Red Zone Archives

Recovery Zone ReCheck – New in The Recovery Book

Posted on by

The Recovery Zone ReCheck is a simple relapse prevention plan.

In every Recovery Zone, at all times, you will be at some risk of relapse, often when you least expect it. The Recovery Zone ReCheck helps you avoid relapses by regularly taking stock of your life.

Once a month or so, use the three Recovery Zone ReCheck questions to assess your life. They will help you see when changes are coming up—relationships, work, health, medication and so on—that could trigger a relapse. These changes can be almost anything: dental procedure, divorce, getting a raise, having a baby, moving to a new town.

When you spot such road blocks, you move back a Zone or two, brush up on the guidelines of that Zone, re-commit to sobriety, and re-focus on recovery. See pages 18-21 in The Recovery Book for all the details.

The Recovery Zone System – New in The Recovery Book

Posted on by

The new Recovery Zone System is the “backbone” of the new second edition of The Recovery Book.

Over many years of treating alcoholics and addicts, Dr. Al saw that two issues were messing up recovery for many people:

One, people in early recovery often had no idea how much time and energy they would have to focus on recovery activities.
Two, people with many years of recovery sometimes lost their focus on these activities as the years passed.

Both of these situations, he saw, all too often led to a downward spiral that put people at high risk of relapse. So he developed the The Recovery Zone System (pdf chart).

The Recovery Zone System is a road map for a life in recovery. It gives clear guidelines on when and how a person in recovery can address various areas of life—treatment, fellowship activities, relationships, education, career, finances, recreation, and … Read more...

The Recovery Zone System (TM)

Posted on by

An integral part of the second edition of The Recovery Book is the Recovery Zone System(TM). We are now putting the finishing touches on it, and want to share it. A brief explanation is below.

(UPDATE February 2015: Here is a pdf copy of the The-Recovery-Zone-System chart, including references to the relevant book chapters.)

~ ~ ~

The Recovery Zone System (TM)

Over many years of treating alcoholics and addicts, Dr. Al saw that two issues were messing up recovery for many people:

One, people in early recovery often had no idea how much time and energy they would have to focus on recovery activities.
Two, people with many years of recovery sometimes lost their focus on these activities as the years passed.

Both of these situations, he saw, all too often led to a downward spiral that put people at high risk of relapse. So he developed the Recovery … Read more...

Reality TV Comes to The Recovery Book

Posted on by

~ by Howard Eisenberg ~

Well, not exactly. That’s just a teaser headline to get you to read the next few paragraphs.

There’ll be no TV, but plenty of sobriety reality in The Recovery Book revise we’re working on, as readers of the first book become contributors to the second. How will that work? Here’s a for-instance.

Jennifer B., fresh out of recovery at Willingway and a long stay at its women’s halfway house, needed surgery on both hips and her spine. What she – and Dr. Al – feared most was that an anesthesiologist (or hospital RNs) unfamiliar with addiction recovery would inadvertently throw her into relapse by administering the very drugs that had addicted her in the first place.

As Dr. Al tells people in recovery, “No matter how far along in recovery you are, having surgery means you are back in the Red Zone, and that means … Read more...