Incentive Motivation

Incentives that provide access to immediate pleasure or relief can offer some control over immediate experience – a great benefit for a stressful life. Alcohol, drugs, food, cigarettes, sex, computer assisted gaming, gambling, porn, and relationships are corruptive to the extent that an individual will sacrifice something of value to access it again. Corrupt politicians trade their integrity for cash; dependent individuals end up sacrificing what is truly dear to maintain a relationshiip with the incentive.

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 or loss of control shows up when an individual continues to use an incentive despite promises to quit or cut down. Behavior is not dependent upon the individual’s intentions but upon 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 an iindividual 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 a short-term fix. To achieve good long-term outcome you will have to acquire the competencies that will enable you to perform as you intend despite the encounters with predictable and unpredictable stressors and temptations. Certainly, it is useful to have access to a coach with technical training and practical experience in helping people acquire these competencies, but the relationship must be collaborative. In my private practice, I have the easy job of advising from the sidelines while the client is the heroic member of our collaboration who performs in the arena of real time stressors and temptations.

As a user of this kit rather than a client who sees me in my office you have the additional responsibility to tailor the contents of this kit to suit 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, and your principles.
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, 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 facilitate communication about this abstract topic various metaphors will be used throughout this kit, beginning with the addictive traps metaphor.
Addictive Traps Metaphor:
Addictive disorders are so destructive because of their relapsing nature. It is not that difficult to quit using the incentive, the problem is relapse. Different individuals relapse in different ways, and for different reasons. Each relapse is the result of a set of cause-and-effect relationships, and each individual is more vulnerable to some of these traps than to others. 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]. Reactance is a major problem for some individuals and trivial for others.

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.

Most people remain dependent because they misperceive the true nature of their problem. They seek short-term behavioral suppression rather than the irreversible change that results from developing the procedural skills to cope with the stress and temptation. 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 experience without hindering performance. Not so here! To address this problem, two types of material are presented:

Text: Summaries of pertenant resarch in the cognitive and neural sciences along with several models of how this creature you inhabit works are presented. These presentations are, for the most part, designed for your conscious, rational mind. Evidently there is more to you than rational processing; otherwise you would not repeatedly act counter to your interests, and so a major part of this kit has a different audience..

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 will help you escape your addictive traps.

For personal consultation please contact our office (512) 343-8307 or email: bill@souldirected.com].