Commitment to change is the most critical element of being successful in achieving full recovery from addictive behaviours. Steely determination, willpower and/or partner ultimatums can go a long way but without personal commitment to the cause you may lack the emotional and psychological momentum to behave differently when it counts.
Common to all addictions is the all-powerful tornado-like pull of the cravings and other maladapted neurological processes – commitment has to be bullet-proof to withstand this pull. Re-aligning the brain into what is right or wrong for you is the key to securing commitment. Just several years of automated repetition by these neuro-processes gradually erode your commitment to being ‘good’. Your brain has become wired up to acting out. Working through the following exercises will help you to re-access and strengthen your commitment.
Activity 1 – just for a few moments, close your eyes and seriously reflect on your level of commitment to change and then score it on a scale of 1(weak) to 10 (unshakeably strong). Honesty to self is the best policy here.
Anything more than 7 probably means your commitment is already strong enough to withstand the pull of most compulsive urges. You should crack on with the free V2V online recovery programme .
Between 3 and 7 means you have sufficient to get you underway with this work but you need to focus hard on building commitment in the early stages before moving on too quickly. Less than 3 is likely to mean that whilst you have a fragile sense of a problem that needs sorting out you are not yet ready to tackle it – certainly not independently and without the helping hands of a treatment therapist. In this case stay with these exercises for a few weeks or a month or two to crystallise your commitment to change.
Adopting the strategies below will help to build commitment if you scored low and to sustain it where you scored more highly.
Activity 2 – over the next few weeks make a concerted effort to apply the following 6 small, simple but smart mental exercises that will help to automate commitment.
1) The huge benefits of stopping need to have a higher profile in your automatic thinking than the pull of the fake benefits of acting out. Reinforce through hourly reminders what these benefits are (write them here):
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- Biggest benefit
- 2nd benefit
- 3rd benefit
- 4th benefit
2) Now start to build your automated disapproval about the COSTS and NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES of acting out – experienced or potential. Write these down below and look at them every day – spend 5 minutes every few hours training your brain to keep these at the forefront of your daily thoughts. Typical ones are loss of marriage/family, loss of job, loss of money, loss of self-esteem and police knocking at your door.
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- Biggest negative impact
- 2nd negative impact
- 3rd negative impact
- 4th negative impact
3) Likewise, your core values need revitalising and adding to your daily mantras so that your brain is reminded where you stand on boundaries and what it means to you to be doing the right thing. List your top 10 values and look at the list daily. If you struggle on this send me an email and I will send you a free values worksheet. Typical values are respect for self and others, integrity, honesty, resourcefulness, being caring or reliable etc.
4) Commit yourself to the view, which you should reflect on daily, that addictive behaviours are precisely that – behaviours. This will give you more power and control over addiction. This makes recovery do-able because we know that behaviours can be restricted, controlled, and stopped for good.
5) Acceptance of a problem is a pre-requisite of commitment to change. Clearly you have got this far so there is something in you somewhere saying this isn’t right. Stop avoiding or denying the issue. Stop self-destructing. Don’t look elsewhere for a definition of the problem – YOU decide what feels wrong and right for you then mentally sign up to the cause.
6) Focus on a pruning rather than cold turkey approach to stopping. Scaling back or de-escalating your behaviours over time can be a less daunting prospect than facing the instant loss of acting-out and its associated (fake) pleasures. Your brain is less likely to be overwhelmed and immobilised by using such ‘baby steps’ approaches. Chipping away at addictive behaviours is perfectly fine if it suits you and you can sustain it. Don’t over-preoccupy with ‘stopping’ tomorrow or next week which can sound like too-daunting a task. Stopping might sound too big a task leaving you exposed to the distortion that you are helpless and left giving in again to addiction.
Treat the brain as if it needs bringing back into line. You will need to use covert methods to win this war of attrition against addiction, such as the baby steps to stopping or making benefits, negatives and values more prominent in your neural pathways. Daily intonations on these will produce tiny incremental improvements day on day until commitment becomes more automated.