Welcome to Therapist Unsensored, a podcast where therapists freely speak their minds about real life matters. Hi, welcome to Therapist Uns answered.

This is episode 30 and we're going to look at the stages of change.

We're going to see how it impacts addiction and any

problematic behavior. You know a topic on many people's mind is change and we

haven't talked much about addiction and how hard that change is.

And I'm wondering, let's use that idea of change in addiction to really develop a deeper

understanding of it and just a deeper understanding of how do you

change anything that's exactly right twenty years ago these two addiction

researchers declimenti and Prashaska they put their ideas together about what they were observing and it started out about

addiction specifically, chemical addiction, but then it was applied to smoking cessation and

HIV and domestic violence even,

even, all kinds of different things that people wanted to change.

And it's called the five stages of change.

And back when I used to work in the criminal justice system and in addiction treatment specifically,

we use this all the time.

But I actually still find that I use it in clinical practice and on myself.

So we thought that this would be a good thing to talk about whether you are struggling with addiction

or not.

Or whether someone you love is and you're trying to

figure out how do I help you know how do you help people who really want to make a

change or you think they should be making a change? I think it's it's also

people who don't want to make a change, but are doing

...