The PIG's Blog

5.1 Contemplation

2009-06-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

Some people get into network marketing and dedicate themselves to developing a financial pyramid scheme based on selling cleaning products and cosmetics to their friends and relatives. The success of a sports team or political party is vitally important to some individuals; for others it is a particular religious or philosophical structure that gives meaning to life, while others are single-mindedly focused on getting laid.

How do you evaluate these core motivations? Do some seem more foolish or more base than others? Not everyone would agree on which are the foolish ones. Each of us was impressionable as a child, and the conditioning that you received when “the cement was wet” may have produced perspectives that are no longer valid, yet continue to influence your beliefs and motivations. Now that you are an adult and considering changing your course, what criteria do you use to determine which is the path of greatest advantage?

There are many ways to view the world, and some have enthusiastic advocates who are motivated to convert others to their value system. Since the goal of this kit is self-direction, the only values of importance are yours. How do you appraise the alternatives available to you? The criteria by which you evaluate other people’s motivations can tell you something about your own. For example, Ms. X evaluates people on the basis of how much joy or pain they bring to others; Mr. Y evaluates people on the basis of their income and social status; and Ms. Z evaluates people on the basis of how judgmental they are.

Appreciating your core motivation enables you to honestly appraise the choices available to you so that you can go for what you really want, rather than rebelling against, or slavishly complying with, the “shoulds” you have been conditioned to accept. There may be people who think they know what you should do—for your own good. But they have their own biases, and they don’t know all there is to know about you. The important question is: How do you select among motivations? What do you really want? And what are you willing to sacrifice to get it?

If you have never thought deeply about what is important to you, what you stand for, and what you want to be sure to include in this limited lifespan of yours, then what is the source of your core motivation? Do you even know what your core motivation is?

You are now at a crossroad, and are considering a radical change of course, but you are pulled in different directions. You will have to choose between maintaining access to the incentive and your path of greatest advantage; you cannot have both. So now is a good time to revisit or develop your core motivation, so that you can make intentional choices.

Contemplation
The indispensable first part of the exercise of will is deciding what you will. Each individual has a unique story and intended direction. Contemplation exercises provide one path to understanding of your core motivation.

Contemplation often involves posing a question such as: “What do I really want for this one life I have to live?” and then letting the mind explore, without editing, the thoughts and images that come along. Investing your cognitive resources in a contemplative investigation is interesting in its own right. The real payoff of contemplation exercises lies in the improved quality of life over the alternative that would result from following the path of least resistance.

Thought Experiment: Contemplation – to access and investigate your core motivation you are invited to participate in an experience that combines a script designed to evoke a calm, clear mindset (presented as a trance inducing audio file) with an intention (in you) to discover or review your core motivation. Contemplation questions provide opportunities to dispassionately consider important aspects of your life. So now, or when convenient for you, get into a dispassionate mind set, listen to the contemplation audio file on the CD-ROM, let your mind go, and watch what happens

Occasionally, this exercise yields clear insights and specific answers; if you know what you want and have the motivation to do what it takes to get it, you are ready to complete the Decision Matrix presented later in this chapter. If there is any ambivalence, then continue working with the exercises in this chapter and elsewhere to answer questions such as:

Who am I and where am I going?
What is meaningful for me?
What do I stand for?
What do I really want for my finite lifespan?
What must I do to get what I want?

Thus Spake Zarathustra
Another invitation to self-discovery was suggested by Nietzsche. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra describes two roads:

“One leads from the past, the other from the future, meeting at a gateway where I now stand (the present moment). But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur—it will create me again! I am part of these causes of the eternal recurrence. I shall return, with this sun, with this earth . . . not to a new life or a similar life. I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, to teach once more the recurrence of all things.”

Nietzsche was proud of his ‘discovery’ of Eternal Recurrence, and there is more to it than at first meets the eye. The value of this exercise is unrelated to the validity of the concept; instead, the focus is on the choices you would make if it were true. Suspending your disbelief and acting as if this weird premise was valid can reveal your core motivation.

Thought Experiment: Eternal Recurrence. Consider a crossroad in your life that requires a decision from you: In evaluating your choices assume nothing but the premise of Eternal Recurrence. Act as if the path you select now will be the very same path you will be condemned to repeat for eternity. How would you behave if you were free from all constraints? Abandon all the “shoulds” and all the restrictions associated with the morality conditioned into you since childhood. For this experiment we are purposely choosing to ignore any concept of good and bad. You are free to make whatever choice you want, knowing that you will encounter the same choice point and make the same decision with the same consequences again during each of your recurring lifetimes—for eternity.

5.0: The Stages of Change

2008-05-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

Evidently, your relationship with the incentive has led you to
the point where you are reading about how to change it.
Coincidently, the text says that individuals who have developed
an addictive relationship go through a predictable sequence of
stages, including one in which they gather information about
how to change by reading texts such as this.
In fact, much can be learned by observing what happens when
people attempt to end or control their relationship with an
addictive incentive. The Stages of Change model1 emerged from
researching how addictive relationships unfold over time. The
typical sequence of stages is listed below. As you review them,
see if you can identify your current position within this
developmental passage.
Pre-contemplation – Stage at which there is no intention to
change. You are unaware or under-aware of the problem. It isn’t
that you can’t see the solution; it’s that you can’t see the problem.

Contemplation – Stage of ambivalence; you are aware of the
problem and would like to give up the costs but are reluctant to
give up the benefits of incentive use.
The Decision – When it is clear that the costs of incentive use
far outweigh the benefits, you may decide to do what it takes to
change course. You make the decision with the understanding
that you may encounter local conditions that would motivate
lapsing, and so the promise that you will do what you said you
would do despite the influence of local factors is implied.
Action – Stage at which you develop the plan to change your
life’s course and begin to implement it.
Relapse Prevention – During this stage, which hopefully lasts
the rest of your life, you do what it takes to prevent relapse. If
you do relapse, you will cycle back to the contemplation stage
and at some point in the future go through these stages again.
Because it is both painful and hard to escape, an addictive
relationship condemns you to continue to cycle through these
stages until you achieve irreversible change, one way or another.
Like the passage from childhood to adulthood, the passage from
dependence to self-determination is complex and takes time.
During different stages you will face different challenges that
require different tactics. Tools well matched for particular stages
are described later in this chapter.
This model is useful because it suggests that the different stages
of this passage require different ways of coping. Because you
will be developing your own plan, you have the opportunity to
match your methods with the stage of change that best matches
where you are at now. Some rules of thumb:

• Do not rely on change processes appropriate for the
contemplation stage (e.g., costs-benefits analysis) when you
are in fact in the action stage. Trying to modify behaviors by
becoming more aware of why you should change is not
effective. Insight alone does not bring about behavior change.
• Do not rely on change processes appropriate for the action
stage until you are genuinely motivated to do what needs to
be done. Action without insight produces short-term change.
Recommendations for each stage:
Contemplation Stage: Most people are vulnerable to local
sources of motivation, because they have never developed a
core motivation, or if they have, they have forgotten it. Such
individuals are easily corrupted because their motivation is
always state-dependent—that is, there is no
core motivation to compete with local sources
of motivation.
The purpose of your life is not ending your
relationship with the incentive; rather it is to
be free of dependence on the incentive so you
can behave in accord with your principles and
interests—your core motivation. If you are
unsure about core motivational issues—such as: What do you
really want? What is meaningful to you? What do you stand
for?—please engage the contemplation exercises in Chapter 5.1.
Once you appreciate your core motivation, you can perform a
realistic costs-benefits analysis regarding incentive use by
completing the Decision Matrix, which follows these exercises.
The contemplation stage is completed when you have resolved
your ambivalence so you can make an incorruptible decision.

Decision Matrix to be a useful tool later when you are in the
action stage.
The Decision: The climax of your relationship with the
addictive incentive is your decision to change it. You must
appreciate that the decision requires that your behavior can no
longer be state-dependent. If you decide to quit drinking, you
cannot then have a drink just because you feel like it at the
moment. You accept the commitment with the understanding
that you will go to any lengths to adhere to its terms. Be aware
that unlike a goal, a commitment is a promise. If you make one
and fail to honor it, it would have been better to have declined
it and avoided the violation of your vow. So, if you are not yet
ready to make such a commitment then
return to the contemplation stage
exercises. If you are ready to proceed,
be aware that whatever you decide
during the action stage implies a No
Exceptions Clause such as, “I agree to
permit no exceptions to the
contingencies stated here—regardless of
how reasonable a momentary lapse may
seem at the time.”
Action Stage: Once you appreciate your core motivation, and
have decided upon your intentions, you will have to act. This is
a major undertaking and you will have to pay attention to
following your intended course for quite some time, so you will
need a plan. The action stage includes developing your plan
and the first few days or weeks of following it, and lasts until
the initial excitment of the new project wears off. Then the
most important stage begins.
Relapse Prevention Stage: Research shows that most people
who achieved good long-term outcome did so only after several
trips through the sequence of stages. Don’t be discouraged if

you have relapsed in the past; instead, learn from your experience
in order to discover what it will take to prevent relapse. In the
beginning, most people are highly motivated to do what it takes
to be free of their problem. After this initial “whoopie effect”
has past, the real battle begins. As long as you perform well,
time is on your side, and you will get better with practice.
However, as you might suspect, some people become sloppy as
the salience of their original commitment dissipates with the
passage of time. Good outcome requires that your motivation
to adhere to your plan is always greater than the forces that
would pull you into relapse. Your task during the Relapse
Prevention Stage is to respond as intended during the high-risk
situations that lie ahead until your intended reactions become
the default.2
The chapters of this section are presented in the order suggested
by the stages of change mode, but users are encouraged to focus
on the content best matched with their current stage.
2. The “rule of three” provides a rough guide to the creation of an intended
default path: If you adhere to your plan for 3 days that means you have gone
beyond merely thinking about it and have begun to engage the challenge; if
you adhere for 3 weeks you may notice it takes less cognitive energy to cope
successfully with many of the high-risk situations you encounter; by 3 months
successful coping reactions become habitual and often occur without conscious
effort; and by three years the intended action patterns have become autonomous
and your path of greatest advantage has become the default path.

4.4: Invitation to the Trance

2008-05-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Covert experience is cheap. Imagining what would happen if you take a curve too quickly on a slick road is less costly than learning from direct experience. Taking the time to purposely engage your mental faculties, including rational analysis and creative imagination can prepare you to cope with the unavoidable crises that await you on your journey ahead. The exercises in this chapter will give you the opportunity to explore and develop your cognitive resources.

The Exercise of Will
During the early phases of behavior change you will encounter many autonomous paths that lead to relapse, and so you will have to be vigilant for the early warning signals of state-dependent biases the would promote relapse. These are your signals to switch to a meta-cognitive perspective and dissociate from your current state. A recommended tactic is to use this moment of dissociation to ask Will’s Question: “What is the best use of my attention right now?” The answer to this question may then be used as the target stimulus to achieve Intentional Trance Formation. The objective of this tactic is for you to get yourself focused on thoughts or activities that promote good outcome as you define it, rather than to allow yourself to get sucked into the emotional states and the autonomous behavioral sequences they evoke.

Contemplation
To understand what good outcome means to you, invest 20 minutes of your attention to contemplate questions such as: “What do I really want for this one life I have to live?” Engaging such issues with your full cognitive powers can produce more interesting adventures and a higher quality of life than mindlessly following the path of least resistance. There are many methods to facilitate the contemplative process; the attached CD-ROM includes:

· Ask Alice
· Short Harmony

Other Transformative Tools
Intentional Trance Formation refers to a range of covert tactics that can help you intentionally change your life’s course. The attached CD-ROM contains hypnotherapy audio files (in MP3 format) including inductions and scripts that address specific addictive relationships. These may be copied to a format that will be convenient for you to play in an environment appropriate for the purpose of the exercise.

· Hypnotic Induction: This is a general hypnotic induction.

· Suggestion: An exercise to enhance your ability to use your imagination to influence your subjective reality.

· The audio files below are designed for specific addictive disorders. See Psychological ARTS' web site to register and download the appropriate files.

o Nicotine
o Substance Use
o Overeating
o Impulse Control – e.g. gambling, pornography, computer use, etc.

4.3: Meta-Cognitive Awareness

2008-03-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

Crises have both predisposing and precipitating causes ─ a predisposing cause of World War One was the complex set of military alliances among European powers, while the precipitating cause was the assassination of Prince Ferdinand. Likewise, relapses are triggered by specific precipitating events at times when predisposing circumstances render the individual vulnerable to them. This chapter describes a cognitive strategy that permits you to conserve the resources required to perform well during crises, and thereby gives you more control over the predisposing causes; the next chapter describes several cognitive strategies to manage crises and other precipitating events.

We learned how to think when we were children, and most of the time we still think that way. Some schools of thought distinguish between the primitive mentality of childhood and more advanced cognitive strategies. An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective experience, including cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings, is merely a temporary, state dependent phenomenon, which exists only in the mind. The objective world is populated with events; it is only in our subjective experience that beliefs, emotional reactions, and the story that gives it all meaning exist. The technical name for this realization is: Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

It is often easier to see the solution to another person's problems than to your own, because subjective reality is biased by our local fears and desires. It is easier to appreciate the big picture and put things in a realistic perspective when we are detached from temporary emotional states. Meta-cognitive awareness involves dissociating from local experience so you can observe it dispassionately. The awareness that your thoughts and emotional reactions are merely passing experiences ─ not necessarily unbiased reflections of objective truth ─ can free you from the Soul Illusion!

A child may label mental events, for instance thoughts and feelings, according to some judgmental scheme such as good or bad. The evaluation crystallizes these experiential phenomena into "things" that have an independent reality. For example: “It is terrible that my team lost” rather than “I feel terrible that my team lost.” From the perspective of Meta-Cognitive Awareness, thoughts and feelings are viewed like sounds ─ simply passing events in the mind that arise, become objects of awareness, and then pass away.

Mindfulness is a discipline that promotes Meta-Cognitive Awareness and is defined as: Awareness of present experience with acceptance [non-judgment]. Much of our behavior occurs autonomously while we are “asleep at the wheel.” As we go about our daily lives, we are typically preoccupied with the past or future while our actions in the present mindlessly follow the path of least resistance. In contrast, mindfulness involves keeping attention in the present moment without judging it as good or bad - to calmly and consciously observe and accept whatever is happening in the here and now.

Thought Experiment: Mindfulness Meditation ─ Focus your attention on the sensation of the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils with each breath. Each time a thought or feeling arises, notice it, but don't analyze it or judge it, and return your attention to the breathing. Don’t approach this exercise with the expectation that anything special will happen (that is the very trap we seek to escape through this exercise). As you follow your breath you will notice that all sorts of thoughts, images and sensations arise in your consciousness to which you will react. Your task is to intentionally suspend the impulse to characterize or evaluate what you are experiencing, and, rather, to experience the here and now directly without filtering it in any way.

Awareness of the continual shifting of emotional state from moment to moment and from situation to situation gives you the opportunity to develop the skill to disengage from bad trances and intentionally change your perspective. Developing Meta-Cognitive Awareness is effortful because it requires that you pay attention, rather than drift in the direction of least resistance, asleep at the wheel.

Acquiring Meta-Cognitive Awareness permits mindful behavior, which is an alternative to the kinds of behavior patterns that promote relapse:
o Autonomous behavior
o Behavior driven by passing emotional states.
________________________________________

Autonomous Behavior
The consequence of repeatedly engaging the addictive activity is that the sequences of events that produce the addictive experience become autonomous. Once that happens, whenever you are not intentionally controlling your actions you may be on a default path that leads to relapse.

Consider a time when you were driving your vehicle along a familiar route, and you were so absorbed in your thoughts ─ planning some future activity or ruminating on a current concern ─ that you didn't notice passing a certain landmark along the way, or the music from the vehicle's sound system, or the feel of the steering wheel in your hands. And even though the conscious mind was so completely preoccupied that you didn't notice all these things, a part of you was driving the vehicle and operating it perfectly safely.

Since your conscious mind was preoccupied with its thoughts, who was operating the vehicle? It must be a part of you of which you are not conscious. The unconscious, experiential processing system is capable of guiding complex performance while making little demand on your finite conscious resources. Indeed, most of the time you are not consciously operating the bio-psycho-social vehicle you inhabit, because your attention is focused elsewhere, or not at all.

By contrast, "mindful" driving means being fully present in each moment, consciously aware of sights, sounds, thoughts, and bodily sensations as they arise ─ being awake so you can respond intentionally rather than follow the path of least resistance. When mindful, you can act in accord with your interests and principles despite the influence of local stressors and temptations that would promote relapse.

Buddha means "awake." When asked, "Are you a god?" Gautama, the person who became the Buddha replied, "No." "Then what are you?" he was asked again. Gautama's answer was, "I am awake."

Relapse often occurs when you are “asleep at the wheel,” and an autonomous behavioral sequence unfolds along the path of least resistance. Developing more advanced cognitive strategies can enable you to perform mindfully ─ an eye opening experience.

For those who have been asleep at the wheel, the Buddha suggests awakening from the mindless trance. Maintaining mindfulness is critical during periods of intentional habit change. Early detection of relapse-related patterns of thinking and feeling can help you nip a relapse in the bud. In other words, the mindful recognition of an early warning sign can wake you up so that you intentionally interrupt the autonomous sequence before it develops momentum toward relapse. This topic is discussed in detail in the next section.
Fear, Desire and the Mentality of Childhood
Up to now, the text has focused on incentive motivation, which results from repeated exposures to a payoff – the incentive. The other source of motivation, drive, comes from within and seeks to remove the discomfort caused by a perceived need. Hunger motivates the search for food, thirst motivates search for water, and pain motivates one to seek relief. The greater the discomfort, the greater the drive for relief.

A predisposing cause of internal discomfort is, the mentality of childhood. Children assume that their state-dependent perceptions and beliefs are accurate reflections of objective reality. When the child is angry, then Mommy is bad, and, in the child’s state-dependent world, she always has been and always will be. The dispassionate observer can see that the child is in the midst of a tantrum, which will pass;. later the child will be in a different state of mind, and then everything will appear differently.

To get a child to trade something of genuine value for a trivial incentive is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in some cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to state-dependent phenomena as they were when they were children. Provoking a relapse during a high risk state is as easy as taking candy from a baby.

Accepting state-dependent beliefs and perceptions as objectively valid can cause you to fall into a recursive sequence of anxiety, depression, or anger. These are painful experiences that can drive you to seek the temporary relief the incentive offers. Moreover, the emotional states can be exhausting and deplete the cognitive resources that would otherwise enable you to cope with the difficulty and act in accord with your interests and values.

Meta-cognitive awareness - that subjective reality is continually morphing from situation to situation - can enable you to wake yourself out of recursive traps. Mindfulness, awareness of present experience with acceptance, is practical method to detach from a transient state and observe it

4.2: Intentional Trance Formation

2008-03-06T18:32:00.000-08:00

You are always in one trance or another. You are angry when your attention is captured by a stimulus that evokes anger. In fact, your current trance is determined by the stimulus that has captured your attention at the moment. Not all stimuli are equally salient; some are more attention grabbing than others. Highly salient stimuli have the potential of eliciting a state change without your conscious intention or awareness.

Stimulus Salience refers to how effective a stimulus is at capturing your attention, not necessarily how important it is. Perceiving a rattle snake at your feet would likely change your motivational state. Even if you really wanted to maintain your focus on this text, it would be difficult to ignore the snake. The fact that threatening stimuli are highly salient is adaptive, and consequently we are descended from the organisms that noticed threatening stimuli; those that did not are not our ancestors.

So a rattle snake in the room with you is both salient and meaningful. But for an individual with snake phobia even the thought of a snake – which is not objectively threatening – can elicit a powerful motivational state. In this case the snake is salient, but meaningless.

Reward refers to the pleasurable aspects of drinking or using a drug. Reinforcement refers to the effect the substance use has on autonomous behavior. The Karma of repeatedly experiencing powerful reinforcement from substance use is that the stimuli associated with getting or using the substance become highly salient. They will catch your attention even when you don’t want them to and, if you allow yourself to attend to them, they can elicit a trance that promotes relapse. To follow the path of greatest advantage you will have to develop the strength to avoid or escape the influence of the many meaningless but highly salient stimuli you are bound to encounter.

To produce the version of you that is most appropriate for the challenge you face, focus your attention on the stimulus [object, thought, or image] that elicits the intended trance. That may not sound very difficult, and you certainly have the faculties required, but as you may have guessed, executing in real-time requires some preparation.

There are many benefits to developing the ability to intentionally alter your subjective reality in real-time; here our interest is to cope with stressors and temptations that would motivate relapse. How you perform in such situations largely depends upon your subjective reality at that moment ─ the heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona. But appraisals such as “heroism” do not exist in the objective world, only in the mind of the beholder.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you invent. To be sure, your overt behavior has become part of world history ─ and so can never be undone ─ but the trance that gave rise to it was purely subjective and did not exist until you created it.

So why not create a fiction that is beneficial to you and consistent with what you stand for instead of creating fictions that produce bad outcomes for you? That is the point of intentional trance formation – to intentionally transform objective reality – your overt behavior, accomplishments, and relationships with others – by creating subjective realities that promotes these outcomes.

As you follow your intended path you are likely to encounter high-risk situations where you will be tempted to be pulled off of your path by local conditions. This kit has used several metaphors for this conflict as suggested by terms such as willpower, mental strength, battle, tactics, and strategies. Regardless of the metaphor, we want this conflict to resolve in your favor.

Warrior Metaphor:
How the conflict among stimuli that are competing for your attention plays out determines your subjective reality. For your intentions to be effective in real-time you will have to be able to focus on what you choose despite the pull of highly salient stimuli that would promote relapse. Just as you would strengthen muscle power by lifting weights against the downward pull of gravity, so you can strengthen willpower by focusing on an intended target despite the pull of distracting stimuli. This exercise is called meditation.

Thought Experiment: Counting your breaths ─ Visualize or sub-vocalize the number “1” during your first exhale, the number “2” during your second exhale, and so on. You will find that your attention tends to wander away, the exercise is to bring your attention back to the target. If you forget what number you are up to, just continue with the number “1.” Each repetition of returning your attention to the intended target is analogous to lifting a dumbbell. If meditation is analogous to lifting weights then hypnosis is analogous to working out with a personal trainer, and the high-risk situations you encounter are your sparing partners – opportunities that help you develop the abilities required to escape dependence and follow your path of greatest advantage.

4.1: Operating the Creature You Inhabit

2008-01-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

When you tell yourself to raise your hand it goes up, but when you tell yourself to calm down, become sexually aroused, or to salivate, you may not get the desired response. This is because consciousness is a property of the Central Nervous System, which operates your skeletal muscles, so you can raise your hand at will, but your emotions and other biological reactions are controlled by your Autonomic Nervous System, which is not subject to direct conscious control.

There is, however, an indirect method by which you can exert conscious influence on your biological responses: Instead of willing the response, aim your attention to the stimulus that elicits the intended response. For example if you want to salivate, instead of telling yourself to salivate, imagine licking a sour but juicy lemon.

For those who engage in regular physical exercise, observe the temporary effects on strength and stamina of recalling in detail a situation that makes you angry. Some people find that evoking a cringe (see below) produces a similar increase in heart rate and physical energy, but with a different flavor of discomfort.

Of primary interest for our purposes is the subjective reality of a craving. For many individuals merely thinking about the incentive or, perversely, trying not to think about it produces an urge to use it. However, you have the ability to influence your immediate motivational state by purposely thinking certain thoughts. For example, thinking in detail about the penalties of relapse can decrease the urge to use the incentive. With practice, you can enhance your ability to intentionally influence your motivational state [trance] in real-time.

Thought Experiment: Evoking a cringe. Take a few moments to relive a time when you embarrassed yourself. You will find that the more detail you can conjure up the greater the cringe effect.

If you were able to experience the cringe, then you successfully initiated trance formation – that is, you willfully aimed your attention to a particular stimulus – in this case, an embarrassing moment ─ in order to produce the intended state change.

Because this is an early exercise and I wanted to make it easy, I used cringe imagery rather than efficacy enhancing imagery, which would have been more useful for our purposes. Special exercises designed to strengthen your ability to focus and use your imagination are included in this kit precisely because there is so much resistance to efficacy enhancing imagery. Some people intentionally suppress efficacy enhancing imagery because they were trained to be modest or to avoid the sin of pride, but there are more universal impediments to positive self-suggestion:

• Asymmetry of Positive and Negative Imagery: Because it is more dramatic and threatening, negative, efficacy deflating imagery is more salient than positive, efficacy enhancing imagery. Moreover, stimuli that promote self-direction are less salient than stimuli that would promote relapse – especially during high-risk situations.

• Bias Against Self-Suggestion: Paradoxically, it is easier to accept suggestion from a hypnotist – who may know nothing about you or your situation ─ than it is to accept your own suggestion. Giving suggestions to yourself seems forced and inauthentic, a consequence of the tacit premise that there is an authentic you and pretending to be better than you are would simple be an attempt to deny the ugly truth. In fact there is no authentic you. The version of you before a lapse when you are experiencing positive outcome expectancies is different than a later version who regrets the relapse. In fact there are infinite versions of you, and whichever version is dominant at the moment feels like the only one possible. Suggestions, whether developed by you or an external agent, are creative fictions designed to evoke the intended subjective reality so that you can perform as intended in real-time.
Suggestion
Hypnosis is a powerful method to deliver suggestion and thereby change an individual’s subjective reality. Most people believe that as a result of the hypnotic induction a mindless subject is compelled to obey the suggestion of the hypnotist, which results in a profound misunderstanding of both hypnosis and self-determination. The belief that the hypnotist is in control is not surprising, because stage demonstrations of hypnosis often include a challenge – for example: "Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/ but it will be so heavy/ that you won't be able to do it.”

This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject, but it is not. In fact the phenomenon is produced completely by the subject, and is an intra-personal rather than an inter-personal phenomenon. After you have read the explanation you can experience this classic hypnotic suggestion by downloading the Heavy Shoe file.

As you will see, the script is full of lies, such as "your shoe is made of lead." In fact your shoe is not made of lead. Clinicians will often use scripts such as this because they show how suggestion can influence actual experience and behavior, and the demonstration is dramatic and easy to produce in the office setting. The experience and behavior is nonsensical because the hypnotist suggests a reality that is objectively false. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true ─ e.g., your shoe is made of lead ─ produces behavior that would appear silly to an observer, which is why stage hypnosis often produces laughter from the audience who are not asked to buy into the false suggestion.

But some things are neither true nor false. Are you a hero or a loser? There is no objective answer to that question. Concepts like that exist only within your subjective reality. But how you perform in real-time depends to a large extent upon your subjective reality at that moment ─ the heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you are continually inventing. To be sure, your overt behavior has become part of world history [and so can never be undone], but the trance that gave rise to it was purely subjective and did not exist until you created it. So why not create a subjective reality that is beneficial to you and consistent with what you stand for instead of creating self-sabotaging fictions?

Suggestion, the use of imagination to influence subjective reality, can be used therapeutically to change the predictable patterns of mood disorders, addictive disorders, as well as a wide range of relationship problems. This capability requires a good imagination and the ability to focus attention. Like other talents some individuals are more gifted than others, but everyone improves with practice. The Heavy Shoe audio is a stimulus with which to practice; its purpose is to strengthen your ability to intentionally influence your subjective reality in real-time.

4.0: Hypnosis and Ordinary Trances

2008-01-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. There is nothing unusual about hypnosis, everything we experience is trance. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to one of the induction audio files in this kit [see Appendix A: Trance Formation Audio Files], but you don’t need a formal induction to change your state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency ─ Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your state of mind and body. State-dependent phenomena ─ including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution ─ are determined by the subjective reality that existed only in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

In the example above the information that evoked the stressful state was objectively false, and so the trance was not valid. But some kinds of information are neither objectively true nor false, so the trances they evoke are neither valid nor invalid. Pathogenic structures emerge when the individual considers such information to be important [e.g., “others find me unattractive,” “I don’t have what it takes to succeed.”]

Barry, the 31 year-old engineer who views himself as socially awkward is at a party with co-workers, when his supervisor makes a joke at his expense. Barry would love to respond with a clever comeback, but he expects to be inarticulate. Will there be a witty exchange or an awkward silence?

The appraisal: “I’m a loser,” or the expectation: “I will perform well” exist only in Barry’s mind not in the objective world, but his subjective reality has a great influence on how he performs in the real world. Appreciating Barry’s tendency to freeze up in such situations, one coworker expects an embarrassing pause and another expects him to say something stupid. But these expectations exist only in their minds. Objective reality is determined by how Barry actually performs.

When he is in the right state of mind Barry can be very funny and quick witted. Whether or not he can use this talent in this stressful situation depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “I’m a nerd” trance. He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be weak and intimidated as usual.

So there is a conflict between Barry’s intentions ─ to be cool and clever ─ and his expectations of humiliation. Will his expectations or his intentions determine his subjective reality at the critical moment? Which will be the effective stimulus when Barry is faced with his crisis?

Expectations have the advantage ─ both Barry and his friends believe them to be objectively true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are merely creative fictions which are neither true nor false. As a dispassionate observer I can see that Barry himself is the source of an artificial limitation that diminishes his fun, increases his misery, and prevents him from establishing an intimate partnership. My task as his therapist is to help him create a subjective reality that is at least as valid as the one he currently holds, but that evokes more self-serving trances.

At first Barry resisted change because being someone different than he really is would be inauthentic. My first task is to challenge his tacit premise that there is a real Barry. In fact I have met many versions, including the clever Barry and the intimidated Barry. Intentional Trance Formation refers to the method of transforming a less resourceful version into one that is more resourceful. The ambitious objective of this section is to enable you to intentionally influence your subjective reality and hence you capability to cope with real-time challenges.

3.3: The Enlightened Path

2008-01-06T10:21:00.000-08:00

Is light a particle or a wave?

Is the electron here or not here?

Am I the most important thing in the universe or am I merely dust and ashes?

Oddly, the best answer to each of these questions is that both of the incompatible alternatives are true at the same time! Because we do not have access to objective truth, our understanding of reality is riddled with paradox. Accepting the paradoxes is the Middle Way. This enlightened path is not available to the young, for it requires a mature perspective. Indeed, enlightenment is not a state of bliss; it refers to the ability to cope with the paradoxes of life.
The Watercourse Way [the Tao]
Water follows the path of least resistance. When building an irrigation system, it is wise to take into account the principles of hydrodynamics. Just as the flow of water is influenced by lawful principles such as gravity, the course of your biography is influenced by lawful principles such as the PIG.

It is not the water's fault that it is influenced by gravity, nor is it your fault that you are influenced by the PIG. You are, however, responsible for taking factors such as the PIG into account in order to produce the outcomes you choose. Knowledge of the bio-psycho-social principles that influence your real-time behavior makes possible responsible action. You are not responsible for having this impulse control problem, but you are responsible for overcoming it and following a more advantageous path.

You have now examined two ways to accomplish this, and soon you will have to design a particular plan for yourself, a plan to which you will have to adhere, despite the crises you are bound to encounter. Should you follow a rigid path impeccably or a flexible path where errors are opportunities for growth?

The Middle Way contains elements of both the Impeccable Path and the OPEN Path. You must honor all commitments without exception, but you must only commit to process, not outcome. You can accept responsibility for what you do, but it would be imprudent to accept responsibility for the outcomes you cannot control. So be careful about committing to improving your life, or to repairing relationships, because you have less control over such things than you think. Instead make commitments about process, such as keeping a log or reviewing your plans every day.

In a sense the Middle Way is an opportunity to apply the scientific method to practical problems. Our understanding of reality will always be imperfect, so we must always be open to disconfirming information and be willing to reconsider our assumptions on the basis of new observations. The scientific method not only allows for failure to confirm a hypothesis, it welcomes such observations as the path to growth and improved understanding.

At the abstract level the scientific method is flexible; at the execution level it is rigid. A good scientist adheres, without exception, to good scientific process ─ you can be confident that [s]he followed the procedures exactly as described in the research documentation.

When executing your treatment plan, you must follow your commitments exactly as described and without exception! Be mindful of this responsibility when you compose your plan. Don’t look for or accept loopholes!

When you view high-risk situations as a contest between your will and the pull of local incentives, you can get a sense of the Psyche by observing how it responds to such provocations. On the Enlightened Path, whatever happens is nature's way of teaching you the lessons of cause-and-effect. Never let neurotic self-evaluations demoralize you and motivate you to abandon the effort. Following this path requires that you rigidly hold yourself to the commitments you make, and have a forgiving attitude toward yourself and a readiness to accept what nature teaches you so that you can modify your plan accordingly. The truth wants to set you free!

3.2: The OPEN Path

2007-12-23T08:53:00.000-08:00

It is not enough to finally decide to change [although the decision is essential], nor is it enough to develop a plan [although thinking it through is important]. You must be able to execute effectively during the crisis!

Like the ability to perform well on stage ─ following your plan during a crisis requires the development of skill to such a level that it can be performed without conscious guidance. Remember, during the crisis the cognitive resources required to intentionally guide behavior will be occupied, so the intended action must be well rehearsed.

For a variety of reasons the rigid Impeccable Path may be a poor match for you. The more flexible OPEN Path is based on the scientific method. The focus of this approach is to learn the truth about cause and effect for your particular reality.

As your biography unfolds you may encounter situations where choices which now seem preposterous will seem like a good idea. During such times you will be at risk of behaving differently than you now intend. The challenge is to do something now ─ while you have access to good cognitive resources – that will help you to perform as you now intend. The Soul Illusion causes most people to underestimate this challenge; because they believe that during high-risk situations they will be motivated to avoid lapsing, just as they are now. Part of breaking free of dependence is learning to cope with this illusion.

To follow the OPEN Path you would develop an Implementation Intention such as – “When I encounter high-risk situation X, I will execute tactic Y.” Then like a scientist you observe what happens. If you get the expected outcome you are on the right track. However, if things did not work out as you expected, nature is telling you that cause and effect play out differently than you thought, and you must modify your plan to account for this new knowledge. Again, you will ask nature about this new tactic, and be nurtured by the feedback, and so forth. Over time you will develop a more sophisticated understanding of cause and effect in your universe, and a progressively more realistic and effective set of coping tactics.

The OPEN Path refers to: Outcome – Plan – Execute ─ Nurture:
o Chose an Outcome you want.
o Develop a Plan to achieve it.
o Execute the plan
o Nurture the plan through observation

Example of H’s plan: “At the wedding reception, whenever I think of drinking alcohol, I will take a sip of club soda. When I run out of club soda I will go the bathroom and review my reminder card.” At the reception H executes the plan. Later, he reviews his observations, asking himself: “What can I learn from this experience?” “What helped, what did not?”
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The truth will set you free!
The objective of the OPEN Path is to improve your understanding of cause and effect through observation so you can continually improve your methods. If your predictions were good enough for you to create a plan that worked well: congratulate yourself and note what you did that was effective. Success has a lot of information value: There are many ways to fail, but few ways to succeed.

Alternatively, if things did not go as predicted, nature has taught you something you did not know before. The task now is to use this new information to improve your understanding of cause and effect, and modify your plan accordingly. You might make some adjustments, or abandon the tactic completely in favor of a different approach. As you continue to accept natural feedback and use it to improve your coping abilities, you will become progressively more effective.
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Self-Forgiveness
The follower of the OPEN Path seeks truth as revealed by observation. Personal experiments are conducted primarily to ask a question of nature and receive an answer. These experiments are risky. Unexpected results are common; if we knew what would work we would not have to do the experiment.

Performing these experiments requires courage. Unfortunately, many people with addictive disorders are relentless promoters of self-hate. The inevitable setbacks and hard times are taken as proof of their intrinsic worthlessness, or the hopelessness of their situation.

To utilize the powerful tools of the scientific method you must be:
Open to the truth as revealed by direct observation

Capable of utilizing the disciplines of inductive and deductive reasoning

Free from attachment to any particular story of the truth.

Willing to rehearse your coping tactics so that you can perform them with little conscious guidance.

Flexible enough to Try something different when a tactic you are trying out produces bad results.
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So far we have described two mutually exclusive paths to self-determination:

 The Impeccable Path requires no decisions, because there are no options ─ no exceptions are permitted.

 The OPEN Path requires you to be forgiving of errors and be flexible enough to modify your plan on the basis of new information.

Neither of these paths seems sufficient, and yet each has their advantages. If only there was a middle way…

3.1: The Impeccable Path

2007-12-12T15:17:00.000-08:00

Few users of this kit have already tried to quit or control their incentive use. If you have ever lapsed despite your intention not to do so, then you have experienced the PIG’s ability to influence your perception and behavior in real-time. Nevertheless, you may still have insufficient respect for this challenge and so make shallow commitments that will fail because they are not sufficiently binding.

In the final analysis, the only thing preventing you from giving in to a temptation is your commitment not to. Failing to honor a commitment sets the precedent that you can make a commitment and then violate it. This precedent immediately weakens the ability of future commitments to restrain impulse. The critical error of making and then breaking a commitment can transform abuse into dependence. The transition is gradual and the individual is generally not aware of the process while it is happening.

The point of making a commitment is to freeze your current motivation, so that you behave in the future the way you now intend, rather than to yield to local temptations. A commitment is your guarantee that you will adhere to your plan no matter the local circumstance. But if you fail to honor your guarantee you have made a liar of yourself, and future guarantees are worth less.

Making a commitment is like making a bet. If you adhere to it you win, and what you win is the ability to do what you said you would do despite local conditions that would motivate you to lapse. But if you fail to honor it you lose this power of your word ─ willpower.
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Odysseus and the Sirens
In a different era Odysseus had to sail within earshot of the Sirens. No sailor could resist their seductive call. The penalty for giving in to this irresistible temptation was death by drowning ─ the fate experienced by all who had come before. Appreciating the danger, Odysseus filled his men's ears with wax so they would not be able to hear the Sirens. Odysseus wanted to hear what the Sirens sounded like, but he knew that if he did he would be unable to resist its pull. The heroic solution: Odysseus pre-committed his future behavior by ordering him men to tie him to the mast of the ship.

The plan was successful ─ When the ship sailed past the island, the Sirens called, but the men could not hear them and kept rowing. Odysseus heard the Sirens, but did not [could not] give in to the temptation, because he was bound to the mast.

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Four Lessons:
Odysseus made his plans in advance. He knew that once he heard the Sirens it would be too late to influence his own behavior – their call would have transformed him from a potent warrior to a helpless victim. You would do well to use Odysseus’ humility as a model. Understand this: when you encounter a high-risk situation you will not have the strengths available to you now, and you are not likely to come up with an effective response during the crisis. To succeed you must have a well planned, well rehearsed coping tactic already in place.

Engineer your environment to minimize your exposure to temptation, so avoid high-risk situations and people ─ at least until the healthy habits have strengthened.

Because no sailor had ever survived the temptation of the Sirens, some might take a defeatist attitude and passively accept the inevitable loss. But Odysseus was a hero ─ he had high self-efficacy ─ and so he approached the challenge as a problem to be solved. He devised a good plan, and executed it well.

But the most important lesson of this story: Even though Odysseus experienced irresistible temptation, he did not give in to it. Before reading on, think back to the story: . . . How did he do it?

Having respect for the power of the Sirens, he pre-committed his future behavior by having himself bound by strong rope. Likewise you can pre-commit your future behavior by being bound by your word. For example: "I am not experiencing temptation now, but I know that I will, and so I give my word that whenever I experience temptation I will move away from it." Willpower refers to your ability to adhere to your commitment regardless of local circumstance.
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Willpower – the power of your intention to influence real world events – is a creation of the psyche and can be gained or lost according to how you actually perform.

Thought Experiment ─ You announce that you need to move some bulky furniture. Ernest, who owns a pickup, offers to help. You point out that he often makes such promises and has let you down many times. He replies, “But this time I really mean it.” He seems sincere, but he seemed sincere the other times too. The objective world demands that the furniture gets moved. Should you count on Ernest showing up, or make your plans assuming he won’t? Events in the objective world have not happened yet so we don’t know whether or not Ernest shows up. However, you have expectations based on your appraisal of Ernest’s likelihood of honoring his word when you need him.

When you make commitments for yourself are you earnest? If you fail to honor a commitment your expectation that you will honor your commitments in the future is diminished – telling yourself: “But this time I really mean it” is not an effective rescue. On the other hand, each time you honor a commitment your belief that you take your word seriously increases, and your willpower increases with it. Once you make a commitment you must permit no exceptions to occur!

Note that the word "decide" is derived from the root "cide," as in sui-cide, homi-cide, insecti-cide, and means "to kill." When, for example, an alcoholic makes the decision to quit drinking, it is understood that [s]he means to kill, once and for all, the option to drink alcohol, and thereby lock out drinking in the future. [The requirement of absolute adherence to the commitment is equally important for those who choose moderation rather than abstinence as an outcome goal].

Typically, one decides to control an impulsive behavior when its costs are more salient than its benefits. Your commitment is your promise to adhere to the plan even when the benefits of violating it are more salient than the benefits of adherence. Willpower is the measure of your ability to deliver on that.

Willpower is not static, and your ability to override the influence of the PIG can increase or decrease according to certain lawful principles. Local conditions such as anger, fatigue, or a run of bad luck can deplete this power. So, like an athlete it is important to train hard to develop this strength and be vigilant for circumstances that would deplete it.

Willpower Enhancement Notes:
• Making a commitment is like making a bet. Each loss weakens you; each win strengthens you. Honoring a commitment enhances willpower; failure to adhere to a commitment diminishes willpower.

• There is a difference between a goal and a commitment. A goal gives direction; if you lapse you can benefit from what you learned. A commitment is not a learning exercise; by making a commitment, you are foreswearing all excuses and explanations for failure.

• Since you cannot guarantee outcomes, do not commit to outcomes. Commitments must be procedural. For example, you can guarantee that you will perform a History Review [review of the sequence of events that led up to and followed a moment of decision] within 24 hours of the occurrence of a high-risk situation.

• Avoid bets you cannot win in your lifetime. "I will never again search the internet for porn” is such a bet. You don't get to win it until you are on your death bed. Better to go for one day at a time ─ even better is one hour at a time [see the delay method in Chapter 5.5: Coping Tactics].

• Make the commitments short and manageable, but once made, permit no exceptions to occur! Go for what you really want, but realize that more ambitious goals tend to come with a higher price. So be careful about over-committing. Remember, whatever you promise, you will have to deliver.

• Go for little wins. If you have had a history of violating commitments, you are starting out in a hole. Be especially conservative and make sure you honor every commitment without exception. If you do, you will over time re-establish the power of your word.

• People often do pretty well in the beginning, because their commitments are fresh in their mind and hence are salient. However, with the passage of time the salience of the original commitment decays. So periodically review your commitment and why you made it – see Hard Copy Page.

o As rule of thumb, once the crisis that originally motivated the commitment recedes into the past, your motivation becomes more a function of local circumstances than of the now distant commitment. The PIG, which at first supported the commitment ─ when you wanted immediate gratification of the desire to be free of the problem ─ must be overridden when the commitment is far away and the incentive is near.

• The more you exercise a behavioral sequence the easier it is to perform.

o For some individuals, vowing abstinence and then lapsing has occurred so often that they lose the ability in influence their own actions. Their life’s course is no longer determined by their intentions, but by the path of least resistance.

• Be aware that you are free to specify any commitment that you choose, so never make commitments unless you are certain that you will be able to adhere to them under all circumstances implied by the commitment. Because you are free to specify the details of the commitment, you have no excuse not to adhere to it.

o Remember, when you take this bet you are giving long odds; one loss overcomes many victories. It is critical that you adhere to every commitment you make. So specify clearly what you are committing to, and don't accept a commitment unless you are serious enough to bet your reputation that you will adhere to it on every occasion.

• A commitment may be stated formally as an implementation intention [form: Whenever I encounter X, I will Y] – for example, "Whenever I experience an urge, I will visualize the penalties of lapsing.” Note: coding the intention as a negative, e.g., "I will not think about sex" is poor form [see The Imp of the Perverse].
The true goal of this effort is for you to exercise your intended reactions to stress and temptation until they become your defaults. The Impeccable Path is the most straightforward and direct way to achieve this end. Conceptually it is simple, and for some individuals this direct approach is an excellent option: Change your lifestyle and permit no exceptions, and after a while you will have become familiar with your new, but nevertheless idiosyncratic, path: Your path of greatest advantage.

The problem with this approach becomes evident if there is a single lapse. This is a brittle method! Once a commitment is broken the ability to honor future commitments is compromised, and there is no longer a defense against complete loss of control.

In contrast to the rigid path of no exceptions, The Open Path is flexible. At each point, you are free to make decisions on the basis of local circumstances, and what you consider to be in your best interests at the time. Needless to say, anything as valuable as freedom comes at a price.

3.0: Matching Strategies

2007-12-10T13:11:00.000-08:00

Hedonism makes sense: One wants the maximum amount of pleasure and good experiences and the minimum amount of pain and bad experiences. You probably decided to end your relationship with the incentive when you realize it was a bad deal – it was causing more pain than pleasure. But breaking fee is trickier than it seems. The purpose of this kit is to give you the tools that will enable you to follow your path of greatest advantage, as you define it.

Good outcome is rare because of the high rate of relapse, and so you will have to develop the ability to prevent relapse, even in the face of the stressors and temptations that life deals you.

Section 1 focused on establishing a vocabulary and intellectual foundation that will enable you to utilize the tools provided by this kit. Section 2 described the traps responsible for most relapses. You should by now have some hypotheses about your particular traps, and so you are ready to consider solution strategies.
Matching
Part of the complexity of this challenge is that there are different approaches to treating addictive disorders, and each is helpful to at least some individuals. Some institutions tout one or another treatment orientation as the only real solution. In fact there is no single solution, because each individual is unique. Some people are well matched with behavior change strategies that for others are worth less.

This kit is based on the bio-psycho-social model rather than the disease model, and is best matched with inner directed, high-functioning individuals. Anyone who has made it this far through this dense material is almost certainly to be in this group. But even among this relatively small sub-group, there remains tremendous variation in temperament and circumstance. The key to good long-term outcome is matching treatment to the attributes of the individual.
Disease Model of Addictive Disorders
Many people with addictive disorders are impaired and require external structure or supervision to lead functional lives. There are, however, some individuals who function quite well in most domains, save their relationship with a particular incentive. For them, the disease metaphor and the idea of the passive patient being cured by the active treatment agent complicates good long-term outcome and fosters dependence on external agency. As a rule of thumb, the more impaired the individual, the greater the external control required to maintain incentive free periods. Some operational definitions of "impairment" are listed below:

• Cognitive impairment resulting from chronic substance abuse.

• Cognitive impairment due to other factors such as: Head injury, other organic causes, low native intelligence.

• Psychiatric impairment such as: Mood disorder, thought disorder, malevolent narcissism.

In North America, failing to control incentive use is viewed as a disease: The patient is treated and hopefully cured by an external agent such as a physician or treatment provider. The 12-Step Model of Alcoholics Anonymous, the version upon which most treatment programs for addictive disorders are based, is contrasted with the Bio-psycho-social Model upon which this kit is based:

According to the 12-Step Model, impulse control problems are diseases. Treatment emphasizes admitting powerlessness over the problem, complying with a plan developed by treatment providers, and adopting the norms and values of a new social group ─ the support or self-help group ─ in order to achieve total abstinence, which is the only acceptable outcome goal. The victim of the disease is responsible for neither the cause nor the resolution of the problem.

There are many excellent 12-Step treatment programs. In most communities virtually all treatment programs are based on this orientation. These programs will provide the best match for many individuals with addictive and compulsive disorders, especially those who benefit from the support of a self-help group, have a religious orientation, or are not well matched cognitively or philosophically for the demands of a self-directed approach.

The Relapse Prevention Model is based on the disciplines of neural and cognitive science. According to this view, substance abuse problems are the product of biological, psychological, and social factors. Rather than encourage the individual to accept powerlessness over a disease, the individual is encouraged to accept responsibility for changing behaviors that are excessively costly. Individuals who do not feel comfortable with the 12-step philosophy, or those who have attempted 12-step programs without success, often find these cognitive and behavior change techniques to be practical and direct.
Total Abstinence vs. Moderation
The disease model and 12 step programs assume that the individual is powerless to control incentive use, and so do not permit moderation as a treatment goal. The Relapse Prevention model does permit such a goal, which for many individuals is a weakness of this approach. Most individuals with an impulse control problem have tried moderation at least once and did not achieve good outcome. Even though the author does not know anything about you he asserts that choosing moderation as a goal rather than complete abstinence is probably a mistake. Nevertheless, you are an adult and it is your call. Be aware that your relationship with the incentive can take three forms: 1) abstinence, 2) controlled use, and 3) uncontrolled use. If you cannot control your use of the incentive, you have two options.

The desire to maintain some access to the incentive is certainly understandable; it does have its benefits. But incentives that can deliver immediate gratification have such an impact on the Psyche that attempting to control its use is often a fool’s errand. However, if you still want to pursue moderation rather than abstinence as a goal, take the PIG’s wager. If you win you get to be a controlled user, if you lose you must admit you have only two options regarding this incentive.

The PIG’s Wager:

 Establish whatever rules you think are appropriate regarding incentive use.

 Whatever these rules are, the PIG bets that you can’t follow them.

 Take the PIG’s wager – that is, you bet that you will adhere impeccably to your rules.

 If you win the bet you get to continue to use the incentive under the terms of your rules.

 But if you lose the bet you must admit that you cannot be a controlled user. You don’t get a second chance. Any violation of the rules means you lose, so bear this in mind when you make your rules.

 Controlled use means that you are following your own rules, so there must always be rules pertaining to this aspect of your life. You may modify your rules over time – never on the spur of the moment.

How Rigid or Flexible Should I Be?
The remaining chapters of this section address this strategic issue. Three approaches are described; it is important that you understand all three.

2.5: ATTACHMENT TO OUTCOMES

2007-11-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

If you don't get what you want you are disappointed, but if you don't get what you need you will die. Food, water, and oxygen are examples of needs, while respect, love, and being right are examples of wants. Dr. Albert Ellis based his Rational Emotive Therapy on this distinction.

The Fight-or-flight reaction is an exquisite orchestration of biological processes, which makes an organism physically stronger so that it will be able to fight powerfully or flee quickly when its life depends on it. If you ever encounter such a situation, you will be glad you have it.

This power, however, comes at a price; during a fight-or-flight reaction the body is sacrificing everything else – including digestion, immune response, and higher cognitive faculties - to be physically strong now. But some people react to trivial stressors as though they were life and death, which exhausts the resources needed to over-ride the pull of local incentives.

Dr. Ellis suggests a way of defusing excessive emotional reactions: When you experience strong emotions, ask yourself: "Is this about something I want or about something I need?” If you don't get what you want, it is disappointing but not a matter of life and death. Successful coping with such situations is often aided by being cool and calm rather than being in fight-or-flight mode. Indeed, people may destroy what is genuinely important to them because of their fight-or-flight reactions to trivial slights and losses.

According to Dr. Ellis, traps of emotional over-reaction result from attachment to outcomes that are not of vital importance.
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Stoicism
If your boss or spouse falsely accuses you of some sin you did not do, it is indeed frustrating, but it is not life or death. Even if you lose your job over it, it is still not life and death, very upsetting to be sure, but not life or death. To make this point, the Stoic, Epictetus would say: “Have you ever seen a beggar? He doesn’t have a job, but he is alive.”

Epictetus preceded Dr. Ellis by about two thousand years, and his position was more basic. He used the metaphor of an archer who strives to shoot excellently, and will not be disappointed if he shoots well, even if he doesn’t win the competition. Winning is desirable, but there will be times when an excellent archer shoots well and still - for reasons beyond his control, such as a sudden gust of wind, or an extraordinary performance by an opponent – is not awarded first place. A non-stoic archer views this as a failure because he did not achieve the outcome he intended; whereas a stoic archer views it as a success because he shot well. The stoic is focused on performing well, not the outcome of the performance.

In Epictetus' words:

On the one hand, there are things that are in our power, whereas other things are not in our power. In our power are opinion, impulse, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is our own doing. Things not in our power include our body, our possessions, our reputations, our status, and, in a word, whatever is not our own doing.
Straightaway then, train yourself to say to every unpleasant impression, ‘You are an impression, and by no means what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by asking whether it concerns things that are in your power or things that are not in your power: and if it concerns something not in your power, have ready to hand the answer, ‘This is nothing to me.’
Remember that, on the one hand, desires command you to obtain what you long for, and on the other, aversions command you to avoid what you dislike. Those who fail to gain what they desire are unfortunate, whilst those who fall into what they seek to avoid are miserable.

Epictetus' brand of stoicism foreshadows contemporary cognitive therapy:

A person’s master is the one who has power over that which is wished for or not wished for, so as to secure it or take it away. Therefore, anyone who wishes to be free should neither wish for anything nor avoid anything that depends on others; those who do not observe this rule will of necessity be the slaves of others.
When you are about to undertake some task, remind yourself what sort of business it is. If you are going out to bathe, bring to mind what happens at the baths: there will be those who splash you, those who will jostle you, some will be abusive to you, and others will steal from you. And thus you will undertake the affair more securely if you say to yourself from the start, ‘I wish to take a bath, but also to keep my moral character in accordance with nature.’ Do likewise with every undertaking. For thus, if anything should happen that interferes with your bathing, be ready to say, ‘Oh well, it was not only this that I wanted, but also to keep my moral character in accordance with nature, and I cannot do that if I am irritated by things that happen. Say to yourself, ‘This is the price for peace of mind, and this is the price for being free of troubles. Nothing can be had without paying the price.
Remember that the insult does not come from the person who abuses you or hits you, but from your judgment that such people are insulting you. Therefore, whenever someone provokes you, be aware that it is your own opinion that provokes you. Try, therefore, in the first place, not to be carried away by your impressions, for if you can gain time and delay, you will more easily control yourself.
According to Epictetus, the traps of emotional over-reaction result from attachment to outcomes that you do not control.
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Taoism
About 500 years before the Stoics were was the Tao poets. Consider this concise poerm by Chaing Tsu:

THE NEED TO WIN

When an archer shoots for nothing he has all his skill.
When he shoots for a brass buckle he is already nervous.
When he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind, or sees two targets.
His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him.
He cares.
He thinks more of winning than of shooting,
And the need to win drains him of power

Attachment to outcomes hinders ongoing performance in two ways:
Emotionality: If the archer needs to win, the prospect of failure is threatening, and produces a biological reaction – nervousness – which undermines the steady hand required of the task.

Distraction: The archer will perform best when his attention is focused on shooting to the complete exclusion of everything else. To the extent the archer thinks of winning rather than shooting the prize divides him, and the need to win drains him of power.

According to the Tao, the key to the traps of emotional over-reaction is detachment from outcomes.

2.4: RECURSIVE TRAPS

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Some of life’s problems are self-correcting. You catch a cold and the body’s immune system learns to recognize the pathogen and defeat it. A child learning to ride a bicycle may fall a few times, but will eventually get it. People who have fallen into a recursive trap never get it, because their distorted interpretation provokes them to respond in way that confirms the pathogenic bias.

Negative emotional states are not necessarily pathological. Sadness and fear are the natural reactions to loss and threat. The emotional reaction that results from an encounter with an objective threat, a poisonous snake for example, is adaptive and tends to dissipate after the threat has passed.

The negative emotional state produced by a recursive trap is different: Because it is based upon one’s cognitive structure, rather than upon objective reality, it may persist indefinitely. The anxious mood experienced by a person with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, a chronic worrier, is unrelated to objective threat, and so rather than energizing adaptive behavior, the anxiety only serves to sap the resources required for effective action.

Barry worries about his social performance – his consciousness if full of thoughts and images of being unable to cope with the social challenges he expects to encounter at the Friday office party. Attending to such thoughts causes him to become more anxious, and the more anxious he becomes the more he dreads the party.

Believing he is unable to cope with social challenges biases his performance in a particular way: He acts in ways that confirm the pathogenic belief! Because of recursive structure his self-sabotaging tendencies can persist indefinitely. Barry’s expectation of social failure is continually validated by objective evidence: He is anxious and hence unappealing in social situations. In this manner Barry creates a social reality for himself for himself and those around him.

Blushing is another example of a recursive structure. If blushing is embarrassing for me, then any feedback that I am blushing enhances the physiological reaction. The more obvious the blush the more embarrassed I feel, and the more embarrassed I feel, the more I blush.
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Self-Confirmatory Bias
None of us see objective truth; our perception is always biased by our beliefs. Suicide bombers and corporate executives are built of the same biological material, but they are biased by different beliefs and hence experience a different reality.

There are many ways to misperceive the world, and people make all sorts of errors. But some distortions are special: They have a recursive structure which can entrap a person indefinitely.
Two Recursive Structures:
Circular Chain - This structure is like a snake swallowing its own tail. It has no end, and so may repeat indefinitely. Barry’s belief: “Nobody would want to date a loser like me” makes him a less desirable date.

Circular chains can perpetuate addictive disorders: Consider how low self-efficacy perpetuates dependence on external agency

Mr. H is demoralized by his most recent relapse following intensive outpatient treatment. Like most people with low self-efficacy, when confronted with a difficult challenge he gave into it fairly easily – without dedicating the energy or persistence required for success. The failure further diminished his self-efficacy causing him to seek a more potent external agent to cure him of his problem. The dependence on external forces prevents him from developing the skills from which self-efficacy emerges.

Positive Feedback - When a microphone gets too close to a speaker the self amplification, or positive feedback, results in a progressively louder squeal. Likewise, emotion is subject to recursive amplification. The rapid heartbeat of a person in a panic attack is perceived as threatening which results in the secretion of more fight-or-flight hormones, which further increases heart rate.

Positive feedback can produce bingeing: Consider how using an incentive to make yourself feel better [technical term: using the incentive as an emotion focused coping tactic] is a setup for loss of control

Winnie’s obesity causes her pain, and the more she thinks about it the worse she feels. She can escape the pain of self-awareness by becoming absorbed in the pleasurable experience of mindless eating. The overeating episode causes self-loathing, which she is driven to escape by becoming absorbed in the pleasurable experience.

2.3: THE KARMA OF BEHAVING BADLY

2007-10-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

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.
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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.

2.2: PERVERSE MOTIVATION

2007-10-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

People often end up doing exactly what they tell themselves not to do. The intention to suppress a response has the perverse effect of making that response more likely. Edgar Allan Poe labeled this phenomenon: the Imp of the Perverse.
Thought Experiment #2
Try not to scratch your nose. Continue reading, but be aware that even letting your nose itch would indicate personal weakness. So try not to even think about your nose, and see if you can read to the end of this chapter without once touching your face in the area around your nose.

Trying to prevent your nose from itching may, perversely, produce the very thing you are trying to prevent. The more seriously you try the greater is the effect. Two interpretations of this perverse phenomenon:

Negative Suggestion: Negative representations are defined in terms of positive representations [their opposite], but positive representations are defined directly. For example, the statement: "It is not raining" requires one to conceptualize the meaning of the statement: "It is raining." Likewise, the statement: "Chester is not a pedophile" requires the conceptualization of Chester molesting a child. After hearing such an assertion you may feel uneasy about letting him play with your children. To understand the instruction: "Don’t let your nose itch!" the reader must access a representation of an itchy nose, which evokes that very sensation.

Ironic process: To determine if you are successful at having a nose that is not itching, you must compare the current sensations with what they would be if your nose was itching. According to this interpretation, it is checking to make sure you are successful at preventing your nose from itching that causes the nose to itch. Ironic, isn't it?

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Reactance
Humans hate restrictions - especially of those freedoms they already have. Reactance refers to the motivation to react or rebel against restriction. In one study, two-year-old boys accompanied their mothers into a room containing equally attractive toys. The toys were arranged so that one was easily available to the child while the other stood behind a transparent Plexiglas barrier, out of reach. Which toy do you think the little boys wanted? This is one among many examples of the general rule: Forbidden something increases its desirability.
Attribution Theory: The Insult Is the Injury
Smoking cessation research shows that it takes on average seven attempts to finally quit. Most smokers, however, interpret a failure to quit as an indication of their personal weakness. The belief that the cause of the failure is within the self is called: an internal attribution for failure. Explanations of one’s failure, which appeal to motivation, intelligence, or character defect are examples of internal attribution for failure. The belief that the same inadequacy that caused me to fail in the past will cause me to fail in the future is an example of a stable attribution for failure.

Internal, stable attributions for failure are associated with low self-efficacy. If you believe that you don’t have what it takes to succeed at this challenge, and, moreover, that you are not going to change, then it is understandable that you would want to turn yourself over to a treatment provider or a higher power. Self-determination requires that you persevere through difficult challenges. Internal, stable attributions for past failures are demoralizing and will rob you of the energy and clear-headedness required for good outcome. Efficacy enhancing imagery, contemplation, and other trance formative exercises are included in the kit. These tools are especially useful during times of crisis when your self-efficacy may be threatened.

Paradoxically, the belief that: "I am unable to achieve good outcome" generally results from an initial underestimate of the difficulty of this task. "It shouldn't be that difficult to change my ways once I make up my mind, so my history of relapse means there must be something wrong with me." This misattribution is based on popular misconceptions about what it takes to end an addictive relationship.
Attribution and Self Image
Consider the following study1 which demonstrates how internal attribution and counter-regulatory motivation can work together to affect one's self-perception. Teen-aged boys were told that a book was too sexually explicit to be read by those under 21. This restriction had the effect of dramatically increasing their desire to read the book. The experimenters knew that the attractiveness of the book was enhanced because the book was forbidden. But the boys had a different perspective; they attributed their motivation to read the book to a personal weakness - to be attracted to lewd content. Forbidding the book had the perverse consequence of causing the subjects to believe that they were perverse.

Footnotes:

1. Influence: Science and Practice - Cialdini - 1988

2.1: THE PIG

2007-10-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

The Problem of Immediate Gratification [the PIG] refers to the universal principle that immediacy is much more important than magnitude of a reward when it comes to influencing real-time behavior. This is especially true for animals, children and impulsive adults. Impulsivity is defined as the tendency to choose a small reward now at the expense of a large reward that you could have had if you waited [e.g., choosing $1 now over $10 tomorrow]. Alternatively, impulsivity can mean avoiding a small punishment now and getting the big punishment later [e.g., avoiding dental treatment]. Incentives which offer immediate payoffs are especially corrupting.

The relationship between immediacy of reward and its influence on local motivational state is hyperbolic. So when the incentive is nearby [in terms of time, space, or psychological distance] it can be terribly influential on real-time behavior. See Figure 1 below.

Some outcomes such as physical health, professional success, or loving relationships may have large magnitude, but are not produced immediately by a specific behavior. In contrast the gratification produced by consuming a drug or alcohol is immediate, and for that reason exerts an influence on behavior that is disproportional to its importance. Some people behave as if they valued this incentive more than they value health, wealth, or family.

This phenomenon looks different than it feels, and using the incentive is experienced differently when it is happening than in retrospect. So even though they may feel guilty about it later, crack heads have been known to trade their babies for small amounts of the drug.

Figure 1: The PIG

Motivation is fluid, and changes with local conditions. When the incentive is near it has a greater influence on motivation than the commitment you made some time ago. Changes in motivation alter perception in ways that you cannot now fully appreciate. Choices that may seem ridiculous now may seem to be a good idea in certain situations.

Ultimately your success or failure is determined by how you perform when you encounter the high risk situations that lie ahead. At these critical moments you will be in conflict: Pulling in one direction is the motivation to follow the path of greatest advantage, and pulling in the other is the motivation to yield in the direction of least resistance.

Below is a concrete example of an approach-avoidance conflict in which the line with arrows pointing to the right indicates the desire to engage the incentive and receive it’s benefits, and the line with arrows point to the left represents the motivation to avoid the price that will be paid later. In the example shown below the punishment is ten times greater than the reward, but delayed by one unit of time.

Figure 2: Approach-Avoidance Conflict

When you are far from the incentive, the motivation to avoid is greater than the motivation to approach. But when you are near the incentive the PIG works it’s magic and the pull of the incentive can become very strong very quickly. Once the gradients cross and the motivation to approach is greater than the motivating to avoid, the loss of control can be stunning.

The graph below (Figure 3) shows the gradient of net attraction to the incentive--that is, the motivation to approach the incentive minus the motivation to avoid it.

Figure 3: Net Motivation

When the motivation to avoid the incentive is subtracted from the motivation to approach it, the resulting gradient of net motivation is also hyperbolic; the tendency to approach increases exponentially as the distance between you and the incentive decreases.

When you are far from the incentive the gradient of net attraction is below zero indicating motivation to avoid the incentive. Under such circumstances the prospect of changing your ways looks easy. But when you are near the incentive - in terms of time, space, or psychological distance – net attraction will be greater than zero, and you will be motivated to approach the incentive. As you do, the pull of the incentive increases exponentially until it becomes sufficient to overcome your motivation to control your actions and you lapse. Once the distance between you and the incentive begins to shrink, the only way out is to exert an extreme effort to somehow put distance between you and it..

Note that the motivation to lapse is relatively flat until the it crosses “X” axis. But as soon as it does the increase in net attraction is so rapid that you may lapse before you know it – there may be no internal debate, no attempt to over-ride the urge, you may simply go from intending not to lapse to intending to lapse – literally before you knew what hit you.

2.0: ADDICTIVE TRAPS

2007-10-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

Listed below are six traps that interfere with the exercise of will; you will be more vulnerable to some than to others

 The PIG – The Problem of Immediate Gratification: Motivation is much more influenced by the immediacy than by the magnitude of the pay off – the incentive.

 Perverse Motivation [Also known as counter-regulatory motivation] – Psychological quirks that cause people to act differently than they say they want to. For example: Reactance: As soon as there is a restriction there is a perverse motivation to violate the restriction – especially if you are forbidden something that is not forbidden to others.

 The Karma of Behaving Badly- You don't pay for your sins in the next life you pay for them during this life, because whatever choices you make become stronger with exercise. With enough practice the sequence of events that leads to the incentive can unfold by itself, and it now requires conscious effort to interrupt. Your path of least resistance is your Karma. The Karma of repeatedly violating commitments is dependence – that is, you lose control over this aspect of your life.

 Recursive Traps – Paul Wachtel described this trap in as few words as possible: "It is often possible to discern a structure to people's difficulties in which internal states and external events continually create the conditions for the reoccurrence of each other."

 Attachment - Some people fail because they don't care enough to perform well, and others fail because they care too much about outcomes to perform well.

 Dependence – If your happiness or unhappiness depends upon something you do not control, you will become its slave. You remain a slave by waiting for someone else to free you.

Completing the Trap Detector - click the heading: 2.0 Addictive Traps - will help you identify the traps to which you are most vulnerable so that you can focus on the urgent issues first.

1.5 THE SOUL ILLUSION

2007-10-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

The Rodney Dangerfield of philosophical questions: When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is there a sound?

It gets no respect, because it seems to be one of those pointless questions that have no answer. But there is an answer – an answer with profound spiritual and practical implications.

When the tree falls, it produces a series of pressure waves in the surrounding air. The ear drum converts these waves into a mechanical signal which is transmitted by 3 small bones to the fluid filled cochlea – the spiral bony canal of the inner ear. Hair cells of the cochlea are the actual receptors. Each is tuned to a particular frequency of the fluid waves. Hair cell vibrations are converted to electrical impulses, and transmitted along the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex where intensity and frequency of the vibrations are mapped. Neither pressure waves, physical movements of body parts [bones, hair], nor electrical signals are sound. What we mean by sound exists only in the mind of the perceiver.

Perception differs qualitatively from the physical properties of the stimulus. The nervous system extracts only certain information from the natural world. We perceive fluctuations of air pressure not as pressure waves but as sounds that we hear. We perceive electromagnetic waves of different frequency as colors that we see. We perceive chemical compounds dissolved in air or water as specific smells or tastes. In the words of neurologist Sir John Eccles: “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.” Sounds, colors, patterns, etc., appear to have an independent reality, yet are, in fact, constructed by the mind. All our experience of the natural world is our minds’ interpretation of the input it receives.

Optical Illusions
In the classic text, Principles of Neural Science, Eric Kandel observes:

“The organizational mechanisms of vision are best demonstrated by illusions. Illusions illustrate that perception is a creative construction that the brain makes in interpreting visual data.... Learning does not prevent us from being taken in by these illusions.”

There is an illusion – though not an optical illusion – that causes otherwise competent individuals to voluntarily chose a path that everyone knows will lead to a bad outcome. The lessons learned from painful experience do not prevent them from being taken in again and again. Our logo was composed with this in mind. It is the Greek letter: Psi, which represents the Psyche, surrounded by an impossible triangle that illustrates the illusory nature of perception.

Perceptual Bias is Invisible to the Perceiver
Consider Dr. Jekyll: He loves his wife, and generally treats her well, except when he is angry at her. The first time he hit her he apologized and swore he would never do it again. Like an alcoholic who swears he will never drink again, he meant it when he said it, but when he is transformed by anger into Mr. Hyde he fails to inhibit the aggression as Dr. Jekyll promised.

As Dr. Jekyll, he has tender thoughts of his wife, and memories of good times past come easily to mind – bad thoughts and images are far away. But when he is in his Mr. Hyde trance it seems that she is always looking at other men and never treats him with respect. Now the tender feelings he has for her are unavailable. The trance formation from Jekyll to Hyde is invisible to him – he believes he is always seeing the world as it really is.

Dr. Jekyll is no fool and yet makes the same error again and again. Like you, he can easily see the perceptual biases of others, but is blind to his own at the critical moments. In retrospect he is full of remorse, but that does not stop him from repeatedly hurting the one he loves.

Because it is the perceptual system itself that is biased, we are always blind to the current bias. Whether we are angry or in love we assume we are reacting to permanent truth rather than to a state-dependent construction of reality. Consequently, we often act in ways that seem foolish when viewed from a different perspective.

To extend the Jekyll and Hyde metaphor to addiction: The rational Dr. Jekyll understands that his relationship with the incentive is a bad deal. Moreover, he has leaned through painful experience that a single lapse invariably leads to loss of control, and so vows complete abstinence. He does fine until he encounters a high-risk situation, which transforms the rational Dr. Jekyll into the impulsive Mr. Hyde. At the crucial moment when decisive action is required Mr. Hyde not only fails to see the danger, but is focused on anticipating the immediate gratification of lapsing.

A Clinical Tale
The clever attorney, Mr. Hasslebring, provides an illustrative example of the Soul Illusion. During our first session, scheduled shortly after his third DUI, he reported that it is now clear to him that intoxication has much greater costs than benefits for him and his family. He stated that our sessions were just a formality because he was already highly motivated to quit drinking.

He had come to the same conclusion before – namely, that drinking alcohol produces bad outcomes for H and his family. Each time he sincerely vowed to change his ways, each time he violated his vow, and each violation led to a demoralizing relapse. Now, in my office, he is about to do it again. He is not stupid, and is aware of his history, yet he is convinced that this time he really means it.

Why can’t a clever attorney learn this simple lesson of cause and effect? As you may have guessed, H has been taken in by the Soul Illusion. He is unaware that experiential phenomena such as perception, learning, motivation, and memory are state dependent, and so when he is in a high-risk situation he is transformed by local conditions and makes different choices than would the version of H I see in my office. Previous painful relapses do not prevent him from being taken in again by the same illusion - in H’s case, “I can have a beer and not lose control.”

A Society of Hasslebrings
The expansive H who was drinking and carrying on with his buddies the night of his most recent DUI was a completely different entity than the remorseful wretch before the judge, or the one who showed up in my office for his first session. Telling this remorseful fellow that he ought to quit dinking is pointless – he knows it. In fact, during an early session he laughed at himself while recounting the rationalizations that set the stage for some of his previous relapses. It is almost like two different people: One seriously believing he can control his drinking, and the other finding it humorous that the first one could be taken in by such obvious denial.

But these are only two of the possible versions or states of H, which also include the tender father H, the angry H, the clever lawyer H, the sexually aroused H, etc. When H is in a certain social context and begins anticipating the taste and feel of a first drink, his subjective reality changes, and at that moment H himself changes. He is no longer the logical, sophisticated attorney who thinks three steps ahead. Local conditions have trance formed him into an impulsive fool who is easily tempted to behave counter to his own self interests. This version of H is now making the decisions, and it is he who honestly believes: “Of course I can have a single drink, two if I want. Screw the uptight rules that assume I am a loser. “

In this state H expects the outcome of the first drink to be positive and it is he who lapses. Soon after the first lapse he recognizes that he has violated his vow and the remorse “trance forms” him – now into the remorseful H, who must pay the emotional price of the relapse. Once again he believes that this time he has learned his lesson and so makes another permanent vow that he will never drink again – and this time he really means it! However, unless he does something differently, this cycle is likely to repeat until he has lost everything.

To the therapist and most observers it is clear that he is different when in the remorseful state than he is when he wants to get high. But regardless of his current state – be it the remorseful H, or the H who expects the outcome of a lapse to be positive, he believes that he perceives objective reality, and that he will continue to view things the same way in the future as he does now. H’s pain is testimony to the power of the soul illusion. He can look at previous examples of the “vowing-abstinence-and-then-relapsing” sequence and recognize that the beliefs he used to justify the first lapse and demoralizing slide to relapse did not turn out to be objectively valid.

A great frustration of being a therapist – and a motivation for developing this kit – is that despite their sincere desire to achieve good outcome, dependent individuals repeatedly make the same errors with the predictable disastrous consequences for themselves and their loved ones. H’s folly is obvious to most observers and even to H when he is in my office and I force him to review his history. You may think he is somehow defective since he continually makes the same error. Be assured that your follies would be equally obvious to H, while to you they remain invisible.

1.4: WILL & THE PSYCHE

2007-09-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

We are each dealt a particular biology, psychological history, and current social environment. From these parts emerges a new entity: – the Psyche – with attributes that did not exist before. Even the neuron, as remarkable and complex a structure as it is, does not posses consciousness. Experiential phenomena emerge from the activities of many neurons. Opinions, actions and will are properties of the Psyche, but do not exist within any of its component parts.

Some individuals have good cognitive abilities, and are able to predict the likely outcome of making one choice versus another. They may, nevertheless, knowingly choose a less rewarding over a more rewarding alternative. The technical term for this perverse tendency is: Impulsivity.

Dependence occurs when the individual becomes unable to control incentive use despite its obvious destructive consequences. Despite sincere attempts to quit or cut down the individual predictably relapses to the scold from self or others: “Don’t you have any willpower?”

Willpower
Free will refers to the idea that we have the ability to intentionally influence our actions. The contrasting view, Determinism, holds that we actually have no free will, because all of our decisions and actions are completely determined by a set of causes, though they may be unknowable to us. Determinists believe that the experience that we have free will is merely an illusion.

There is a third, or middle, position: Libertarianism – not to be confused with political libertarianism. This view holds that human behavior is determined by many causes including, biological factors, psychological conditioning, and current social pressures, but this very causality provides the opportunity for us to have an intentional influence on how things play out. The more we discover about the cause-and-effect relationships, the more power we have to impose our will upon the world.

Consider the turkey; it doesn’t have free will yet it provides excellent care for its young. Turkeys spend much time warming and cleaning their young; but this complex behavior is triggered by one thing – the “cheep cheep” sound of her chicks. If the chick makes that sound the mother will care for it, otherwise she will ignore it. In a research project a polecat, the turkey’s natural enemy, was stuffed with a tape recording of the “cheep cheep” sound. When the stuffed pole cat was pulled by string to approach turkey she attacked it viciously, but when the taped sound was turned on, the turkey not only did not attack it, but gathered it under her to comfort it. When the sound was turned off she again attacked it.

Unlike turkeys whose behavior is determined by specific aspects of their immediate environment; some humans are able to set long range goals, develop plans, and make adjustments to the plan until their goal is achieved - their life’s course appears to be self-determined. Advocates of freewill argue that a new phenomenon emerged with human cognition, which makes us fundamentally different from turkeys. Alternatively, determinists argue that it may just seem that way because we are so much more complex than turkeys.

We cannot resolve the free will debate by simply asking people whether they intended to do something or not, because we cannot be sure whether the intention led to the behavior or the behavior led to the experience of intention. The subjective experience of free will is not evidence for its existence.

We can never be sure that A causes B, as there could always be a third variable C that causes both of them. While it seems that our intentions cause our actions, there may be causes, of which we are unaware, that produce both of them. In fact, there is evidence that even before we are aware of the intention to perform an action, the neural precursors of the action have already occurred. For example, subjects were told to note the time on a clock when they made the decision to press a button, and then to press the button. They took 0.2 seconds on average to press the button, after they decided to do so. EEG monitoring of their brain waves, however, revealed a spike 0.3 seconds before they decided to press the button. 1

Even if willful control of our immediate behavior is an illusion, we can use our understanding of cause-and-effect relationships to intentionally influence the course of events. This kit contains information and tools that can help its user change a tragic life’s course into a heroic one.

Willpower – overriding the path of least resistance to follow the intended path – is taxing, so conscious, free choice must be restricted to a small proportion of human behavior. Following the path of least resistance is the default, because it does not make demands on the cognitive resources required to consciously guide behavior. For this reason it is desirable for the intended behaviors to be expressed automatically without needing to be instigated and then guided by expensive acts of will. The limited conscious resources are better spared for those occasions when there are real options and choices of which paths to take.

To utilize the gift of rational processing it is important to appreciate when it is available and when it is not, as well as what it can and cannot do:

 Rational processing is only possible when there is a surplus of cognitive resources. It is not available when cognitive resources are otherwise occupied by complex cognitive demands, strong emotional states, or diminished by fatigue or intoxication.

 Rational processing is too slow to influence behavior in real time. Performance, to be smooth and responsive to a changing world, requires a rapid, holistic processing. Typically when you try to consciously control ongoing behavior, you disrupt it.

 Rational processing can produce rapid change, e.g., “I used to believe in the tooth fairy, but then I realized that it was my mother, and since then have never relapsed to the earlier view.” This is contrasted with the many repetitions required to change a habit.

 Rational processing can influence future behavior through a variety of means including: pre-commitment, rehearsal of desired performance, modification of environments.

Procedural Skill and the Acquisition of Control
Operating the bio-psycho-social system you inhabit is a bit like driving a car. To operate the motor vehicle you must appreciate that pressing the accelerator makes it go faster, turning the wheel steers it, etc. Once you learn how it works it then becomes a matter of practice – with some guidance from dad or a driving instructor – to achieve competence.

Those who live in cold climates are forced to develop additional skills to cope with icy roads. While it seems unfair that northerners have an extra burden to bear, fairness is irrelevant. Northerners and southerners must each cope with the reality they are presented. As partial compensation for the additional demands, northerners get to be better drivers in icy conditions than southerners.

Your relationship with the incentive has created dangers with which you must now cope. The key to good outcome is developing the competence to manage your high-risk situations successfully; after all you are bound to encounter them again.

Depletion of Willpower
According to Freud, the ego is the part of the psyche that must deal with the reality of the external world by mediating between conflicting inner and outer pressures. A Victorian gentleman standing on the street might feel urged by his “id” to head for the brothel and by his “superego” to go to church, but it is ultimately left up to his “ego” to start his feet walking in one direction or the other. Freud was fond of the analogy of horse and rider, because, as he said, the rider (analogous to the ego) is generally in charge of steering but is sometimes unable to prevent the horse from going where it wants to go. In fact, it requires some energy to control the “horse”, and recent research demonstrates that this energy can be depleted: Depletion of willpower refers to a temporary exhaustion of the Psyche’s capacity to engage in volitional action – including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action. Like muscle power, it can be strengthened with regular exercise, though it may be exhausted by trying to do too much too soon.

Footnotes:
1. Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W. and Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in
relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely
voluntary act. Brain, 102, 623–642.

1.3: TWO MINDS

2007-09-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

Knowing what is good for you is one thing, acting in accord with that knowledge is quite another. To explain why people act counter to their own interests, Freud proposed a Psyche motivated by Conscious and Unconscious factors. For our purposes a model proposed more recently by Epstein1 is particularly useful. Epstein posits that we, like other animals, have an Experiential Processing System through which we learn which response under which conditions produce immediate pleasure and pain. But unlike other creatures we have access to higher cognitive faculties - a Rational Processing System - that enable us to appreciate the likely long-term consequences of our actions, so that we can maximize our gratification and minimize our suffering. This wonderful resource is only available during periods of surplus, because it requires sufficient time and energy to think things through. The attributes of the two processing systems are contrasted below:

Experiential Processing System	Rational Processing System
Pleasure-pain oriented: What feels best now	Rationally oriented: What yields the greatest net benefits
Connections determined by the principals of classical conditioning	Connections determined by the principals of logic
Has a long evolutionary history and operates in animals as well as humans	Has a brief evolutionary history, operates through language
Holistic	Analytic
Encodes reality in concrete images, metaphors and narratives	Encodes reality in abstract symbols, words and numbers
Rapid processing: Oriented toward immediate action	Slower processing: Oriented toward future action
Slow to change: Change requires repetitive or intense experience	Rapid to change: Changes with the speed of thought
*Experience is state dependent*	Logic is independent of local state
Experienced passively, outside of conscious awareness [one is seized by one's emotions]	Experienced actively and consciously [one is in control of one's thoughts]
Certainty is self-evident [seeing is believing]	Certainty requires justification via logic and evidence

Because the rational processing system is only available in special circumstances, it cannot be counted upon to guide behavior during a crisis. In my office clients generally have access to good cognitive resources; he or she has taken an hour out of their day to focus their full attention on solving this problem. Knowing that I will point out thinking errors, most competent individuals are able to adhere to the rules of inductive and deductive reasoning. But at most other times, the experiential processing system is the default, and guides real time performance.

Ms. Lickfire has become dependent on cocaine. She is a competent woman, a well-paid attorney, body builder, and mom. In my office she develops an excellent plan – one that would certainly produce good outcomes for her and her daughters if she adhered to it. She has good cognitive skills so developing the plan is the easy part for her. The real challenge is for her to get herself to adhere to her plan when she encounters a crisis and her cognitive resources are otherwise occupied.

That this is a difficult challenge is demonstrated by the fact that L has already gone through several inpatient and intensive outpatient treatment programs, and has attended self-help group meetings on and off for years, yet she continues to relapse.

I interact with L’s rational processing system, the one to whom it makes no sense to risk everything dear to her for the trivial pleasure of a cocaine high. But there are other versions of L, and I only have access to the one who appears in my office. The L that I see has put aside all the other demands of her daily life and dedicates her best cognitive resources to the problem of acting counter to what she says are her true intentions. But during the critical moments of a high-risk situation, my office and her excellent cognitive abilities are far away.

Real-time performance is not based on deliberate rational processing – there is no time for that. The best predictor of what L will do when faced with a particular high-risk situation is what she did the last time she encountered such a situation. To behave differently she will have to override this default reaction and intentionally guide her behavior. Initially this requires will, but with practice the intentional reactions become habitual and hence easier to perform.

The process of sculpting her habit patterns is not all that different from the way L sculpts her physique. First, she used her rational processing system to figure out a possible solution to her challenge. Then she strengthens the intended coping tactics through the practice performing as intended. With sufficient practice the intended reaction becomes habitual – that is, automatic, easy requiring little cognitive resources. For both body sculpting and habit sculpting the intended reality gradually emerges with exercise.

1.2: SELF-EFFICACY

2007-09-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

Most clients who see me privately have achieved sufficient financial success to pay for my services. These are impressive individuals who generally accomplish what they set out to accomplish; they typically develop the necessary skills and work industriously until they achieve their goal. But when it comes to controlling their use of the incentive they perform less well – astoundingly less well.

Perseverance and Self-Efficacy

Technical terms can provide a more specific definition of a concept than ordinary language in which a word may have different meanings to different individuals. Self-Efficacy refers to the expectation that one can master the challenge. “I can fix any computer problem” is an example of the confident expectation of a person with high self-efficacy in that domain. That same person may have low self-efficacy in another domain, “I am a nerd and will probably make a fool of myself at the party.”

As you would expect, self efficacy has an influence on performance: People with high self-efficacy can tolerate physical discomfort and surprising amounts of frustration, and yet persevere, creatively solve problems, and stay the course until one way or another they accomplish what they set out to accomplish. In contrast, people with low self-efficacy abandon the effort after minor discomforts or frustrations. “I’m not going to succeed anyway, so why suffer more than necessary?” is an example of the demoralized attitude of a person with low self-efficacy in a particular domain.

Achieving a worthwhile outcome often requires that you tolerate some discomfort or frustration. A mountain climber would never achieve his goal if he abandoned the task at the first sign of discomfort or frustration. It is persevering in the face of challenge that is part of the adventure of mountain climbing. But discomfort and frustration do not evoke a heroic reaction from people with low self-efficacy. Instead of triggering resolve and creative problem solving, setbacks and discomfort evoke negative emotional reactions such as hopelessness, guilt, or self-loathing, which may motivate one to abandon the effort. Indeed, most dependent individuals repeatedly relapse because they misperceive the nature of their challenge, and underestimate what is required to achieve good outcome.

A Peak Experience

Mountain climbing is a metaphor for a difficult but surmountable challenge. It would be foolhardy to attempt a serious climb without proper preparation, or without the understanding that you will probably encounter physical discomfort and difficult challenges along the way. Most climbers have fond memories of their adventurous challenges and remember them as peak experiences. People voluntarily take on difficult challenges, because it’s fun to experience the mastery and enhanced self-efficacy that result from achieving an impressive goal. Mountain climbing is hard and often painful, but people take it on voluntarily - without financial compensation – because engaging and mastering a difficult challenge can be quite gratifying.

Despite the serious dangers and formidable obstacles, most people who set out to climb a mountain successfully achieve their goal. When competent individuals have realistic expectations about the nature of their challenge, they dedicate sufficient resources to planning, and are able to persevere until the goal is achieved, despite the physical and mental discomforts they encounter along the way. The difficulty of the challenge is in fact an essential part of the story, and the whole enterprise – including the discomfort – is often remembered as a positive experience.

In contrast, the vast majority of people who resolve to change their relationship with an addictive incentive fail to achieve their goal. They relapse, become demoralized, and lose faith in their ability to overcome their problem. The low self-efficacy, in turn, makes future failures more likely, which in turn lowers self-efficacy, and so it goes. If low self-efficacy is a problem for you, it will be helpful to distinguish between process and outcome. The mountain summit is the nominal or outcome goal of the mountain climber’s efforts. Performing well on the slopes is the process goal. For the climber, the real goal of going mountain climbing is the peak experience that results from engaging the challenge. The function of the summit is to provide a focus that gives structure to the activity, and later to the story the climber will tell friends, family, and self. If, for example, a storm developed during the climb and the team performed brilliantly getting everyone off the mountain with no injuries, the climber would feel successful despite failing to achieve the outcome goal

Ironically, low self-efficacy often causes people to focus more on outcomes than process. The insecure climber may be more focused on what the other climbers think of his skills than on the details of good performance. As everyone knows, good outcome is a byproduct of good performance.

Major life accomplishments emerge over time as you systematically solve the problems encountered along the way. In domains in which you are successful, it is likely that your real time performance is guided by focus on the task rather than on self-evaluation. Actual success is encouraged by an attitude that permits you to competently and consistently perform all the actions required to achieve your goal, the pleasant ones as well as the unpleasant ones.

Self-Efficacy Research Highlights

n Individuals who have high self-efficacy are willing to tolerate physical discomfort and psychological frustration without abandoning the path to their goal.

n Individuals with high self-efficacy tend to employ an action oriented thinking style - that is they focus on how to solve the problems.

n Conversely, research shows that action oriented thinking makes success more likely.

n Individuals with low self-efficacy tend to abandon the path in the face of even minor obstacles.

n Individuals with low self-efficacy tend to employ a state oriented thinking style – that is they focus on how they feel and why they feel that way. Research shows that state oriented thinking makes failure more likely.

So, if you have low self-efficacy in this domain, switch from state oriented to action oriented thinking; that is, focus on how to solve the problem I am facing here and now rather than on yourself and how you are feeling.

Thought Experiment #1: Efficacy Enhancing Imagery

Consider a domain of your life in which you are usually successful - athletic, artistic, occupational, social, etc. Imagine what it feels like to be you when you take on a challenge in this domain. Invest the time and energy elaborate this imagery until you experience the confident state associated with high self-efficacy. Now, imagine that you are presented an impressive challenge in this domain: What is your attitude toward it? How would you expect to react to the discomforts and frustrations you encounter?

THE PARADOX OF CONTROL

2007-09-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

Nobody wants to sell out or become dependent. One intends to use the incentive judiciously, and receive the benefits, but not to harm one’s self, loved ones, or integrity. Nevertheless, despite the best of intentions, the consequence of repeatedly exposing a biological creature to immediate gratification is to create a trap from which escape is deceptively difficult. There are many ways to become dependent; here is one:

Our protagonist, Mr. H, throws away more money than he can afford on lottery tickets. After debating with himself for many months H decides to change his ways and vows he will never buy another lottery ticket. It is now a little after midnight three weeks later, and H has just pulled into a convenience store for gas. The clerks remarks, “This must be your lucky day, I was going to close up 5 minutes ago.” H interprets this an an omen of good fortune. Under these circumstances will he buy a ticket and break his vow? If he does, that means that his behavior was dependent upon local factors rather than on his commitment

Some Causes of Dependence

Whether the lottery ticket was a winner or a loser, Mr. H lost something by failing to adhere to this commitment. When he vowed abstinence he bet the seriousness he gives to future commitments that he will not break this one. By lapsing he lost that bet, and as a result he lost some respect for his word. Dependence is a consequence of losing this wager too often [see chapter 4.1].

An other channels through which the lapse promotes dependence: Each time H uses the incentive he strengthens the sequence of behaviors that leads to the incentive. With sufficient practice this sequence becomes the default path, and once it does it requires conscious effort to interrupt the sequence of behaviors that produce the incentive. From this point on, whenever the cognitive resources required to consciously direct behavior are compromised, H tends to follow this path of least resistance to incentive use [see chapter 2.3].

Dependence is often an iatrogenic condition [pathology caused by treatment efforts] in that it may result from misattributing the cause of the relapse to a characteristic of the self, which is not going to change. A popular misconception is that once you have made up your mind it is a trivial matter to act as intended, and anyone who fails to do so must be defective in some way. While the decision to change is indeed necessary, it is by no means sufficient. In fact, preventing relapse is much more difficult than most people realize, and failure is often the result of insufficient respect for the challenge. Repeated failures lead to the belief: “I am powerless [have a disease], so I need an external agent to resolve my problem for me.

Attribution

It is possible to have an intentional influence of the course of your life, but it requires a serious investment of time and attention. But because most people underestimate how formidable a challenge this is, they engage in shallow self-management attempts. To add insult to injury, everyone – the individual as well as friends and family – believes that it should be easy to quit this self-destructive behavior, and so the relapse that results from the shallow commitment is all the more demoralizing. The failure to prevent relapse is taken as evidence of an underlying disease or character defect. Hence the responsibility for good outcome must be delegated to a responsible treatment agent such as a program, doctor, or self-help group.

In the United States the vast majority of treatment programs for addictive disorders are based on the medical model or the 12-Step model of Alcoholics Anonymous. Both view the problem to be treated as a disease over which the individual has no control – other then complying with the treatment regimen. The person presenting for treatment is given the label, “patient,” and assumes the passive female role, while the agent of change, the treatment provider, is assigned the effective male role.

Outcome research has been unkind to this approach and the vast majority of graduates of such programs go on to relapse. Ironically, the treatment failure is taken as further confirmation of the individual’s incorrigibility, and need for greater reliance on external sources of control.

True, many individuals require externally imposed structure because of psychiatric or intellectual deficits that make it impossible for them to follow a self-directed path. For these individuals, medical and 12-Step treatment programs are the only reasonable alternatives. However, some individuals who have been caught in an addictive trap are best matched with a more self-directed course, and for them accepting responsibility produces better long-term outcome than accepting powerlessness.

Escape from Freedom

Don’t underestimate the attractiveness of abdicating responsibility. Many individuals who are capable of self-direction prefer dependence on an external agent. Following a path that is already laid out for you is easier than making up your own – especially for those who have lost faith in themselves. For such folks, conventional treatment programs can and do produce short-term behavior change, but rarely lead to freedom from dependence.

Responsibility without power can be frustrating. The fact is, we don’t have complete control over events, and have only limited control over outcomes. We often fail through no – or only partial – fault of our own. But the fact that we do not have complete control over the course of events cause some people jump to the opposite pole and accept the premise that they are powerless.

People who have lost faith in themselves are vulnerable to testimonials touting the effectiveness of one or another external source of control. Testimonials are easy to get, not because they are false, but because people demonstrate a remarkable ability to be influenced by an external source of control . . . for a while. As network marketers and Al Qaeda recruiters demonstrate, it is not that hard to motivate people to do amazing things, regardless of the validity of the motivation’s premise. But independence requires more than temporary compliance with externally imposed rules.

The downside of taking on the passive patient role shows up when program participants easily commit to procedures that are unlikely to work for them; publicly accept program rules and restrictions that privately they don’t expect to follow; or are motivated to rebel against the externally imposed rules.

The Buddha’s Secret

Still, it is tempting to believe that there is external salivation from the natural consequences of our actions, as well as from other forms of suffering. Being human, the Buddha spent years seeking the secret to understanding human suffering and how to escape it. His insight was simple, and can free you of an illusion that promotes dependence. And the secret is: There is no secret.

The irony of seeking treatment for dependence on an external source of control has probably not escaped the astute reader, and this kit is designed to enhance willpower rather than compliance. While developing the ability to act intentionally in real time is demanding, there is a payoff – the change is irreversible! Rather than wear off, willpower becomes more robust with time and exercise. Among your first task is to give up the comfortable illusions of childhood and accept responsibility for what you can control.

The discovery that Santa Claus is fiction is an early developmental milestone. Development continues throughout the lifespan, and a major milestone of adulthood, that not everyone achieves, is the passage from dependence on an external agency to self-direction.

Rather than accepting powerlessness and turning responsibility over to an external agent, the text and experiential invitations contained in this kit are designed to enhance your willpower. This approach is intended for those individuals who have the intellectual skills to follow the admittedly complex subject matter, and who also have a pragmatic and self-directed temperament. The fact that you have made it this far suggests that you have the requisite intellect; what remains to be demonstrated is the pragmatism and perseverance to see this challenge through to good long-term outcome.

Incentive Motivation

2007-09-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

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].

Dependence

2007-05-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

Some people act counter to their best interests because they have developed a dependent relationship with a substance or activity that can provide immediate pleasure or relief. There are many kinds of pay-offs or incentives, including but not limited to - alcohol, drugs, food, cigarettes, sex, computer assisted gaming, gambling, porn, and relationships. An individual’s unique set of preferences and vulnerabilities determine the addictive potential of the different incentives available. Once an addictive relationship develops, controlling or ending it is deceptively difficult.

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.

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

Weight Management

2004-12-01T16:46:00.000-08:00

As a psychologist in private practice I tend to work with people who are able and willing to pay top dollar for expert consultation. In fact, most of my clients are impressive individuals who have achieved success in many areas of their life – except, of course, weight management. It is not for lack of effort or nutritional knowledge; many have read books, taken classes, and have a good understanding of the physiology of weight management. In other domains, when they want to accomplish something they learn what they need to learn – perhaps by reading a book or taking a course. They tend to work intelligently and industriously – often developing skills along the way – until they achieve their goal. Not so with weight management. Clients are often apologetic during our first session, embarrassed by their history of repeated failure in a domain of life they consider important. There are many books and programs focused on weight management, and heretofore none have produced satisfactory results for a reasonable percentage of users. This kit is different. It can produce good long-term outcome for a large proportion of users. The caveat is, only a small segment of the population can be a user: The kit is designed for those who have sufficient cognitive resources to make sense of the complex and often counter-intuitive information that follows. Part of your responsibility is to use what you already know to select a diet or lifestyle that is best matched to you and your current circumstance. There are many diets and programs to choose from. After weeding out the ineffective and the downright fraudulent you will be left with some options with which you could become comfortable and which – if you followed it -would produce a higher quality of life for you. Most clients have a good idea of what to do, the problem is getting the self to do it – and to stick with it to prevent relapse.Presented here are tools to get yourself to do what your rational processing system concludes is in your own best interests. Dietary rules, recipes, and exhortations to exercise are deferred to other authors. Rather, our focus is volition – that is, the ability to follow a course that you set for yourself so that you behave in a way that is good for you and that supports what you stand for.
Perseverance and Self-Efficacy

Sometimes the use of a technical term has the advantage of providing a shorthand way of referring to a new concept. Self-Efficacy refers to your belief in your competence in a specific area of life. Many overweight individuals have high self-efficacy regarding their parental skills or business abilities, but low self-efficacy when it comes to weight management.
People with high self-efficacy can tolerate physical discomfort, surprising amounts of frustration and failure, and yet persevere, creatively solve problems, and stay the path until one way or another they reach their goal. In contrast people with low self-efficacy abandon the effort after minor discomforts or frustrations. Their reasoning may be: “After all, I’m not going to make it anyway, why suffer more than necessary?” or they may experience a subtle alteration of state or a feeling – e.g., hopelessness, exhaustion, anger at self. The diminished self-efficacy that result from repeated dietary failures, makes the overweight person want to abandon the effort and turn over the responsibility of solving this problem to an external agent who would do a better job. The desire for an external solution to a personal problem sets up a kind of trap. The person trades self-reliant problem solving skills for some magical external solution - the more magical, the more seductive. Unfortunately, magical solutions tend to fail, which paradoxically strengthens the trap - a trap that prevents most people from ever achieving good long-term outcome. Rather than be actively involved in the creative process of developing a path that would lead to a successful outcome and taking responsibility for following it, those who have lost faith in their ability to succeed tend to passively present themselves for treatment. The passivity shows up when patients too easily commit to procedures that are unlikely to work for them, or when patients publicly accept the program rules and restrictions that privately they don’t expect to follow. Self-sabotaging traps are self-perpetuating, because they have a recursive structure1 One frequently observed example is called the Failure Syndrome: Low self efficacy → hope for an external rescue → perception of the self as the “patient” [the recipient of treatment] rather than as the responsible agent of change → uncritical acceptance of unrealistic outcome goals and preposterous weight loss schemes →failure to achieve outcome goals→ abandoning the plan → weight gain → demoralization and diminished self-efficacy→ greater dependence on external source of rescue.
Ahead is a goal of great value to you, but, alas, the path to it does not yet exist. The path of greatest advantage emerges as you follow a course that produces the best outcome for you, as judged by you. Critical to following this path is avoiding the traps and pitfalls that predictably lead to relapse and demoralization.
Weight management is an extraordinarily difficult skill to master. The reason for the 85-95% failure rate among dieters is that most underestimate the resources required to achieve their goal and overestimate how easily it can be done. This is a challenge worthy of your respect.
It is assumed that you already understand the physiology of weight management. If this is not the case there are pages with information and links at www.psycharts.com. However, despite the fact that you probably know a lot about this issue and you are pretty smart, you have not yet achieved your goal. Why?
Illusions & Self-Sabotage
The short answer [follow the links for a more detailed explanation]: They are taken in by illusions, which make each step along the path seem like the best choice at the time. Several factors conspire to encourage a first lapse [for more on this, please visit: The Imp of the Perverse], which often damages self-efficacy. So the consequence of a single innocent slip may be the development of a complete relapse.
We perform badly not because we want to fail, but because we are duped into behavior that is counter to our own interests. When we review a relapse, the errors which are so obvious to us in hindsight were not so obvious when they were made. We do not learn from painful experience, because we are repeatedly taken in by illusions. For a direct experience, please visit Optical Illusions.
Considering the difficulty of this path, how can good outcome be achieved?

The Default PathGood outcome is the byproduct of doing the right thing for a long time. Happily, the consequence of following a certain path for a long time is that it becomes easier to follow.
It is through real time practice that you train your body how to perform; after repeated practice performance becomes effortless and requires little cognitive resources to execute successfully – see the Karma of Practice. During the early stages of this journey you will have to expend energy to mindfully guide your behavior during high risk situations in order to set good precedent for coping successfully in the future.
Most people do not cope well during relapse crises, because they are not prepared. There are few instruction books on how to get yourself to perform well in the face of powerful local factors such as stress and temptation. A primary goal of this kit is to provide the intelligence that will help you perform as intended at the moment of decision, so that you exercise and hence strengthen effective coping reactions to the high risk situations that lie ahead.
Two Paths to Self-Determination
v When someone achieves remarkable results – e.g., impressive weight loss – it is usually the result of following an Impeccable Path. This is a comparatively easy path to follow, while you are on it. The problem is that once you are off it, you are out of control. Once the politician takes the first bribe, it is a small step to the second, an even smaller step to the third. [S]he is corrupt, and no longer an honest politician. Once the original commitment is lost, it is usually lost forever. Following a vegetarian regime is an example of an impeccable path. There are no decisions about eating meat. Many people happily and effortlessly remain vegetarians for long periods. However, those who attempt this lifestyle, but occasionally allow themselves to eat meat have a different experience: they have to continually make decisions. Weight loss through protein sparing fasting is an example of the using the Impeccable Path to promote weight loss. Those who follow it report: “It is easy because there are no decisions.” For a description of how this approach to weight management tends to play out, please visit Two Surprises.
v The Open Path is a less rigid approach – here the person is free to choose. While it may be liberating, the freedom to use good judgment rather than being bound by rigid rules comes at a price: At any and every choice point you must have access to sufficient cognitive resources required to size up the situation on the fly, make the right decision, and get yourself to adhere to it.

Footnotes:
1. The Failure syndrome is an example of a self-defeating recursive sequence of internal states and external events that recreate the conditions for the recurrence of each other. The recursive structure here is based on the emotional reaction to a perceived failure. The emotional reaction to the expectation of failure motivates actions which increase the likelihood of future failures, and consequent emotional reactions, etc. Another example: Depressed emotional state → negative perceptual bias [perceiving the self as worthless, the future hopeless, etc,] → negative outcome expectancy→ decreased motivation [energy for problem solving behavior and perseverance despite local discomfort and frustration] → ineffective overt behavior → disappointing outcome → confirmation of the original bias.