My Pledge To You

Within the covers of this book, I will show you how you can cure your alcoholism or drug addiction. Here, at the outset, I want you to notice that I do not mince words. I do not say "however," "maybe," "although," "perhaps," or use other qualifying terms or conditions. By reading this book, you will learn how to cure your alcoholism or drug addiction. That statement is based on the results we achieve at Passages in Malibu, California, the world’s most effective substance abuse treatment center, where the success rate of our treatment program at the time of this writing is highest in the country.

In 1956, the American Medical Association (AMA) named alcoholism as a disease. Throughout the world today, the existing primary paradigm regarding alcoholism and drug addiction is not only that they are diseases, but also that they are incurable. We’re told that even if we were to stop abusing substances, the disease would continue and we would be addicts or alcoholics forever. It is that belief that is primarily responsible for the stagnation that has existed for the past seventy years or so in the treatment of alcoholism and addiction. It is that paradigm that has given birth to those two terrible, and untrue, slogans "Once an alcoholic or addict, always an alcoholic or addict" and "Relapse is part of recovery."

It is my intention to change that paradigm in your mind, and perhaps throughout the world. Innovators in any field who have brought about revolutionary changes report that longstanding paradigms are exceedingly difficult to eradicate and replace with new paradigms. However, eradicate and replace we must if we are to survive.

Alcohol and drugs are not the problems; they are what people are using to help themselves cope with the problems. Those problems always have both physical and psychological components - anything from anemia, hypoglycemia, or a sluggish thyroid to attention deficient disorder, brain-wave pattern imbalances, or deep emotional pain. You will be reading later about the steps to recovery that address these causes, but foundational to them all is this key premise: when the underlying problems are discovered and cured, the need for alcohol or drugs disappears.

Reading this book will open your mind to new ways of thinking that will cause you to see your dependency, and perhaps your entire life, in a whole new light. It will help you understand that all dependency is just a symptom, not a problem. Seeing your dependency in that new light will enable you to heal yourself more quickly and more effectively than ever before - and permanently. Alcohol actually scars your liver. Since the liver cannot feel that type of pain, we can literally drink ourselves to death. It is never a pretty death, because we are slowly poisoned by the toxins our livers can no longer filter out. If your liver could feel that type of pain, you would never consume your second drink…