Customer Reviews

Getting Beyond Sobriety: Clinical Approaches to Long-Term Recovery (Gestalt Institute of Cleveland Publication)

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I was excited to read this Gestalt approach to overcoming addictive behavior. I ended up being disappointed by the author's adherence to traditional disease model/12-Step thinking, rather than supporting the basic premises of humanistic and Gestalt therapy philosophy. In particular, the author remains stuck in describing people who have overcome addictive behavior as "addicts" or "alcoholics." Rather than seeing people as being dynamic and growing, he assumes the old "once an addict, always an addict" position. Similarly, he refuses to acknowledge that many people overcome their addictive behavior and learn to become moderate in their use. Toward this, he repeats the old circular logic that such people were "probably not real addicts in the first place." If the author were able to actually believe the Gestalt premises that he writes about in a more general context, including seeing "people" rather than "addicts," this book could have lived up to its potential.