How to Kick Everything

Christopher Kennedy Lawford on recovery. Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s ambitious, one-size-fits-all undertaking is titled Recover to Live: Kick Any Habit, Manage Any Addiction: Your Self-Treatment Guide to Alcohol, Drugs, Eating Disorders, Gambling, Hoarding, Smoking, Sex, and Porn. That pretty much covers the waterfront, and represents both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book. There’s no doubting Lawford’s sincerity, or his experiential understanding of addiction, or the fact that the raw ingredients were present in his case: bad genes and a traumatic early environment. He is related to Ted Kennedy, two of his uncles were publically murdered, and he started using drugs at age 12. But this book doesn’t dwell on his personal narrative. Lawford is a tireless supporter of the addiction recovery community, and Recover to Live is meant to be a one-stop consumer handbook for dealing with, as the title makes clear, any addiction. To his credit, Lawford starts out by accurately pegging the addiction basics: A chronic brain disorder with strong neurological underpinnings. He cites a lot of relevant studies, and some questionable ones as well, but ultimately lands on an appropriate spot: “You can’t control which genes you inherited or the circumstances of your life that contributed to your disease. But once you know that you have the disease of addiction, you are responsible for doing something about it. And if you don’t address your problem, you can’t blam...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs