Addiction, Progression & Recovery: Understanding the Stages of Change on the Addiction Recovery Learning Curve

This entertaining and practical book points out a basic fact about changing harmful addictions - that many people need to develop a devotion to a healthy, positive addiction - to which they can cheerfully "just say yes!"

Based on thousands of observations made by the author during 23 years of active participation in the addiction recovery and treatment field, this ground-breaking new book describes five naturally-occurring stages of change on an Addiction Recovery Learning Curve that many people with the most serious harmful addictions will usually have to go through on the long road to lasting recovery.

Addiction, Progression, & Recovery illustrates how harmful addictions often develop gradually with many identifiable signs and symptoms emerging over time in a series of progressively worsening stages, and it clearly describes the lifelong learning process normally followed by people who successfully make the difficult transition from active progression into permanent recovery.

In this pioneering work, Dale Kesten introduces readers to the FACE to FACE Unified Addiction Recovery Model. This promising new developmental learning model offers a realistic and individualized approach to addiction treatment. It can help clinicians simultaneously assess, educate, motivate, and empower clients to eventually control or stop harmful addictive behavior by reframing their past, present, and future experiences as an honest and open-minded series of "Formal Addiction Control Experiments and Failed Addiction Control Experiments."

This innovative new model is not based on any abstract, academic, scientific, or partisan theory about how people might or should be able to change harmful addictive behavior. Rather, it accurately describes the natural and readily observable process by which most people actually do change or ultimately fail to change such behavior in the long run.

Dale Kesten brings solid professional credentials and a depth of practical wisdom and authority to his writing, speaking, public seminars, and clinical training workshops which are drawn not only from his extensive professional experience but also from his unique experience with the process of achieving and sustaining long-term personal change. He is a licensed clinical social worker and a licensed alcohol and drug abuse counselor who has helped thousands of clients learn how to change some of their most addictive, compulsive, or self-defeating attitudes and behaviors through his work in the mental health and addictions treatment field since 1987.

Equally important for the development of his unique perspective on changing addictive behavior, Dale is also a recovering compulsive overeater who has achieved 23 years of sustained success through his active participation in a self-help recovery program since 1981. At that time he was morbidly obese and weighed more than 300 pounds and he has now been maintaining a normal weight (and a remarkable weight loss of about 140 pounds) since 1983.

He earned his Bachelors degree in Government from Cornell University and then worked as a Congressional staff assistant in Washington, DC. Dale has also worked as the editor of a professional journal focused on U.S. Army Aviation, and he later completed the intensive Training Program for Alcoholism and Chemical Dependency Counseling sponsored by the National Council on Alcoholism and Other Drug Addictions/Westchester prior to earning his Masters degree in clinical social work from the Columbia University School of Social Work.

Dale has worked as a front-line clinician or clinical supervisor at outpatient psychiatric and substance abuse clinics, intensive outpatient chemical dependency treatment programs, partial hospital dual-diagnosis programs, residential alcohol and drug-abuse treatment centers, and on inpatient psychiatric and medical detoxification units as well.

Dale now works primarily as an author, speaker, trainer, personal growth seminar leader, and consultant. Dale is the founder and sole proprietor of The HIGHLIGHT ZONE Personal Growth Programs, a publishing and educational services company located in Westport, Connecticut, where he also remains active as a psychotherapist in private practice.