system
• “Self-control is a limited cognitive resource” (p. 45)
• Learning how to be sober

Chapter 4: Introducing Structured Family Recovery

This section looks at “The Williams” family as they demonstrate effective usage of SFR. It also suggests rethinking “family involvement” as a “systemic solution” instead of simply motivating loved ones into treatment.

Chapter 2: Stick with the Winners

This section reviews the 8 essential elements found within Physician Health Programs (PHP). “[PHPs] are the first to demonstrate that integrating all eight elements into a single, long-term program of support is the formula for producing durable, lasting sobriety” (p. 19-20).