Personal Recovery Programme – The LifeRing Approach

Addiction is widely recognised as having “biopsychosocial” impacts. In other words, it has negative impacts on physical health, on emotional/psychological wellbeing, and on our social interactions, including with those closest to us.

As addiction progresses, these negative impacts deepen and become all-pervasive. The predicament of active addiction is that we can usually recognise the harmful effects, but find ourselves at a loss when it comes to working out what to do, or where to begin.

To build momentum, each participant in LifeRing is encouraged to develop their own Personal Recovery Programme. This is tailored by the individual to suit their own needs, and adapted over time as those needs change, to progressively build a stable recovery. This approach embraces the modern, evidence-based principle of individualised treatment, and applies it to self-treatment.

Regular participation in meetings offers a pathway for each person to progressively develop their own thinking, and to process everyday decisions that affect their recovery. The cumulative effect of those better decisions sustained over time amounts to a detailed recovery programme, especially when this is translated into written plans.

The Recovery by Choice Workbook offers a structured way of thinking about many of the same issues, and is arranged to address nine life areas (or “domains”), each with its own chapter. The outcome of completing the workbook is a Personal Recovery Programme that reaches into every life domain affected by addiction – an integrated “biopsychosocial” solution that changes with the individual over time, and helps them to recover a more peaceful, fulfilling life.