A Reader’s Guide to Psychology and Recovery
Building a Valued Life: contents
Towards what matters even in the darkest times. Dr Eric Hadinata, MBBS BMedSci FRACGP FAChAM. First edition, 12/09/2026.
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These are the complete chapter titles and contents headings of the 305-page Reader’s Guide. Expand a chapter to see its section headings. All reading links, including individual sections, open the protected reader and require Reader’s Guide access details.
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Front matter
Chapters
Section headings for chapter 1: Understanding the treatment and making it your own
- A reason of your own
- One treatment with a clear direction
- The same purpose under different pressures
- Different explanations can illuminate the same event
- What counts as good evidence
- A treatment effect and a mechanism answer different questions
- Confidence is part of the context of care
- Helpful information without unnecessary alarm
- An informed way to practise
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 2: How experience becomes a pattern
Section headings for chapter 3: Values, motivation and chosen direction
Section headings for chapter 4: Acceptance and the struggle for control
Section headings for chapter 5: Attention, mindfulness and presence
- Finding out where your attention has gone
- Attention is selective, and that is useful
- How you notice matters
- The DBT language of observing, describing and participating
- Non-judgemental, one-mindful and effective
- Different practices serve different purposes
- Benefits, limits and a workable response
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 6: Language, thinking and defusion
Section headings for chapter 7: The observing self and the stories we tell
- When one description fills the picture
- Narrating is an ordinary and valuable capacity
- Observing is a perspective, not another person inside you
- How a point of view can be learned
- Three changes hidden inside 'taking a step back'
- What the cinema image can illuminate
- Identity can matter without becoming a cage
- A grounded capacity for choice
- What evidence supports, and what the metaphor cannot prove
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 9: Distress, regulation and the return of choice
- Regulation is not emotional obedience
- When emotion narrows the route to what matters
- Crisis survival has a time horizon
- The next task depends on the capacity available
- Acceptance comes before the tool as a stance
- Primary emotion, secondary emotion and the response target
- Checking facts without cross-examining yourself
- When action changes emotion
- Vulnerability is not a character flaw
- From knowing a skill to finding it under pressure
- Dev returns to the direction, not the verdict
- Priya learns to sequence the work
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 10: Shame, guilt and the courage of compassion
Section headings for chapter 11: Acceptance, validation and the next useful response
- Why either-or thinking is so persuasive
- How sensitivity and invalidation can become a transaction
- Validation without counterfeit agreement
- Validation restores information before it asks for movement
- Wise mind is integration, not an oracle
- Change and acceptance are partners
- Acceptance gives change a direction
- A coherent treatment still needs priorities
- Aroha stops waiting to deserve the next step
- Culture, context and the missing truth
- Common failures of both-and thinking
- Practice makes integration more available
- Elliot leaves the false choice
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 12: Behavioural chains and the places choice can grow
- Behaviour makes sense before it becomes helpful
- Consequences teach more than intentions do
- A chain is a reconstruction, not a prosecution
- The chain is a working hypothesis
- Solution analysis matches a response to a link
- Evidence supports practice, not a magic ingredient
- Mechanism findings remain a map, not a verdict
- Why rehearsal, retrieval and review form one sequence
- Chains extend beyond the individual
- Learning from near misses and partial changes
- Naomi tests the explanation rather than accepting it
- Tomas maps the evening accurately
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 13: Boundaries, assertiveness and the shape of a relationship
- Three goals can pull in different directions
- The priority reveals what the conversation is for
- Anatomy of a clear request
- A boundary describes your action
- Power changes the communication problem
- Conflict needs a shared problem before a shared solution
- Saying no communicates the structure of consent
- Substance use can reorganise relationship priorities
- Repair is tested in behaviour
- A conversation is one link in a larger learning system
- Ravi protects recovery without making the friendship unreal
- Maya makes the invisible workload visible
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 14: Attachment, mentalising and minds under pressure
- The mind predicts before it explains
- Reflective functioning turns reaction into a workable account
- Affect changes which evidence is available
- When a partial truth becomes the whole reality
- Certainty can be too thin or too elaborate
- Trust is a condition for learning, not a moral duty
- What the treatment evidence permits us to borrow
- Addiction raises the stakes of the next interpretation
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 15: Self-worth, misunderstanding and repair
- A social moment can become an identity verdict
- What keeps the person stuck is often a protective sequence
- Misunderstanding is co-created, but responsibility is not automatically equal
- Rupture can look like conflict or perfect cooperation
- Repair begins with reality, not reassurance
- Misattunement can either close or reopen social learning
- From threatened worth to valued relational action
- Treatment findings guide confidence, not identity
- Addiction can make rupture both trigger and consequence
- Daniel corrects the shared map
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 16: When control becomes costly
- Control is a capacity, not a diagnosis
- A transaction between temperament, learning and environment
- The benefits of inhibition can conceal its costs
- Overcontrol as a form of psychological inflexibility
- Perfectionism overlaps without becoming the whole model
- Radical openness and acceptance do different work
- Self-enquiry revises a model rather than attacking a self
- Play and flexible effort widen the behavioural repertoire
- Rules can capture action in more than one way
- The next choice is an empirical question
- What a full treatment adds
- Mixed patterns, addiction and eating disorders
- Treatment evidence supports interest and revision
- Mina gives achievement a different job
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 17: Openness, social signals and connection
- Emotional loneliness is a problem of wanted connection
- Intention, signal and response form a loop
- A social-safety model is a guide, not settled physiology
- Communication fit is mutual
- One missed signal supports several explanations
- Emotional expression should increase information, not performance
- Feedback tests receptivity without demanding obedience
- Play creates low-stakes social flexibility
- Trust develops by domain, dose and reciprocity
- Repair turns impact into future information
- The same signal changes meaning across relationships
- Recovery can depend on being knowable without being exposed
- Evidence distinguishes outcome, process and theory
- Maya and Felix revise the relationship model
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 18: Addiction and the recovery of choice
- When knowledge and desire point in different directions
- What the diagnosis describes
- One diagnosis, several jobs for treatment
- Learning what is worth pursuing
- Why an immediate consequence can outweigh an important future
- Wanting is not the same as liking
- A cue changes the scene, not just the strength of desire
- When relief becomes the main reward
- When ordinary rewards feel distant
- Habits, decisions and the choices available
- What a brain explanation can and cannot settle
- Using explanations to choose the next step
- Recovery is further learning, with support
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 19: Making room for choice: the body, medicines and safety
- The body belongs inside the formulation
- Adaptation, withdrawal and the meaning of relief
- Why the substance and the setting matter
- Steadiness can change what becomes possible
- Reducing reward and reducing withdrawal are different jobs
- Nicotine makes the relationship between relief and choice clear
- Where the evidence is still developing
- Safety plans protect the opportunity to continue
- Jon recognises a recovery gain
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 20: When an urge feels like an instruction
- The few minutes in which the future feels decided
- How desire recruits imagination
- The first thought and the work that follows it
- Acceptance is a different relationship to urgency
- Learning that an urge and an action can separate
- Defusion separates a thought from its authority
- A story can change its job
- Labels can connect, clarify or imprison
- Making a future available without turning it into a fantasy
- A return to use is an event with consequences, not a total verdict
- The second decision after a return to use
- What craving research can and cannot tell one person
- What gives this approach a credible basis
- From an urge to an effective sequence
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 21: Choosing recovery and making the goal your own
- Motivation belongs to the person
- Ambivalence contains information
- Motivational interviewing supports choice without selling recovery
- Discrepancy can guide without shaming
- Acceptance, a chosen skill, then committed action
- Autonomy and clinical responsibility work together
- Harm reduction and abstinence describe goals, not moral ranks
- Importance, confidence and readiness point to different work
- Choosing treatment by the task it must change
- Motivation develops in a social world
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 22: Making valued action easier to repeat
- The gap between a good reason and a repeatable action
- Reinforcement is a relationship, not a judgement about character
- Why timing changes the force of a consequence
- When treatment deliberately rewards a useful behaviour
- Does an incentive undermine personally owned motivation?
- Putting acceptance and reinforcement in the same formulation
- Changing the surroundings is part of committed action
- Rebuilding ordinary rewards without making pleasure a test
- A chain becomes useful when it changes the next situation
- When the support ends, the learning still needs somewhere to live
- Measure what the plan is meant to accomplish
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 23: When rewarding behaviour becomes hard to control
- Start with function, control and consequence
- Related learning processes do not erase diagnostic boundaries
- Rewards can shift from pleasure to relief and urgency
- Gambling turns loss into a demand for another decision
- Gaming may carry connection, mastery and avoidance together
- Compulsive sexual behaviour requires precision and consent
- Acceptance, a selected skill and a return to direction
- Friction lets an earlier decision survive a narrowed moment
- Moderation, harm reduction and abstinence are empirical choices
- Financial and social consequences need direct action
- Review consequences, flexibility and the life being built
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 24: Building a life that can sustain recovery
- What becomes possible when use occupies less of life
- Recovery capital means resources that can actually be used
- Agency grows within circumstances
- A network is useful when its functions are clear
- Trust is rebuilt through repeated evidence
- Belonging can support change without prescribing an identity
- Loneliness and guardedness need different kinds of help
- Progress changes the next treatment question
- A return to use calls for a response that preserves the way back
- Transitions deserve preparation
- A life can remain meaningful while it is still being repaired
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 25: Trauma, the body and present safety
- When survival learning outlives the danger
- The sense of current threat
- Trauma, substances and reciprocal relief
- What the autonomic nervous system contributes
- Interoception, interpretation and choice
- Dissociation and the return of context
- A safety plan is a bridge to action
- Why trauma-focused treatment approaches memory differently
- From protection to a wider life
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 26: Grief, loss and anger
- Two forms of pain that resist tidy stories
- Grief as oscillation rather than stages
- Recognised and unrecognised losses
- Making room without making grief the only activity
- What anger is for
- Arousal, venting and effective action
- Forgiveness, repair and accountability
- Culture and relationship shape the meaning of emotion
- Living alongside what cannot be made right
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 27: A life that supports wellbeing
- Wellbeing is an ecology, not a performance
- Anchors, cues and the minimum viable week
- Behavioural activation: action can precede motivation
- Sleep, rest and the limits of effort
- Pain is real, multidimensional and deserving of care
- Movement, food and medicine as stabilising conditions
- Meaning, spirituality and belonging
- Why circumstances belong inside the psychological model
- Progress that can survive a hard week
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 28: Sleep and the effort to sleep
- An achievement the body knows how to make
- Two biological processes and a state of readiness
- How a temporary disruption can become a pattern
- Why CBT-I changes more than sleep hygiene
- Rhythm, sleep windows and the reason for clinical judgement
- Loosening the night-time examination
- A fictional example: Sam stops sitting the sleep exam
- Progress belongs to the day as well as the night
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 29: Eating disorders and the recovery of choice
- Serious patterns in many kinds of body
- Risk is inherited, learnt and lived
- The logic of short-term protection
- Attention, identity and the narrowing of worth
- One family of disorders, several treatment models
- ARFID shows why one explanation is not enough
- Why coping must be supported by nourishment and care
- A fictional example: Nia's rule is not the whole story
- Recovery is larger than symptom management
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 30: Appearance, attention and body dysmorphic disorder
- When an appearance concern becomes a governing problem
- The promise and failure of certainty
- Seeing is an active process
- Safety behaviours protect and maintain
- Treatment works on the process, not an appearance verdict
- Cosmetic procedures answer a different question
- A fictional example: Ari returns to the meeting
- A life with more than one measure
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 31: Gender, identity and informed care
- Identity is not a disorder
- Several sources of distress can coexist
- There is no compulsory origin story
- Hearing your own signal without forcing a verdict
- Disclosure is a decision about context and power
- Informed care begins with the job an option must do
- What outcome research can and cannot promise
- A fictional example: Kai separates three decisions
- Whole-person wellbeing and continuity
- Ideas to carry forward
Section headings for chapter 32: Continuing a valued life
- Keeping the direction while changing the response
- Six connected processes, rather than six tests
- Reading a difficult moment more accurately
- Recognising progress without manufacturing it
- Making useful responses easier to retrieve
- Continuity, endings and changing care
- Confidence that leaves room to learn
- Ideas to carry forward
Back matter
Includes the glossary and 198 references. Their full text is available in the protected book.