ERA · Evidence-based Recovery through Attention
Attentional training with randomized-trial evidence — for individuals living with cravings, and for the organisations that support them. Founded by Paul du Buf, addiction nurse and author of Shadow Dancing.
Explore the programmes Try the free appThe Approach
Between 40 and 60 percent of people relapse after addiction treatment — a figure published in JAMA in 2000 and essentially unchanged since. Twenty-five years of better protocols, better medication and better cognitive-behavioural therapy have improved many things. They have not moved that number.
Here is what remains untrained: the thirty seconds after an urge arises — the moment a wave of urgency moves through the body and a person either becomes it, or watches it. Attentional training builds that capacity: meeting an urge as a passing event in the body rather than a command, without obeying it and without fighting it. The research literature calls the mechanism decentering. The people we work with describe it more simply — the discovery that they are not the wave.
Free for Everyone
A craving is a wave: it rises, crests and passes. Still·point guides three short practices — meeting an urge, RAIN, and noting — with before-and-after craving ratings so you build your own evidence. Everything stays on your device. Crisis support is one tap away on every screen. It supports recovery; it never replaces treatment.
Open Still·pointEvery two weeks we host the Still·point Circle — a free 30-minute Zoom gathering to share how the practices are landing and shape what the app becomes. Details inside the app under Info.
Programmes
Eight weekly 90-minute group sessions on Zoom, mirroring the format used in the randomized trials — with daily practice structured by the app.
Train your clinicians to deliver the layer your protocols don't reach — with fidelity, supervision, and outcomes measured against your own baseline.
Train-the-trainer certification in the Still·point method: your own practice, the eight-week curriculum, trauma-sensitive delivery, and annual supervision.
Evidence & Writing
Our founding article, Missing the Point, sets out the case in full: why the relapse ceiling has not moved in twenty-five years, what the randomized trials show — including the honest limitations of the research — and what changes when recovery stops being a repair project and becomes a recognition.
“Ask people with long-term recovery what changed, and versions of the same sentence keep returning: I stopped fighting.”
— Missing the Point, Paul du Buf, ERA-Institute
Key sources: Bowen et al., JAMA Psychiatry 2014 · Brewer et al., Drug & Alcohol Dependence 2011 · Garland et al., JAMA Internal Medicine 2022 · Cooperman et al., JAMA Psychiatry 2024 · Garland et al., American Journal of Psychiatry 2024 · McLellan et al., JAMA 2000. The full evidence dossier, including meta-analytic limitations, is available to organisations on request.
About
Paul du Buf worked for decades as a registered nurse in addiction services in the Netherlands and the UK — prevention, treatment, aftercare, dual diagnosis. He is the author of Shadow Dancing: Embodied Recovery from Trauma and Addiction, and was recognised by the International Council of Nurses as a Certified Global Nurse Consultant.
ERA-Institute grew from a simple, uncomfortable observation: everything he was trained to offer taught clients to fight the craving, and the fight kept failing the people who fought hardest. ERA exists to train the other capacity — attention — in individuals, and in the organisations and cultures that support them. Trauma-integrated from the ground up.
Next Step
Individuals: register interest in the next course cohort. Organisations: bring your relapse and retention data to a free 45-minute working session — we'll map where attentional training fits your pathway.
Get in touch