Sex, Drugs and Other Compulsive Behaviors
Process addictions are addictions to behaviors and activities that bring about emotional and even physical relief through the behavior itself and related brain chemistry alterations. Most process addictions are excessive distortions of behaviors that in and of themselves are not necessarily harmful. Sexual addictions, for example, involve compulsive and excessive behaviors around a human activity which is not in itself harmful. Other process addictions may involve harmful behaviors, but even these have an element of excess and compulsivity to qualify as an addiction.
Offering long-term community living treatment and outpatient programs for adults as well as families affected by the disease of addiction, Caron Renaissance has developed a complementary array of related clinical services to treat multiple addictions simultaneously – including process addictions. Long recognized for clinical excellence and recovery effectiveness, Caron Renaissance sets the gold standard for long-term addiction treatment. Founded in 1990 and based in Boca Raton, nonprofit Caron Renaissance is part of the internationally renowned Caron Treatment Centers network.
“At Caron Renaissance, we provide ethical, sophisticated, cogent treatment which promotes and underscores the necessity for personal change if the patient and family are to regain health,” said Robert Johnson, clinical director for Caron Renaissance. “Our therapeutic milieu guides each patient through a thorough process of personal introspection and social exploration. This process results in individualized treatment plans designed to offer the choice of risking personal change. We assist patients in exploring the process addictions which include sexual compulsivity, compulsive gambling, workaholism, relationship addiction, and religion fanaticism. We utilize a variety of expressive, experiential, and cognitive-behavioral therapies addressing those issues. We also have specialized groups for trauma, parenting, body image, gambling, anger resolution, smoking cessation, grief/loss, spirituality, and sexual concerns. Community support is encouraged through attendance at the different types of twelve-step recovery meetings.”Families respond to process addictions with behavior very similar to their response to other addictions. Denial and enabling from family members often support an addiction to gambling, for example, in that families will often move in to pay off debts, avoid looking at the seriousness of the problem, and continue to support the addict by believing false promises to change. Caron Renaissance has long recognized how important it is to engage families and concerned others in the treatment process. The emphasis on challenging self-deception and the non-enabling approach further justifies an intense, recovery-oriented family program. To this end, Caron Renaissance has developed extensive family services, which begin even before the patient is admitted.
“We find that even if the addict doesn’t ‘get it,’ the new boundaries set by the family as a result of their own recovery and their practice of non-enabling behavior make it more difficult for the addict to follow the same destructive path,” said John Baudhuin, director of family services at Caron Renaissance. “We work with the families to prepare themselves for the next crisis and, as they deal with this in a new, more effective way, they are far less likely to revert to the old behavior.”“We also acknowledge that process addictions and substance addictions frequently coexist and may be interrelated,” continued Johnson. “There’s a pattern of out of control behavior, negative consequences due to the behavior, inability to stop the behavior despite the consequences, increase in tolerance and the amount of indulgence, preoccupation with anticipation of the behavior, and denial that the behavior is a problem.”
“In addition to a relationship with our patients’ families, we cannot overstate the value we place on establishing and maintaining relationships with referents throughout the treatment process,” concluded Baudhuin. “We recognize that many of our patients with process addictions come to us as a result of a professional referral. Our ongoing effort at Caron Renaissance is in continuing to develop an interdisciplinary practice that is designed to address the complex issues that characterize patients and families who are typically treatment-resistant and relapse-prone. “
