Taming the Dragon

The book is about addiction and the impact that it has on family, partners, freinds and other people close to a person who is in the grip of addiction. These might include employers and other significant people in the person's life.

The book aims to provide solutions and strategies that can enable such people to cope with and even overcome the many difficulties or traumas asssociated with addiction.

Part one is dedicated to descibing and explaining addiction; the forms it might take, possible causes behind it, how it affects the addicted person, how it affects family and relatuionships and the different stages and degrees of its progress. This section also explains how to deal with these stages.

Part two focuses on what the person close to, or in a relationship with an addicted person can do to (a) help the saddicted person and (b) help themselves. A broad range of issues are discussed, including emotional consequences and implications, the need to make changes and how to implement those changes, support networks and where to find them, self care, the difference between rescuing and helping, co-dependency and more.

Part two also offers effective methods of helping a person into recovery, how to stage an 'intervention' when the person needs to be confronted, how to support them through recovery and the problems and issues that the reader might need to deal with once the person is in the recovery stage.

As well as supplying proven strategies to deal with the situation and new ways of looking at the problem, the book provides practical exercises and questions at the conclusion of most chapters. These exercises are designed to help the reader gain a better understanding of the problem and even question the roles that they have been playing in the situation.

The authour, John Sheppard is well qualified to write this book. He has worked in the field of substance abuse for close to thirty years. He has managed a residential rehabilitation centre and a daytime recovery centre for much of this period. He has been a board member of various related institutions and sat on both government and private sector working parties on substance abuse and family violence issues.He is a qualified hypnotherapist and has his own personal story of addiction and recovery. His credentials and part motivation for writing this book also include the tragic experience of losing his soulmate and partner, the mother of his youngest child, to the disease of addiction.