Six Essentials to Achieve Lasting Recovery

Discover the six guiding principles key to lasting recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs. Discover why they’re important, how they relate to the Twelve Steps, and why they work.

Anyone who has recovered from addiction to drugs or alcohol knows that getting sober is only the beginning. Working the Steps, patching life back together, and living sober are where the real work lies. While the Twelve Steps provide a program of lifelong recovery, recovery experts Sterling Shumway and Thomas Kimball have identified six essential values, or principles, that reinforce the Steps and that are key to achieving lasting recovery:

Hope: A reawakening after despair; to live with greater confidence

Healthy Coping Skills: Managing the pain and stress of life

Sense of Achievement and Accomplishment: Moving beyond the limits of addiction toward personal goals

Capacity for Meaningful Relationships: The positive support and connection with family and peers

Unique Identity Development: The emergence of a unique positive identity

Reclamation of Agency: The internal knowledge that you have choices in your behavior

Using their research, personal stories, and guided journals and exercises, Shumway and Kimball thoroughly unlock these complex principles for recovering addicts and their families, and provide practical steps for applying them to a long-term recovery program.

Sterling T. Shumway, PhD, LMFT, is a regent's professor in the Department of Applied and Professional Studies, Addictive Disorders and Recovery Studies Division (ADRS) at Texas Tech University, and is the program director of the Addiction and Recovery Studies Program.Thomas G. Kimball, PhD, LMFT, is an associate professor at Texas Tech University and the associate managing director for the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery.Both authors are co-facilitators of multi-family groups at The Ranch at Dove Tree, an inpatient alcohol and drug treatment facility providing detoxification, residential, sober living, and intensive outpatient services near Lubbock, Texas.