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Long Addiction, Short Recovery: Unlearning Relief and Rebuilding the Self
Paperback
Series: The Hale & Wise Trilogy, Book 2
Publisher: Hale & Wise
Published: Jun 14 2026
Pages: 148
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.32 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Subtitle: Unlearning Relief and Rebuilding the Self
Underneath every addiction is a relief problem - and your brain learned the lesson too well.
For anyone unlearning a compulsive source of relief - alcohol, substances, or any behavior whose fastest way to survive the day became the thing narrowing their life - and for the people who love them.
The second book of the Hale & Wise Trilogy offers a non-shaming, neurobiological map back to steering. It begins with an uncomfortable truth most recovery books skip: the love was real. From there it shows why willpower fails (it is a calm-day phenomenon, useless in the storm), why state - not character - runs the whole show, and how relief gets trained into the brain as the fastest exit until it outranks nearly everything you love. You will meet the Wall of Death, the relief loop, dialectical abstinence, the reset protocol, the sanctuary of the room, and the grief nobody warns you about.
Written by a man who spent fifty years as a high-functioning alcoholic and got sober in his seventies, this is recovery as the patient engineering of better states - not heroic abstinence, but the slow return of choice.
The road out is shorter than the road in - but only if you stop measuring it in willpower. Steering is the second stage.
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