A Sneak Peek at Dr. Patrick Carnes Recovery Zone II, Building A New Life

Dr. Patrick Carnes, the Clinical Architect and Senior Fellow for Gentle Path at The Meadows, has been working with patients and using his experience to help develop his next seminal work, Recovery Zone II, Building A New Life.

In a sneak peek of Dr. Carnes’ work, he describes what the patients that come to Gentle Path experience when approaching the idea that treatment may be needed for their sexual issues. He states:

“We are wired to protect the young self. Consider a child in danger. Even the most hard-bitten or self-absorbed of us instinctively will protect children. Without hesitation, we will place ourselves between the threat and the child. We will do all that we can to ensure the protection of that child even if life-threatening to us. Every reader upon reflection will remember an effort to help a child. There was no deliberation. No stopping to reflect on whether that child was worthy. Or even was there consideration of whether the child was unknown to us or a friend or a family member. We just did it. Collective consciousness, genetic coding, or cultural imprint, it did not matter. The decision was made.

In the world of addiction, the willingness to go to any length to make life different is elusive to both addicts and loved ones. We have compared the addictions and their accompanying attachments and feelings to a ‘black hole.’ The analogy is that negative dark energy in a star becomes so powerful, the star system collapses in on itself. Nothing – not even light – can escape. The systems of our life including our very biology, recycles the toxic, the unreal, and the destructive through the electrochemical rivers of our brains. Obsession keeps us in a series of closed loops as families, as persons, and as organisms. The original decision to be who we are is lost in the turmoil and gravity of our own darkness. What we would commit to for another child, we could not do for the child within us.”

How true this is for the patients considering treatment at Gentle Path at The Meadows. Fathers, brothers, or sons, they give love and care to those who are around them and yet hesitate to make a decision to help themselves in their own lives. Giving up anything for their loved ones, the compassion and care do not extend to themselves, but those who make the step to come to Gentle Path find their lives immeasurably improved and changed beyond their initial imagining.

More insights and excerpts from Recovery Zone II to come.