Passages Ventura Quotes

People who believe they have bad luck create bad luck. Those who believe they are very fortunate, that the world is a generous place filled with trustworthy people, live in exactly that kind of world.

~ Chris Prentiss

Stress and anxiety cause our brains to release chemicals that put lines in our faces and tear us down emotionally and spiritually.

~ Chris Prentiss

Negative emotions, like depression or anxiety, have been shown to affect our immune system. Stress impedes wound healing.

~ Chris Prentiss

The events that occur in my life are workout situations. They are there for my benefit so I can become strong and gain wisdom and information by working my way through those situations.

~ Chris Prentiss

Treatment for dependency at substance abuse treatment centers must change if alcoholism and addiction are to be overcome in our society.

~ Chris Prentiss

Take a few minutes now and see your current circumstances- your physical condition, your emotional condition, your possessions, your financial condition, where and how you live, your relationships, the situations surrounding your life, and the way you believe other people see you- as mirrors showing you Who You Are.

~ Chris Prentiss

Believe that is cure is possible for you. Discover and heal the underlying causes with a holistic recovery program. Adopt a philosophy based on what is true in the Universe.

~ Chris Prentiss

What we call coincidences, accidental and remarkable events occurring at the same time, are actually circumstances and events that have come into your life to serve a purpose is to benefit you.

~ Chris Prentiss

You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.

~ Chris Prentiss

It's the causes, not the dependent person, that must be corrected. That's why I see the United States' War on Drugs as being fought in an unrealistic manner. This war is focused on fighting drug dealers and the use of drugs here and abroad, when the effort should be primarily aimed at treating and curing that causes that compel people to reach for drugs.

~ Chris Prentiss

Depression can be due to a low endocrine function, nutritional deficiencies, blood sugar problems, food allergies, or systemic yeast infection. Depression can also result from medical illnesses such as stroke, heart attack, cancer, Parkinson's disease, and hormonal disorder. It can also be caused by a serious loss, a difficult relationship, a financial problem, or any stressful, unwelcome life change.

~ Chris Prentiss

One of the first actions we take at Passages is to ruthlessly scrutinize, always under a doctor's supervision and care, the specific necessity of any mind- altering or mood-altering medications that our clients are taking. As soon as any non essential drugs are out of their systems, the feelings they were trying to suppress usually emerge. When that happens, we can see what symptoms the client was masking with drugs or alcohol.

~ Chris Prentiss

The treatment must fit the malady and the malady is not alcoholism or addiction, or addictive drugs and alcohol. Once the correct cause is diagnosed, healing will take place and hoped-for cure will come about.

~ Chris Prentiss

Whether the underlying cause of your dependency is a chemical imbalance, unresolved events from the past, beliefs you hold that are inconsistent with what is true, an inability to cope with current conditions, or a combination of these four causes, know this: not only are all the causes of dependency within you, but all the solutions are within you as well.

~ Chris Prentiss

We recognize that you've used substances to try to regain your lost balance, to try to feel the way you did before the need arose to use addictive drugs or alcohol. We know that you use substances to alter your mood, to cover up your sadness, to ease your heartbreak, to lighten your stress load, to blur your painful memories, to escape your hurtful reality, or to make your unbearable days or nights bearable.

~ Chris Prentiss

Think about the stigma that is attached to the idea that alcoholism is a disease, an incurable illness, and you have it. That's a terrible thing to inflict on someone. Labeling alcoholism as a disease, a cause unto itself, simply no longer fits with what we know today about its causes.

~ Chris Prentiss

If you examine your motive for doing anything, you'll soon discover that your reason is that you believe it will make you happy.

~ Chris Prentiss

To give up power to change for the better is inherently distasteful to everyone, and to force people to affirm that they are addicts or alcoholics so they can speak in a meeting is shameful and demoralizing.

~ Chris Prentiss

The totally alive, totally conscious, and totally aware Universe takes care of itself completely. It is totally self-reliant and totally self- sufficient. it is perfect.

~ Chris Prentiss

You have chosen to exist, and more than just exist-- you've been chosen to share in the Universal consciousness.

~ Chris Prentiss

People who are dependent are merely using alcohol as a crutch to get through the day. Yet doctors and scientists are still treating alcoholism as if it is the problem, when it has nothing to do with the problem. They might as well be studying scratchism for people who have a chronic itch.

~ Chris Prentiss

I wrote this book to show you that a cure is entirely possible because I've seen it happen over and over again.

~ Chris Prentiss

When you change the way you see and interpret events, suddenly everything will be different for you. Everything will make sense.

~ Chris Prentiss

You are not alone in your quest to be who you want and have what you want.

~ Chris Prentiss

Your perception of the world and the way you see yourself in it has created within your mind a concept, a philosophy, of the way you believe things to be.

~ Chris Prentiss

By changing how you perceive things and how you act upon those perceptions, you will change your life.

~ Chris Prentiss

You can take the entire world of physics with all of its macrocosm and microcosm, its quantum mechanics and nuclear physics and reduce it to one word: energy. It's all energy. Scientists say that if you can't measure it, weight it, or see it, it doesn't exist. Well, no one has ever seen energy. We can see its effects, but not it.

~ Chris Prentiss

When nothing else worked, we created a holistic, hand-tailored program that saved Pax's life. At Passages, he and I use what we learned in curing him to help others discover the roots of their addiction or alcoholism and break free.

~ Chris Prentiss

If you can stop using substance or stop your addictive behavior for extended periods of time without craving, you are not dependent. You are dependent only if you can't stop without physical or psychological distress (you have unpleasant physical and/or psychological withdrawal symptoms) or if you stop and then relapse.

~ Chris Prentiss

I spent the rest of that day and most of the night thinking about all the hundreds of people I had met in rehabs and sober living houses and on the streets. We were all medicating our fears and our pain!

~ Pax Prentiss

The advertise their products in such a fashion as to make it seem wonderful to drink their ethanol products. It does not matter if they give their products fancy name like Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir, or if they put bubbles in an ethanol product and call it champagne or beer- everyone is selling ethanol.

~ Chris Prentiss

If those underlying conditions aren't treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we'll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That's the primary reason there is such a high rate of relapse among people who have become dependent of alcohol and addictive drugs. It has little to do with alcohol and addiction themselves and almost everything to do with the original causes that created the dependency.

~ Chris Prentiss

It is ethanol that everyone is after when they drink alcoholic beverages. That is what gives us the euphoric feeling, and that is what all vendors of alcoholic drinks are selling.

~ Chris Prentiss

If I were to create a word that more accurately describes alcoholism and addiction, I would say it was dependencyism. Sounds silly, doesn't it? Yet it's no sillier than the word alcoholism. The reason alcoholism no longer sounds silly to you is because you're used to hearing it, reading it, and thinking about it.

~ Chris Prentiss

How do you think your body and mind would respond if you were surrounded by psychologists, psychiatrists, or drug and alcohol counselors who subscribed to the belief that once an alcoholic or addict, always an alcoholic or addict and who believed that your current stay in rehab would be one of many?

~ Chris Prentiss

Whatever you now do, whatever you now believe, whatever your current circumstances may be, you are perfectly equipped and fully capable of fulfilling your needs and desires.

~ Chris Prentiss

We know that you don't want to be a drunk and you don't want to be hooked on addictive drugs. You do it because you can't cope with your life without some sort of support, even if that support is damaging.

~ Chris Prentiss

Alcohol is the drug ethanol. They are one and the same. Alcohol is also called ethyl alcohol or grain alcohol. It is a chemical compound. Ethanol is often added to the gasoline we use to run our cars.

~ Chris Prentiss