{ "item_title" : "What You Missed While You Were Away", "item_author" : [" Stephen Mathis "], "item_description" : "Most people are told that addiction is a disease, and that sobriety is the solution.For many adults, that explanation never fully accounts for why life still feels difficult long after substance use has stopped.In What You Missed While You Were Away, Stephen M. Mathis offers a different explanation: addiction functions as a development-halting experience, not a moral failure and not merely a brain disorder. When substance use begins early - most often during adolescence - it interrupts the normal development of emotional, cognitive, relational, and executive capacities. The person continues to age physically, but developmentally becomes fixed at the stage where substance use took over.Does this sound familiar?You're sober, abstinent, or long past your drug years, but still struggle with planning, follow-through, judgment, or impulse control.Relationships feel strained or immature, even when you care deeply.Money, responsibility, intimacy, or identity remain persistent problem areas.You've worked hard to stop using - yet adulthood still feels harder than it should.Drawing on more than four decades of clinical experience, this book explains how addiction operates as a form of cumulative developmental trauma, quietly arresting growth across multiple life domains - and why abstinence alone rarely restores what was missed.Inside, you'll examine how arrested development related to addiction affects: Thinking, feeling, and acting under stressImpulsivity, frustration tolerance, and behavioral controlRelationships, intimacy, empathy, and boundariesPlanning, judgment, follow-through, and executive functioningMoney management, responsibility, and life organizationIdentity formation, meaning, and existential developmentComfort with solitude, reflection, and internal statesPhysical self-care and long-term healthCommon co-occurring psychological conditions that complicate recoveryWritten for adult survivors of substance abuse and dependency, and for the partners, families, and professionals who live or work alongside them. Not a replacement for therapy or treatment, but a developmental framework for understanding what was interrupted, and why meaningful growth remains possible.You were not broken. You were interrupted.And what was missed can still be understood - and addressed.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/06/948/189/1069481890_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "34.99", "online_price" : "34.99", "our_price" : "34.99", "club_price" : "34.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

Overview

Customers Also Bought

Details