The Family and Recovery from Alcohol / Drug Addiction:

A very important message for you to take away from this introduction section is my recommendation to strongly encourage your family members or other important people in your life to buy and read Healing the Addicted Brain and sign up for and work through the eLessons on the website. So often just the identified alcoholic/addict gets to participate in addiction treatment, while the family learns little about this life threatening illness. The family members are not allowed to go to most treatment sessions or even 12-step groups for that matter. How are they supposed to learn what you are learning in your treatment program? With Healing the Addicted Brain and www.enterhealth.com, the important people in your life can now learn just about everything that you are learning. Why is this so important for your successful recovery?

For two reasons primarily:

1. First, the more that your family understands the complexities of this chronic medical illness, the more that they can be supportive of helping you make the necessary changes in your life for successful sobriety. For example, through using the above two resources, they will understand that cravings are a natural symptom of the illness of addiction and are not to be feared, but rather effectively “crushed.”
2. Second, the brain injury caused by alcohol and drug addiction can make it more difficult for you to learn and integrate all of the information that you are being taught by your treatment program into your life. Consequently, if your family or support systems are learning the same information though reading Healing the Addicted Brain and using www.enterhealth.com’s eLessons, they can help teach and reinforce these important concepts to you on a day to day basis, even when you can’t remember them.

Now although the next comment sounds self serving, I assure you that it is meant to benefit you. Because of the importance of your family needing to read Healing the Addicted Brain and use the online recovery section of www.enterhealth.com, I recommend that they get their own copy of the book and even more importantly, sign up separately for the advanced recovery section of the website. In regards to the book, there are specific individual exercises and information that they will read that will personalize the concepts to them, therefore enhancing their ability to really read and study the concepts the same time you are doing so. The reason that they need a separate account for the website is even more important to you and your privacy. When you create an account for yourself on www.enterhealth.com, all of the exercises that you fill in on the web are individually personalized and emailed to you. To be most effective for your learning, when filling in these exercises, you need to be very honest with yourself regarding your answers. So from a confidential standpoint, you will probably not want your family members to have access to this information. Also, your account on www.enterhealth.com will actually be your online “fingerprint” of your recovery process, with all of your customized information to help you at those times in the future that you need it most. This “online journal,” so to speak, can be very valuable to your success over the long term, as you can go back and work though an eLesson two or three times over a period of weeks or months. In doing so, you will find that your answers frequently change as you progress in your sobriety. Because of the above reasons, I strongly recommend that you and your family members have separate Enterhealth advanced recovery accounts. (It is fine if the family members want to share one family account, if they do not want to use the exercises that much.)

Well that should be all of the introduction that you need at this point. I am very excited that you have purchased Healing the Addicted Brain and are here on the Enterhealth website, trying to learn the information and tools that you will need to successfully stay sober from alcohol and drugs. I know that the information in the book and on this website will prove very helpful in guiding you to find the optimal treatment solution for you and your loved ones. Let’s get started. Please return to reading the book until the first Enterhealth reference in Chapter 3 and then return here, and we will do our best to enhance your learning experience.

Enterhealth creates individualized alcohol addiction treatment and drug addiction rehabilitation plans because we know your unique situation calls for an effective one-of-a-kind solution. 

Contact Enterhealth today at 800.388.4601 to schedule an admission or email us at info@enterhealth.com for more information.