Literary Las Vegas: Dan Mager

Las Vegas resident Dan Mager channeled his nearly two decades of experience in behavioral health and addiction treatment along with his personal experience recovering from addiction and pain into the book “Some Assembly Required: A Balanced Approach to Recovery from Addiction and Chronic Pain.”

Part memoir, part self-help book, Mager hopes the book “will have value for anyone struggling.”

For more information on the book, visit centralrecoverypress.com.

Excerpt:

Of all the twists and turns my life has taken, I never expected to be confronted by the challenges and complexities that lie at the nexus of addiction and chronic pain. As an experienced clinician with a master’s degree in social work and advanced training and credentialing in clinical hypnosis, I knew a thing or two about the connection between thoughts, emotions, and physical pain. I had treated others’ suffering from chronic pain with unanticipated success using hypnosis. However, with the onset of my own chronic pain condition and its intersection with the addiction that had long predated it, all my professional knowledge and experience faded away. For all rational and practical purposes, it was nonexistent to me.

I had allowed myself to become utterly dependent upon the prevailing conventional Western medical approach to pain management with its merry-go-round of opioid painkillers.