The Mindful Path to Addiction Recovery

Mindfulness, the quality of attention that combines full awareness with acceptance of each moment, just as it is, is gaining broad acceptance among mental health professionals as an adjunct to treatment. Because at the heart of addiction is the fear of painful emotional states, addicts compulsively seek drugs and alcohol to avoid or escape emotional pain. Mindfulness, on the other hand, helps us develop greater acceptance and ease with life’s challenges, as well as greater self-compassion.

Here, Dr. Lawrence Peltz, who has worked as an addiction psychiatrist for nearly three decades, draws from his clinical experience and on the techniques of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) to explain the fundamental dynamics of addiction and the stages of the recovery process, and also gives us specific mindfulness exercises to support recovery.

Lawrence Peltz, MD, has worked as an addiction psychiatrist for more than two decades. He is the medical director of the Bournewood Caulfield Center, a drug and alcohol treatment facility in Woburn, Mass, and has been on the clinical faculty at both Harvard and Boston University Schools of Medicine.  He is also a trained teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and he speaks regularly to mental health professionals about mindfulness and recovery.