Cognitive Processes and Abstinence in a Treated Alcoholic Population

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Abstract
There is an increasing body of literature examining cognitive processes which lead to the initiation and maintenance of abstinence. The findings reported here provide some insights into cognitive processes among a treated alcoholic population. This study focused on successful people as defined by abstinence and examined issues that successful people indicated helped them with abstinence and were related to their success. However, abstinence is a narrow measure of success in that recovering people need to make many other social and emotional adjustments. Further research is needed to spell out additional criteria for assessing both success and failure in alcoholism recovery. And, since alocholics are not a homogeneous population, future research needs to focus on subpopulations including those differentiated by phase of the illness, drinking pattern, and relapse history, among other variables. Especially important would be additional research which extended procedures used with spontaneously recovered alcoholics to the study of recovery in a treated population.