Steven Slate, Mark Scheeren, and Michelle Dunbar have created an indispensable guide through the labyrinth of claims about the nature of addiction to explain how this understanding leads to resolution of addiction and to overcoming it. Indeed, their thoroughly grounded scientific exploration of the “meaning of addiction” IS the basis for such personal resolution. To know that your enemy is not only your addiction, but, more importantly, how you think of it, is the key to freedom from addiction. And no volume in the world can put you in a better position for this resolution than The Freedom Model.
STANTON PEELE, PhD Author of Love and Addiction and Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control and creator of the on-line Life Process Program
The Freedom Model vividly operationalizes the words of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” In The Freedom Model, the things you look at are you, me, and our fundamental ability to make willful, constructive choices and changes in our personal lives. Utilizing the power of free will in the pursuit of happiness, we actively shape our destiny. We welcome adaptive changes in our search for new and more promising ways to effectively engage in the world around us. Beyond powerlessness, mindless addiction, and extrinsic influences, we seek an internal locus of control and a life made from the stuff of our own choices. It is our opportunity to define what is right for ourselves, knowing this definition may not find support from others. In The Freedom Model, use and abuse of alcohol and drugs allows for three basic options: heavy substance use, adjusted substance use, and total abstinence. In reality, these options have always been there and it is our right to choose the alternative best suited to our own, self-defined vision of happiness. We decide how we wish to live our life and benefit when our choices derive from our voice within. Would we want it any other way?
REAUME CARROLL MULRY, PhD Clinical and Sport Psychologist
