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Currie, Lauren Nicole

University of British Columbia

Holding onto an identity as an alcoholic upon stability of recovery may be harmful because this often creates major conflict with other adaptive identities (Gibson et al., 2004). Notably, engaging in identity change in recovery away from solely seeing oneself as an alcoholic has been associated with many positive life outcomes (Best et al., 2010; Dingle et al., 2015; Litt et al., 2015). This study assessed the effectiveness of a newly developed group counselling approach called “Identity Transition Matters” (ITM) against an active control condition, a group counselling approach called “Planning AHEAD Career Transitions” (PCT), to determine if the ITM intervention could better promote identity development through reducing identification with an alcoholic identity and increasing an individual’s number of possible selves. Individuals with a history of alcohol addiction were recruited through addiction-related organizations and social media platforms and randomized to attend either the ITM group intervention or the active control PCT intervention condition. All participants (N = 125) completed the Possible Selves Questionnaire (Oyserman, 2004) and Alcohol Self-Concept Scale (Lindgren et al., 2013b) to assess identity-related constructs prior to (N = 125) and after participation in either intervention (N = 78), and at three-month follow-up (N = 71). Multilevel model analyses were used to determine (a) the effects of the interventions on promoting identity development (i.e., increasing number of possible selves), (b) the effects of the interventions on reducing identification with an alcoholic identity, and (c) whether identifying with an alcoholic identity moderated the relationship between participating in the ITM intervention and number of possible selves endorsed. There was a significant effect of intervention in predicting change in the number of expected possible selves from pre-intervention to three-month follow-up (β= 1.62, p < .05) with participants in the ITM intervention having greater positive residual change (i.e., more expected possible selves) and the PCT intervention group having negative residual change (i.e., fewer possible selves) on average. There were no other significant differences between the interventions. These findings suggest the need to better understand what interventions support identity change and when identity shifts occur in substance use recovery.

Text

2025-01-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90034

Counselling Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/