2.3: THE KARMA OF BEHAVING BADLY

People generally seek my services soon after a relapse. During the first session, I almost always ask the obvious question: "How did it happen?” I spend a lot of time asking about the specific steps that led from their good intentions to the first lapse. I am no longer surprised by the usual answer: “I don’t know.” Despite my patient they usually can’t tell me the details about the critical moment. This is in striking contrast to the detail I receive when the same client describes some trivial issue such as a political conflict at work.

This observation provides a key to understanding failures of will. To intentionally change your behavior you must be aware of the critical moment of decision so you can intentionally choose the path that leads to the intended outcome, instead of mindlessly following the path of least resistance.

When the clever attorney,. H, can only give me a superficial analysis of the sequence of events that led to his relapse it suggests that his conscious mind was not fully engaged during the critical moments; he was on autopilot following the default path.. H lost the battle because he was not aware that it was time to come to his senses and intentionally guide his behavior during this critical high risk period.

H reports that he observed himself following a path he had previously recognized as harmful and vowed to never follow again. He reports that he remembered his vow of abstinence, yet he simply did not exert the effort required to perform mindfully, and passively followed the familiar sequence to the first lapse . . . demoralization and eventual relapse.
________________________________________
Autonomous Behavior
Performance becomes easier with practice. In fact, with enough practice performance can become autonomous, that is it requires no conscious attention at all. Consider activities such as driving or using a computer keyboard. When first attempted, performance is slow, hesitant, and filled with error, but with practice speed increases, variability decreases, and execution becomes increasingly effortless. What once demanded considerable attention can now be performed rapidly and accurately with little or no awareness of the component actions.

Conscious attention is not required to initiate an autonomous sequence. Mere exposure to the triggering stimulus is sufficient, and once initiated the action has a ballistic quality - tending to run on to completion all by itself. For example, when driving, a red light is sufficient to elicit a complex sequence of events that does not require my attention for successful performance. Conscious awareness is not required for my foot to move from the accelerator to the brake pedal or to guide the pressure on the brake to bring the vehicle safely and smoothly to a stop.

Rapid, accurate, effortless performance that makes no demands on valuable conscious resources has obvious advantages. The down side of overtraining a behavioral sequence only becomes apparent when you decide to change it. For example, an experienced driver would take longer to learn to reliably stop at a green light than [s]he originally took to learn to stop at a red light. Until the new habit is acquired, the driver must pay attention in order to over-ride the well practiced behavior of driving through a green light.

Stephen Tiffany1, whose views have been paraphrased in the preceding paragraphs, suggests that after considerable practice, addictive behavior becomes autonomous. While autonomous behavior can be over-ridden, it requires conscious attention to do so. The karma of repeatedly using an incentive is that this path to incentive use becomes autonomous. As a result, whenever your conscious resources are occupied by a demanding social situation, powerful emotional state, or diminished due to fatigue or intoxication, you will tend to follow this default path.

An absent-minded relapse occurs when mindful processing, which is necessary to interrupt the autonomous sequence, is not invoked when needed. This may occur when a person was simply not conscious of the original commitment until the relapse sequence was already well under way. Less dramatic, but probably much more common, the person was more or less aware of the unfolding sequence of events leading to the lapse, and was also fully aware of the previous intention to abstain from the addictive behavior, yet simply failed to dedicate the conscious effort – willpower - required to interrupt the autonomous behavior chain.

The decision to restrict access to a rewarding incentive sets up a conflict. On one side there is the well exercised behavioral sequence that leads to incentive use. Against this is pitted a poorly exercised behavioral sequence that moves the individual in the intended direction. The Hardening Exercise [see- Chapter 5.7] is a structured method of exercising intended coping reactions the presence of successfully closer approximations to actual high risk situations.

As a professional boxer can hire sparring partners to help him hone his skills, you can improve your skills during high risk situations in real time. Unlike the boxer, you will not have to pay for your sparring partners - they will come up without you having to do anything special. As you continue to respond mindfully to the challenges as they arise, you will be developing and strengthening your coping skills. Following the path of greatest advantage does become easier over time, and if you follow it long enough it becomes the default path. The Karma of following an intentional path is that the reactions that lead to the intended outcomes eventually become easier with time, and eventually some may even become effortless - autonomous.

Use it or lose it. Habit strength, like muscle strength increases with exercise. Each success strengthens the responses that led to success. On the other hand each lapse strengthens the sequence of behaviors that lead to the lapse.

Every high risk situation you encounter is a contest with a finite duration - generally seconds or minutes, rarely hours. You will either win by performing as intended, or lose by lapsing. Each win enhances self-efficacy and exercises the responses that produced it, but each loss is demoralizing and strengthens the responses that will lead to future failures.

To change your default path you will have to dedicate the resources required to respond intentionally to the high risk situations that life deals you. Each time you do, the intended coping reaction is strengthened. It will take a finite number of exposures for the new reaction to become stronger than the old one. How many exposures? After working with impulse control problems for many years I can offer some rules of thumb:

It takes forty seven consecutive wins to establish a new default reaction. If you can cope successfully with each of them you will find that it has become easier to stay your intended path than to follow the path to incentive use. Everyone is different, and 64 consecutive wins may be a more realistic requirement for some readers. Certainly, these numbers are arbitrary and we do not know in advance how many high risk situations you will have to navigate successfully to get over the hump of dependence. Rest assured, it is not a million; have patience and stay the course and you will get there.

Each high risk situation is different. Your initial task is to set good precedent in each of your idiosyncratic high risk situations

Some situations will require more practice than others. But even the most difficult will become easier after some successful practice.

You can succeed at this task, but you must stay mindful during this initial phase and manage each and every high risk situation you encounter. While you are going through it, it may seem like it takes forever, but when you look back on it from the vantage point of good outcome you will see that this part of the passage did not last very long, and the struggle was not without its rewards.

Most readers appreciate that developing a healthy default path does not guarantee good long-term outcome. Even after you have followed your path of greatest advantage for many years it will still be possible for you to relapse - all it takes is a little sloppy thinking at a vulnerable moment. But despite the fact that you will forever be in danger of a first lapse and its irreversible consequences, the risky situations will tend to occur progressively further apart over time.