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WORK TITLE: Addict in the House
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://drrobinbarnett.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://drrobinbarnett.com/about-me/ * https://www.thefix.com/robin-barnett-and-living-addict-house
RESEARCHER NOTES:
Notes from writer:
Dates for Education & Career came from LinkedIn. Park Bench Group is in Somers Point, NJ, not nearby Northfield. Much of book is 1st-person (bio/crit)
Since we can’t highlight Bio/Crit quotes in this system (yet), I marked them with [[double brackets]] for your convenience.
PERSONAL EDUCATION:
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, B.S. and certificate in women’s studies; Rutgers University, M.S.W., c. 1992; University of Sarasota, Ed.D., c. 2002.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Private practice of addiction counseling and therapy, 1996-2006; Park Bench Group, Somers Point, NJ, cofounder and addiction therapist, 2006-14; private practice of psychotherapy, behavioral health expert, and writer, 2014–.
Georgian Court College, substance awareness coordinator; Atlantic Cape Community College, adjunct professor; Rutgers University, Camden Campus, adjunct professor, 2013-14. Atlantic County Commission for Women and Children, member; public speaker; guest expert for media programs, including The Steve Wilkos Show.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Robin Barnett became a substance abuse counselor after witnessing her brother’s descent into an addiction that nearly killed him. She earned two degrees in social work and a doctorate in human services administration, along with numerous clinical certifications and licenses in alcohol and drug counseling, sex addiction therapy, and clinical intervention. Barnett spent ten years in private practice until 2006, when she cofounded the Park Bench Group, an addiction rehabilitation facility located in Somers Point, New Jersey. She sold the practice in 2014 and expanded her research to a wider audience through community activities and media appearances.
Barnett was an adjunct professor at Atlantic Cape Community College and at the Camden campus of Rutgers University. She worked as a director of home health care, as founder and executive director of an adoption support network, and as a member of the Atlantic County Commission for Women and Children. Barnett is a frequent guest speaker on broadcast and cable network talk shows. She has also appeared as a substance abuse expert on the syndicated Steve Wilkos Show.
Although Barnett developed much of her expertise through continuing education and years of professional experience, her earliest lessons about addiction were acquired the hard way. She and her family struggled for years to help the addict in their own home–Barnett’s older brother Chris–with little to guide them but trial and error. Year after year, Christ found ways to hide his addiction: in excuses and outright lies. He even explained away a gunshot wound from a drug-related confrontation. Finally his behavior could no longer be ignored, but the family was at a loss for a solution. In the end, it was Chris himself who decided to take his own first steps to recovery. Then and only then could the author support his effort. In her first book, Barnett hopes to help other families manage that long and painful journey.
In Addict in the House: A No-Nonsense Family Guide through Addiction & Recovery, Barnett educates readers with her theory of addiction as a brain disease as well as a behavioral issue. She offers a list of commonly abused drugs, along with the physical and behavioral symptoms attached to the different types of addiction. Barnett offers clues to explain some of the triggers of addiction, from potential genetic predisposition to the overuse of legitimate prescription pain relievers to the emergence of designer drugs or club drugs. She explains the methods of denial and justification that addicts use to manipulate families into enabling their self-destructive lifestyle.
Barnett discusses potential communication skills that can enable the addict’s loved ones to promote honesty without anger, compassion without weakness. She stresses the importance of setting boundaries–and enforcing them, no matter how cruel it may seem. Barnett cautions that no amount of reasoning, begging, threatening, or bargaining can force an addict to change. She also emphasizes the difficult necessity to love the addict while refusing to support the addiction. She discusses recovery as an ongoing process of accomplishments and setbacks, for both the addict and the family. Barnett devotes a chapter to treatment options, and another chapter to the special challenges of dealing with a teenage addict, including legal issues. An appendix includes the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Finally, Barnett looks at recovery as a lifelong process, for addicts and loved ones alike. Even if the addict is not able or ready to begin a process of recovery, family members can begin to shape their own coping and healing processes. According to John McMillian’s article at the Fix, “she includes numerous worksheets designed to help readers clarify their thoughts and manage their feelings.” A Publishers Weekly contributor described Addict in the House as neither memoir nor textbook, but as “an intimate, personal narrative” written by “a fellow traveler.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BOOK: Barnett, Robin. Addict in the House: A No-Nonsense Family Guide through Addiction & Recovery, New Harbinger Publications (Oakland, CA), 2016.
Publishers Weekly, May 30, 2016, review of Addict in the House, p. 49.
ONLINE
Fix, https://www.thefix.com/ (August 11, 2016), John McMillian, review of Addict in the House.
Robin Barnett Home Page, http://drrobinbarnett.com (February 9, 2016).*
Robin Barnett, EdD, LCSW, is a respected behavioral health expert and former CEO of Park Bench Group Counseling, a progressive addiction rehabilitation facility in Northfield, NJ, which she cofounded in 2006. A licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor, and a certified sex addiction expert and therapist, for nearly two decades she has helped countless people conquer addictive behavior and a multitude of behavioral challenges. Inspired by firsthand experience when her own brother encountered a downward spiral with alcoholism and drugs, Barnett hopes to help others manage the heartache of this struggle by sharing her professional—and personal—insights. Barnett is a well-known resource in the clinical community. She was named among “America’s Best Therapists” by Psychology Today, and has appeared as a drug, alcohol, and behavior expert on various national media outlets, including MTV, CNN, HLN, NBC, FOX, ABC (20/20, Nightline), and CBS. Barnett is a regular on The Steve Wilkos Show (NBC Universal Syndication) as their substance abuse expert, and is currently included in the fabric of several unscripted television projects. Barnett holds a doctorate in human services administration from the University of Sarasota and a master’s in social work from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Barnett resides with her family at the Jersey Shore.
How To Live with an Addict in the House
By John McMillian 08/11/16
Author Robin Barnett shares the story of her older brother who managed to convince his family that he was not an addict, even after getting shot in a drug house.
Robin Barnett and Living With an Addict in the House
Robin Barnett
“He had a million excuses,” Robin Barnett says ruefully. Barnett is the author of Addict in the House: A No-Nonsense Family Guide Through Addiction and Recovery (New Harbinger), and she’s talking about her older brother, who, twenty-odd years ago, managed to convince her entire family that he was not, in fact, an addict. He preyed on their credulity so effectively that they remained unaware of his disease even after he survived being shot in the chest during an altercation at a drug house.
“He said he’d driven through a wrong neighborhood, and stopped to ask for directions,” Barnett continues, speaking on the phone from her home near Atlantic City, New Jersey. “Then, when he came home to recover, he was very paranoid. Still, we believed his stories... Had we known what we were looking at, life would have been very different for all of us.”
It wasn’t long, however, before her brother’s addiction became scarily conspicuous, and over the years it led Barnett to numerous places she’d never imagined setting foot in: “seedy motels, jails, mental hospitals.” But it also set her upon a satisfying career path. Instead of finishing nursing school, as she’d planned, Barnett started training to become a psychotherapist who would specialize in helping substance abusers. In 2006, she co-founded the Park Bench Group, a drug and alcohol treatment facility in Northfield, New Jersey, and nowadays she appears as an addiction expert on NBC’s The Steve Wilkos Show.
Addict in the House is Barnett’s first book (though she’s currently working on a second one). Drawing from her personal story and therapeutic experience, it should serve as a vade mecum for those whose loved ones suffer from addiction. Barnett’s advice is often tough, but sensible, and
[[she includes numerous worksheets designed to help readers clarify their thoughts and manage their feelings.]]
It’s a slender book on an enormous topic, and so I asked her: What part of her message was the most difficult to convey?
“That you can’t dictate someone else’s recovery,” she says. Normally, she explains, when we want to influence another person’s behavior, we’ll try reasoning with them (or, if that fails, cajoling, bargaining, threatening, or demanding). But none of these approaches are likely to work with an addict. Once a person has become chronically ill from the disease, they’ll have to decide for themselves whether to seek help, take treatment seriously, or remain sober. Sadly, the motivating force is usually pain: Addicts stop using after they’ve had enough of it.
Still, families can support recovery in plenty of ways. The first thing they need to do, Barnett says, “is to learn what they’re up against.” That means understanding the brain disease theory of addiction, and recognizing the internal conflicts that can drive self-destructive behavior. Meanwhile, they can refuse to accommodate the strategies that addicts typically depend upon: denial, justification, and manipulation. Barnett is also a big believer in the salutary effects of clear and honest communication (even as she’s mindful of how difficult that can often be). Productive conversations with addicts almost always require a delicate touch. Family members should speak truthfully about how they’ve been affected by the disease, but they should avoid venting, or lashing out in anger. They should show compassion for their loved one, but resist the temptation to soothe or coddle them. Timing is important, too. You wouldn’t want to force a tough conversation with an addict, but you shouldn’t delay it indefinitely, either.
Another chapter in the book is devoted to boundary setting. However awkward it may seem to impose formal constraints on loving relationships, Barnett says that it’s frequently necessary, whether to avoid enabling, or as a means of self-protection. In Addict in the House, Barnett describes having had to do this herself, after her brother called to ask for help on a wintery night in 1994. “What he said was a variation on a familiar theme,” she writes. “‘I’m going to die out here.’ His voice was desperate, demanding. ‘I’m sleeping on a park bench.’”
“I will always love you,” Barnett replied, “but until you decide to live, I can’t help anymore.”
I asked Barnett whether it was difficult to give that type of advice to others, considering how easily it could go awry.
“Oh gosh, it’s frightening every time,” she says. But it’s often preferable to the alternative, which might involve “witnessing [the addict’s] very slow death, with a sense of total powerlessness… So making the decision to let them go with love, and telling them that you’ll support their sobriety, and their recovery, but not their addiction—and making that very clear distinction—could be a turning point.” One time, Barnett and her mother went so far as to hold funerary ceremonies for her brother, even though he was still alive. “That was part of our recognizing the extent to which the addiction had gone,” she said matter-of-factly. “It sounds morbid, but it was a healing process for the two of us.”
Sometimes, however, even the most carefully constructed boundaries may need to be modified in light of changing circumstances. It’s yet another topic Barnett can discuss through the lens of personal experience.
“My brother had fallen through a glass table in his drug dealer’s house,” she explains. “The table pierced both of his lungs, it filleted his back, he was in intensive care, he was going through DT’s, and he was so seriously ill—physically and psychologically—that there was no place for him to go. Even the homeless shelter would not take him in, because he was so vulnerable.” Recognizing that he wouldn’t otherwise survive, she brought him home.
And then something unexpected happened. After detoxing, and undergoing a lengthy convalescence, her brother decided he’d suffered under the pall of addiction for long enough. Barnett wound up actively supporting his recovery, but she stresses that his decision to get sober—and all of the very hard work that that entailed—was his alone. Fifteen months later, he enjoys the fellowship of a 12-step group, and he’s training to become a drug and alcohol counselor. Fifteen months is not a long time, and he’s relapsed before. But Barnett’s encounters with her brother’s addiction have given her a sanguine appreciation for the present, and a healthy confidence that whatever happens, she’s acquired the tools she’ll need to pursue a rich and satisfying life.
Dr. Robin Barnett is a revered behavioral health expert, certified sex addiction expert and former CEO of Park Bench Group Counseling, a progressive addiction rehabilitation facility in Northfield, New Jersey, which she co-founded in 2006 and sold in 2014.
Doctorate- Ed.D. in Human Services Administration
Masters in Social Work
Bachelor of Science in Social Work
Certificate in Womens Studies
Drug and Alcohol Studies
Clinical Hypnosis
Sexual Addictions
Training in Systemic Model of Drug and Alcohol Interventions.
Clinical Hypnosis Certification- American Society of Clinical Hypnosis Drug and Alcohol Studies- Substance Awareness Coordinator, Georgian Court College
Clinical Supervision
Systemic Model of Drug and Alcohol Interventions
Clinical Hypnosis
Forensic Social Work
Individual testing and assessment
Team Management
Treatment of Sexual Addictions Training
Drug and Alcohol Counseling
Mental Health Psychotherapy
Clinical Assessment
Forensic Social Work, Tulane University
Individual Testing and Assessment, University of Sarasota
Clinical Supervision, University of Sarasota
Team Management, University of Sarasota Ethics in Practice
Nova Southeastern University
Adjunct Professor- School of Social Work at Rutgers- The State University of New Jersey
Administrator/CEO/Co-owner at Park Bench Group Counseling
Commissioner for Atlantic County Commission for Women and Children
Adjunct Professor of Child Psychology at Atlantic Cape Community College
Psychotherapist at Private Practice
Director at Director of Home Health Care
Executive Director/Founder at Adoption Support Network
ER/Trauma Social Worker
Doctorate- Ed.D. in Human Services Administration
Masters in Social Work
Bachelor of Science in Social Work
Certificate in Womens Studies
Drug and Alcohol Studies
Clinical Hypnosis
Sexual Addictions
Speaking Engagements and Honors
Named among “America’s Best Therapists” by Psychology Today magazine, 2003 Guest Speaker at Stockton College for graduating Social Work Class Conference on Elderly Abuse, Princeton, NJ Women’s Issues, Atlantic Health Education Committee Pediatric AIDS, Ryan White Convention Depression and the Elderly, Jewish Family Services Adoption Issues, National Adoption Congress Convention Health Update, Self-Mutilation, NBC- TV40 How to work with those effected by 9/11, Atlantic Cape Community College Numerous presentations made to state organizations, various TV appearances, radio show guest appearances, Guest Interventionist “Gone Too Far” DJ Am on MTV, Guest Addictions Specialist Morning Show with Mike and Juliet on Fox TV, 20/20 guest expert on ABC, The Steve Wilkos Show guest expert on NBC, and Recovery Warrior Award.
Professional Licenses
Certified in Clinical Hypnosis
Certified School Social Worker
Licensed Clinical Social Worker
Licensed Clinical Alcohol and Drug Counselor
Certified Sex Addiction Therapist
Certified National Master Interventionist
Certified Clinical Supervisor
Bio
Dr. Robin Barnett is a revered behavioral health expert, certified sex addiction expert and former CEO of Park Bench Group Counseling, a progressive addiction rehabilitation facility in Northfield, New Jersey, which she co-founded in 2006 and sold in 2014. A licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor, licensed clinical social worker, and certified sex addiction therapist, for nearly two decades she has helped countless people conquer addictive behavior and a multitude of behavioral challenges.
Inspired by firsthand experience when her own brother encountered a downward spiral with alcoholism and drugs, Dr. Barnett learned that exhibiting “tough love” is one of the hardest but most necessary strategies for the addict’s family. She hopes to help others manage the heartache of this struggle by sharing her professional—and personal—insights in a practical guide for families of addicts, Addict In The House, Dr. Robin’s first book, which is set for publication in August of 2016.
Dr. Barnett is a well-known resource in the clinical community. She was named among “America’s Best Therapists” by Psychology Today, and she has appeared as a drug, alcohol, and behavior expert on various national media outlets, including MTV, CNN, HLN, NBC, FOX, ABC (20/20, Nightline), and CBS to name a few. Presently, Dr. Barnett is a regular on the Steve Wilkos Show (NBC Universal Syndication) as their Substance Abuse Expert and is currently included in the fabric of several unscripted television projects in development.
Dr. Barnett holds a Doctorate in Human Services Administration from the University of Sarasota and a Master’s in Social Work from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Dr. Barnett currently resides with her family at the Jersey Shore and is currently working on her second book with celebrated publisher, New Harbinger.
LC control no.: no2016118058
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Barnett, Robin (Counselor)
Field of activity: Substance abuse Sex addiction
Profession or occupation:
Counselors Human services personnel Behavior therapists Sex
therapists Psychotherapists
Found in: Barnett, Robin (Counselor). Addict in the house, 2016:
title page (Robin Barnett, EdD, LCSW) page [193] (Robin
Barnett, EdD, LCSW is a respected behavorial health
expert and former CEO of Park Bench Group Counseling, a
progressive addiction rehabilitation facility in
Northfield, NJ, which she cofounded in 2006. She is a
licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor, and a
certified sex addiction expert and therapist and holds a
docotrate in human services administration and a
master's in social work.)
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Career & Education dates came from LinkedIn
Addict in the House: A No-Nonsense Family Guide Through Addiction Recovery
Publishers Weekly. 263.22 (May 30, 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Addict in the House: A No-Nonsense Family Guide Through Addiction Recovery
Robin Barnett. New Harbinger, $16.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-62625-260-8
This is a straightforward, rich resource for anyone who lives with, and loves, an addict. It is presented as
[[an intimate, personal narrative]]
to supplement the alarming statistics surrounding addiction. Having grown up in a household marked by addiction, behavioral health specialist Barnett is the ideal guide through a journey that, as she writes, is rocky at best. Rather than adopt the tone of an expert, which risks coming off as condescending, she writes as
[[a fellow traveler.]]
Navigating a life with an addict is not easy: the most basic aspects of communication are compromised, and freedom from the cycles that entangle most addicts' families requires breaking long-established patterns. Barnett presents her discussion with the qualification that it is condensed, in keeping with the "no-nonsense" self-description of the title. Each chapter is introduced by the words of addicts, but readers seeking more detailed, first-person accounts will not find them here. And instead of answers, they will find a process, presented more as a hopeful beginning than an ultimate cure. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Addict in the House: A No-Nonsense Family Guide Through Addiction Recovery." Publishers Weekly, 30 May 2016, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454270620&it=r&asid=cf8f6509deeca684759211bbdcb2d5dd. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454270620