PDF | The Mindfulness Workbook for Addiction – Download

Feeling hopeless and confused, Keith comes to therapy as a last resort. In therapy, he constructs a time line that maps his addictive behavior. He looks especially at times when his addiction grew stronger and at the relapses that left him feeling so powerless. Keith also does the difficult work of identifying and beginning to heal the losses in his life. Finally, he makes connections between his losses and his addiction.

He realizes for the first time that most of his relapses happened in early spring, the same time of year that his grandmother, the one person he could count on as a child, had died unexpectedly. It is also around this time of year that he finds himself arguing more with his wife, accusing her of wanting to leave him. Keith begins to see how the loss-addiction cycle is dominating his life. He can see how the loss of his grandmother brought up strong emotions that he has never learned to cope with and how his fears of losing his wife in the same way propel him further into his addiction and make it more likely that he will lose his wife after all.