SMART Recovery was recently featured in Cigna’s Behavioral Awareness Series, in an episode entitled: Freedom From Addiction.
SMART Recovery Board President, Bill Greer, is someone who understands addiction from two perspectives: as someone who has used the SMART program to overcome an addiction and as a facilitator of hundreds of SMART meetings that help others.
In this interview with Cigna, he explains that recovery is so much more than stopping your addictive behavior. It is creating a new life full of new opportunities. Bill says, “Recovery has many different meanings, some of which are stopping the challenging behavior. Long term recovery requires us to build a new life, recovering what we lost, the person or self we were before addiction started controlling your life.”
Bill goes on to say that, “people think they’ve got it licked after six months, but they haven’t figured out what they are going to do after they stopped using. What are you going to do to make your life more fulfilling? To seize the new opportunities?”
That drive to create a new life, comes from finding your own reasons to change and recover. Bill explains that telling someone to stop doing something isn’t always effective because people need to find that motivation, that reason within themselves.
Finding and maintaining that motivation is the first step in SMART’s 4-Point Program®, which includes:
- Building and Maintaining Motivation
- Coping with Urges
- Managing Thoughts, Feelings, and Behaviors
- Living a Balanced Life.
To learn more about SMART Recovery’s approach to addiction recovery, we encourage you to listen to this informative interview.
Click here to listen to Bill’s interview – Freedom from Addiction.
About SMART Recovery
Founded in 1994, SMART (Self-Management And Recovery Training) uses science-based techniques that have proven to be effective in helping people recover from addiction problems involving any substance or behavior, including such things as alcohol, drugs, gambling, over-eating, shopping, and internet use.
Each week, thousands of people discuss recovery progress and challenges at more than 3,000 in-person meetings in 23 countries, daily online meetings and 24/7/365 message board forums and chat rooms.
Participants use SMART to assume responsibility for their own recovery and become empowered using its 4-Point Program®: building motivation; coping with urges; managing thoughts, feelings and behaviors; and living a balanced life.
For more information, please visit www.smartrecovery.org.
