Brain and Behvaior
The primary pleasure chemical in our brain that plays a major role in substance abuse and addiction.
What is dopamine?
This 4-letter acronym alerts you to high-risk states: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired.
What is HALT?
This core recovery slogan reminds members to break down daunting milestones into digestible 24-hour increments.
What is one day at a time?
A therapeutic technique of focusing awareness fully on the present moment while calmly accepting your feelings and thoughts.
What is mindfulness or meditation?
This late Friends actor was highly transparent in his raw, posthumous memoir detailing his decades-long battle with severe alcoholism.
Matthew Perry?
The clinical term used when a person needs more of a substance to produce the same effect originally felt.
What is tolerance?
Rather than being a single sudden event, relapse is widely understood by clinicians to be a gradual one of these.
What is a process?
In Step 1, members must admit they are powerless over their addiction and that their lives have become this.
What is unmanageable?
Guilt is feeling bad about what you have done, whereas this toxic feeling is a deep-seated belief that you are bad as a person.
What is shame?
This iconic Iron Man actor famously attributes his sustained recovery since 2003 to martial arts, therapy, and 12-step support.
Robert Downey Jr.?
These three specific nouns sum up the external prompts (or triggers) that can cause an individual to experience severe cravings.
What are people, places and things?
The cognitive intervention technique of visualizing the long-term negative consequences of a potential relapse before acting on an urge.
What is playing the tape through?
This experienced peer serves as a guide to mentor a newcomer through the 12 steps.
What is a sponsor?
A healthy set of invisible personal fences built and enforced to protect your personal space, time, and sobriety.
What is boundaries?
Dual diagnosis, or having more than one mental health and/or substance use disorder at the same time.
What is co-occurring disorders?
Sudden isolation, missing support meetings, and poor emotional control are classic signs of this specific stage of a relapse.
What is emotional relapse?
This step explicitly requires members to make a "searching and fearless moral inventory" of themselves.
What is step 4?
The core recovery value that counters the addictive urge to hide behavior, captured in the phrase "You are only as sick as your...".
What are secrets?
This former First Lady founded a world-renowned, eponymous treatment center in California in 1982 after conquering her own chemical dependency.
Who is Betty Ford?
A severe mental state of hallucinations and extreme delusions that can be induced by long-term substance abuse.
What is drug induced psychosis?
The dangerous mental trap of believing you can successfully switch to using a completely different, non-primary drug of choice.
What is cross addiction?
This foundational prayer asks for the composure to accept the unchangeable and the brave intent to alter what can be modified.
What is the serenity prayer?
This clinical acronym stands for a structured form of therapy focused on identifying and changing negative, destructive thinking patterns.
CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)?
The Ohio city widely recognized by historians as the official birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935.
What is Akron?