The Reality Between: A Buddhist Approach to Addiction, Grief, and Psychotherapy

In The Reality Between, author Ken Lucas takes up where Elisabeth Kübler-Ross left off.Lucas elegantly makes the case that although psychotherapists have limited the use of Kübler-Ross's "Five Stages of Grief" to physical death, patients can be taught to see anger, depression, and even addiction in their own grief context. The Reality Between shows how therapists can train themselves to hear the dozens of grief states their patients are experiencing at every single moment!Most psychotherapists fail to see their patients drowning in grief.Anger and depression are grief stages, not simply "stressors" or stand-alone issues.Most people die unhappily in the middle of Kübler-Ross's grief stages.As humans, we have a duty to become just as fluid and dynamic as the ever-changing world around us.Placing grief into a much larger, more fundamental Eastern context is a must for every psychotherapist.

Kenneth A. Lucas is a licensed addiction therapist and author of Outwitting Your Alcoholic, published in 1998 by Idyll Arbor, Inc. He has taught thousands of patients over the years to reframe their depression, anger, and addiction as stages of grief that reflect the Buddhist truth of impermanence.