The Valley of Addiction™ 

Awareness and Treatment by Education of Substance Abuse & Addictions

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What is The Valley of Addiction & Why Should You Be Interested?

In order to truly grasp the answer to this question, readers are asked to wrestle with the following suggested concepts and sentence structures until dawn starts to break, because it will. 

What is The Valley of Addiction: The Valley of Addiction is an addiction treatment by education approach to the 10,000-year old cultural dilemma of substance abuse and chemical dependency. 

It is a simplified display of 70 accurate descriptions of 70 inevitable conditions suggested by EM Jellinek (1890 to 1963), a multi-lingual, biostatistician, psychologist, during his alcoholism research. 

The curve is a brilliantly helpful way to identify the various and most common stages of alcoholism and recovery, illustrating how addiction can and will only ever get worse, unless a new process of recovery is found.

As an avid student of Jellinek’s curve in my own 30-month process of addiction treatment between 1988 & 1993, a critical stumbling block for me at that time, whilst everything I read made total sense to me, was my learning difficulties in areas of focus, concentration, and subsequent anxiety attacks, making the curve look like a 1000-piece jig-saw puzzle in its box that I needed to complete before lunch. 

It was too much for me to process and frustrated me beyond measure.

The reader can Google ‘Jellinek Curve’ and it will certainly be of immense value for self-understanding. But for me, at that time, if it wasn’t made simple, I would feel stupid.

Then at approximately 7-years clean and sober, as the result of a spiritual awakening, still struggling to sojourn the curve, in the early hours of the morning, in a short-sharp period of between 3 and 5 minutes, Valley of Addiction came to me: 

Deception, Experimentation, Recreation, Escalation, Addiction, Determination, Deterioration, Desperation, Devastation, Intervention, Reflection, Deflection, Submission, Depression, Illumination, Correction, Rehabilitation. 

And there it was, simple and crystal clear. 

It was systematically and chronologically logical, something I could memorise and carry with me as my own internal compass. I’m told dyslexics think in pictures – so imagine how this felt when it came! It felt like a gateway to a deeper sense of freedom.

It was an incredible experience. I did not know what the next noun was going to be, until I was halfway through typing the one that I had just received. 

Today, over 20-years later, Valley of Addiction has paved the way for hundreds and hundreds of men, women, young adults, and families, to a new understanding of the nature of their nature, and the nature of their addictions. 

Week after week, sometimes twice a week, lectures would take our clients on a personal step-by-step exposure of the exact nature of addiction’s fatal conditions, as above, with astounding results. 

Valley of Addiction Workbooks.

No one has ever needed to go through the entirety of our Workbooks. 

Each individual must establish for themselves what it is that they need to expose, what they might need to change, and what it is that they may need to receive mentoring out of.  

This approach examines in graphic detail, every feeling, attitude, and belief that eventually became the foundations upon which the addiction was built and the fuel that kept it active. 

Why Should You Be Interested:  Good question. 

There is only one problem with alcohol: `Alcoholism’. If alcohol consumption does not cost any more than money, it is not a problem, and it is therefore not alcoholism, it is socially acceptable substance use. 

It is safe to say that 60% of your university will be socially acceptable substance users.

However, if problems do creep in, full-blown alcoholism is right behind them. If moods, self-esteem, friendships, finances, studies, ambitions, and/or social activities start to feel adverse consequences because you drank again, substance use has evolved into substance abuse and an embryo of alcoholism has been conceived.

It is sad but safe to say that 30% of your university will never be very far away from becoming substance abusers. Not because they are mad, bad, or stupid. Simply because no-one told them. 

It is also really sad to say that 10% of your university student body, at any given time, will fall into chemical dependency.

So, the question should possibly be: ‘how does one fall pregnant with alcoholism?’ and for the answer to that question, we need never look beyond the gateway of Valley of Addiction; Deception (Not me), Experimentation (I’m just trying it, just seeing what all the fuss is about), Recreation (It helps me to relax, just at the weekends), Escalation (I’m starting to see that I need more and more to achieve the desired result) – that’s Addiction. 

It will only be an embryo to start with, but so was King Kong.

In just over 2-years in five addiction treatment facilities at a personal level, it was drummed into us: addiction is a disease, it’s hereditary, once an addict always an addict, the only way forward is total abstinence, don’t even use mouthwash, go to recovery meetings at least twice a week for the rest of your life, keep coming back, it works if you work it, it won’t if you don’t – leaving me feeling like a gun was being held to my head.  

In just over 25-years of addiction and family counselling, it never ceased to amaze me how many parents also live in fear of their children becoming addicted. 

Even to the point of booking them into rehab at the first signs of substance abuse, because of their own fears, leaving me feeling as if they are holding a gun to their child’s head. It’s a parenting style very common with addictions that we at AreYouOk can also address through education, understanding & empowerment on our website.    

Example: Inoculative Parenting manifests in a variety of ways, but with lengthy experience in the addiction treatment context, we could not even begin to tell you how many fear-filled parents, to ‘protect’ their children against addiction, actually inoculate them against addiction treatment if ever it is needed later in life. Not because they are mad bad or stupid, simply because no-one ever told them. 

At AreYouOk, because you are tomorrow’s parents, and because you are tomorrow’s leaders, and because you are tomorrow’s hope, we welcome you and invite you into the wisdom we gained from some of the errors we made because no-one told us.  

Colin & Deanna Garnett 

BA Th, Dip Addiction Psychology, Dip Parenting & Child Psychology

BA LLB, Administrator, Certified Proof Reader/Proof Editor

Email: colingarnett59@gmail.com

Mobile: 07766 862 739

© Colin Garnett 2022