The text and other media contained in this kit are designed to help you achieve something extraordinary: The ability to intentionally influence the course of your life. Overcoming dependence on an incentive requires nothing less.
Dependence develops when an individual continues to use an incentive despite repeated intentions to quit or cut down. The individual appears to have lost the ability to control real-time performance, and his or her behavior is dependent on the availability of the incentive.
The dependent individual or a loved one may seek help from a therapist, treatment program, or self-help book. The strategy of seeking an external agent to free you from dependence on an external source of control has a fundamental weakness: Relapse is likely when the external agent is not available to guide performance during actual encounters with stress and temptation. Assuming the passive “patient” role, which demands compliance with “doctors orders,” while comfortable and familiar, is incompatible with good long-term outcome. To achieve good long-term outcome you will have appreciate the true nature of your challenge, and develop the ability to perform as you intend despite the encounters with predictable and unpredictable stressors and temptations.
Certainly, it is useful to have access to an expert with technical training and the practical experience. However the relationship must be collaborative. In my private practice, I am the “armchair” member while the client is the heroic member of our collaboration. I provide suggestions and rational feedback in the safe, unhurried environment of my office, while the client has the responsibility to perform as intended in the face of real time stressors and temptations.
As a user of this kit rather than a client who sees me in my office you have more responsibility to take the active role by tailoring the contents of this kit to your unique set of objectives, circumstances, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Instead of direct feedback from a live clinician, you have access to a range of tools in the form of text and other media that will help you to discover the causes for acting counter to your best interests, and to develop a path that you consider more congruent with yourself, loved ones, and principals.
The Psyche
Each Psyche – also known as the soul or the self– inhabits a particular biology, personal history, and current social environment. Each faces a unique challenge, and so there is no universal description of, or single solution to an addictive disorder. This kit is designed so that it can be used in different ways by different individuals.
It is difficult to communicate meaningfully about the Psyche in general and yours in particular because the subject matter is so far from direct experience that individuals raised in different environments have developed belief systems that employ entirely different vocabularies to communicate about experiential phenomena. Moreover, the same word may be used by different people to describe different phenomena. To facilitate communication about this abstract topic various metaphors will be used throughout this kit, beginning with the addictive traps metaphor.
Addictive Traps Metaphor:
The key to addictive disorders is their relapsing nature. It is not that difficult to end an addictive relationship, the problem is relapse. Different individuals relapse in different ways, and for different reasons.
Individuals continue along a self-sabotaging path despite their intentions to change their ways, because they have become trapped by a set of cause-and-effect relationships that promote addiction. An example of such a trap is reactance: Forbidding anything – especially something that is rewarding - has the unintended consequence of producing motivation to rebel against the restriction [see chapter 2.2]. For some individuals reactance prevents their escape from the destructive relationship, for others this trap is not a major problem.
To achieve good outcome you will have to appreciate your set of traps and develop the skills to escape or avoid them. To be sure, this is a great challenge, but your biography is the story of many challenges that you encountered and eventually mastered, and as a result you can now read, drive, and do many other things that seemed difficult before you learned how. Acquiring each of these procedural skills changed you irreversibly.
The reason why most people never escape an addictive relationship is that they misperceive the true nature of their problem. They seek short-term behavioral suppression rather than irreversible change. This kit is designed to be used close to the action to help you develop the procedural skills to cope with the stressors and temptations that you actually encounter as you proceed through this life of yours. Developing these competencies is the only reliable path to freedom from dependence.
The difference between most of the skills you have already acquired, and the skill of reacting intentionally to local stressors and temptations, is that when you were acquiring the former set of skills you could ignore the difference between objective reality and subjective reality without hindering performance. Not so now; the confusion of objective and subjective reality is the primary cause of poor outcome. To address this problem, two types of material are presented:
Text: Summaries of recent findings of cognitive and neural science along with several models of how the bio-psycho-social creature you inhabit works. These presentations are, for the most part, designed for your conscious, rational mind. There is, evidently, more to you than rational processing; otherwise you would not repeatedly act counter to your interests.
Experiential invitations: For the non-rational, experiential part of you (Freud called it “the unconscious”), other media – including hypnotic inductions - are presented, to evoke phenomena that are relevant to understanding and escaping a destructive relationship with a rewarding incentive.
