ABSTRACT
Positive criminology is an innovative perspective that focuses on an individual’s encounter with significant forces that are experienced positively and can lead to a cessation of criminal and deviant behaviors. Positive criminology provides a useful approach for studying self-change, also known as natural recovery. Self-change refers to how one can change his/her addictive behavior without formal intervention or without participating in self-help groups. Studying self-change from the perspective of positive criminology serves to encourage and enrich research and provide an opportunity for self-changers to voice their experiences. In the current chapter, we addressed three main characteristics as part of the underlying principles of positive criminology in order to understand the phenomenon of self-change, and the wide array of associated factors that have been reported to date in the literature. First, positive criminology’s focus on personal strengths as factors that promote change such as post-traumatic growth, helps to explain the role of these factors in self-change. Second, the holistic perspective of positive criminology, which incorporates social, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of the human experience, helps in terms of understanding self-change as a multidimensional rather than a purely individualistic process. Finally, positive criminology’s focus on the long-term aspects of change such as maintenance factors of recovery helps to clarify those aspects in self-change. Implications of self-change in research and practice are discussed.
