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Ch. 3: Motivation and Readiness to Change

This chapter introduces important concepts related to motivation and readiness to change. These concepts form the basis for several contemporary approaches with a strong evidence base for their effectiveness in helping people make healthful changes in behaviors, changes such as reducing or stopping their use of substances. This is important in terms of:

  • preventing substance use or misuse from becoming a substance use disorder,
  • motivating a person to enter into treatment for a substance-related problem, and
  • engaging a person in the change process
  • relapse prevention.

This content in this chapter stands in sharp contrast to the highly confrontational Intervention approach that you learned about in Module 6 which encourages family members and professionals to be directive, delivering advice and information from a position of authority, and even punitive or coercive (Holleran Steiker, 2016).

You are reading Velasquez, M.M., Crouch, C., Stephens, N.S., & DiClemente, C.C. (2016). Group treatment for substance abuse: A stages-of-change therapy manual, second edition, (pp. 9-36). NY: Guilford Press. In this chapter you will read about:

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Click here for a link to our Carmen course where you can locate the assigned pdf file(s) for this chapter. You will need to be logged into our Carmen course, select Module 7, and proceed to the Coursework area. Under the Readings heading you will find a box with links to the readings for relevant coursebook chapters. Don’t forget to return here in your coursebook to complete the remaining chapters and interactive activities.