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Building Recovery – Cost

by Dave Cooper | Jan 8, 2020 | A2R

Now we are going to get into more detail about the idea of ‘cost’. Another one of the ‘big three’ things to consider when building your recovery along with ‘design’ and ‘location’. Most of us get the general idea that things cost and that we have to pay, but what exactly is the cost of your recovery? If we do not know the cost then we cannot know if we are willing to pay it. So it’s not surprising that this is one of the biggest blocks to recovery. Let’s take a closer look at how much this new home is going to cost.

Always remember when doing any of these exercises that the more you imagine your recovery home as a real home, the better it will work for you as a genuine aid. So ask the same questions you would ask when considering a new home. These are exactly the same questions you need to ask about your recovery. So think of cost as things you will have to give and things you will have to give up. Probably the first thing you would think of when considering moving would be cost. What can you afford? What would you be willing to pay? It’s exactly the same with your recovery.

Don’t assume that you will be willing to pay

The first thing you need to do is tackle the assumption that you will pay anything. Those of you who have tried to recover in the past will know that this is a dangerous assumption to make. A typical idea here is that your addicted life has been all bad. That there was nothing good about it. Not true. Don’t fall into the trap of the ‘medical model’ that removes any choices and says that you were powerless over everything.

Considering yourself as the manager of your own life is an empowering shift in your thinking. You were making choices and remember, it worked for a while. If what you were doing was still working you would still be doing it! But it stopped working and so you need to seriously consider the cost of your recovery. Here is a shortlist of things that you will need to pay.

The disapproval of others

Not everyone is going to like how you change and what you do. Loss of their approval includes the idea of doing things that are hard that only you can see. If you have been big on ‘approval’ this can be a huge cost. Make up your mind to stick to your design.

Acceptance of limitations

You can’t spend money twice! If you are going to pay for your recovery then the money has gone. If you decide that spending more time with the kids is part of your recovered lifestyle then that time is spent and cannot be spent elsewhere. Make up your mind to value the money you are spending.

Letting go of quick fixes

Buying your new home is a long term goal. It involves working and paying for something that does not appear immediately. Before some of us can buy our new place we have to save up for a deposit. This means working hard for something we do not even have yet! If you have been a typical addict you will only have been willing to pay for something you get right now! Make up your mind to let go of quick fixes.

Cost is an investment

So the first thing I want you to do is to get your attitude right towards this idea of cost. If you are not used to thinking about paying then you will probably be feeling bad about the idea of how hard this will be. Well, that’s not a bad thing to come to terms with but I want you to think of the cost more as an investment. You are going to get something amazing out of this! I want to now take a look at some of the challenges you face when deciding to pay for your recovery.

You are responsible for the payment

Really this is a boundary question. Most addicted lifestyles include the idea that someone else is going to look after us or pay for what we need. One of the biggest parts of your preparation is understanding that you are responsible for the payment! When you sign for your house you are saying that you will pay. If the payment is not made it is you they will be looking for. Anyone who has been in this position will know that this is a 24/7 difficulty. Don’t sign for something you are not willing to pay for!

Paying is uncomfortable

Over the years of working in this field one of the things that quickly became very obvious is the way that people become very wary of discomfort. As you became more and more dependent on your drug or behaviour you will have developed this aversion to certain discomforts. This behaviour develops into a belief that you are not supposed to feel any discomfort! This is inevitably accompanied by greater and greater dependence on the things that offer quick fixes.

I have seen several people run out of treatment centres at the thought that things may get uncomfortable in the future. This is before they have even come down off the drugs or been detoxed! So strong is the belief that discomfort is to be avoided at all costs. But discomfort is normal and inevitable. All adults face discomfort every day. Remember, if you expect discomfort it’s a lot easier to deal with. Expectations change experiences.

If you are willing to face discomfort as part of your commitment to your recovery you will discover two things that all adults know. That paying for good things is uncomfortable, and that discomfort does not kill you!

The world does not owe you your new home

One of the most damaging beliefs in early recovery is the idea that you have done the world a huge favour by becoming ‘clean’. This one idea can get in the way of your recovery for years. If you are going to build your recovery then you are doing it for yourself. The rest of the world is not going to live in it. Just you. So it is for you to pay the cost. No one is going to pay it for you.

So make sure it is what you want and that you are willing to pay. If you are paying for a new home when actually you do not want it you will resent every penny and, what’s worse, you will expect everybody to be grateful. When others around you stop appreciating all that you are doing for them by paying for this home you will tear it down out of frustration and anger. So the question of cost becomes “do you want this for yourself, or does someone else want it for you”.

You can’t keep the old home

According to the old saying you can’t have your cake and eat it. This is just as true when it comes to your recovery. You can’t live in two homes at the same time. The idea of living a ‘double life’ is part of the idea of deceit and secrecy that forms a big part of the addicted lifestyle. Part of the cost of building your recovery is the realisation that the cost is high. Meaning that it’s going to take all you have. Meaning that you can’t afford to keep the old home going.

In the old home you may have been managing others approval. Making sure that, in appearance at least, they would be happy with what you were doing and saying. Letting go of others approval can be one of the biggest costs.

This connects with the idea of reality over appearances. Not everyone has as big a problem with this as I did, but it’s worth considering how much you have invested in the appearance of something. In the old home how much time did you spend, how much effort did you put into convincing people of something that was not true? Something that was not real? Make your mind up to now build something real, something substantial.

The best materials cost more

This leads us to the idea of building materials. We are not ready to build yet, we are just thinking about it. But it’s time to think about the quality of the materials we are going to use. Some of you may remember the film ‘The Towering Inferno’ which dealt with the idea of buildings that were too high for firefighters effectively fight the fires. You may remember that the whole concept of the film was based on the son of the architect skimping on the quality of the materials used in the construction. This is what caused the fire.

We are now looking at one of the most important aspects of deceit. Saying we will use the best materials but in the end not being willing to pay for them. So what are these materials?

When you build your recovery you are building your character. Your addicted self will have been built largely using appearances. Convincing people that you were this or that kind of person became a substitute for real character. As long as they believed it, it didn’t matter that it was not true. Saying you were fine when you were not. Agreeing with something when in reality you resented it. Believing it was more important that you convinced people of something than whether it was true or not.

Your recovery is built with principles. These principles are real, not appearances. It’s no good saying we are going to be honest. Creating the appearance of honesty when we are not willing to pay the price of honesty doesn’t build anything. Other important materials are humility, discipline and perseverance. You need to build with the best materials you can afford.

Later in the course you will learn more about these principles and how to build with them. For now take some time to think about cost and building something that will stand the test of time.

Building Recovery – Your design

by Dave Cooper | Dec 27, 2019 | A2R

Of the three most impotrtant factors when thinking about building your recovery – Design, cost and location. We could say that design is the one I see most often misunderstood, or left out altogether. Remember, if you do not design your recovery, someone else will!

Why is this important? Because if you live in a building someone else has designed you will resent it. And eventually you will pull the whole thing down yourself! I have seen it happen more times than I want to think about. So let’s learn more about what it means to design your own recovery.

The Big Three – Cost – Location – Design

In the first of three posts I am now going to get into more detail about the concept of ‘design’. Which is one of the ‘big three’ things to consider when building your recovery along with ‘cost’ and ‘location’. What do I mean by design and how can you create a good design for yourself? And how can you make sure that it remains your design as you develop your recovered self? Let’s start with how to create the basic design.

Always remember when doing any of these exercises that the more you imagine this as a real home, the better it will work for you as a genuine aid. Remember that the same questions you would ask when considering a new home are exactly the same questions you need to ask about your recovery. So think of cost in two ways. As things you will have to give and things you will have to give up. No longer acting the way you did is a cost and not having neighbours you liked would be a loss.

Location Location Location

Think of Location as who you will be living next to. In other words which relationships do you need to let go of and which relationships do you need to develop more?

There is a short exercise I use for this, the concept is simple. Write down the names of everyone you see regularly. Now score them out of 10 by how you feel about yourself after you have been with them. Remember, it’s not how you feel about them. It’s how you feel about yourself. Everyone who scores less than five is a person you need to move away from or consider limiting the amount of time you spend with them. Everyone who scores more than five is someone you should consider spending more time with.

It must be your design

Your recovery building — It doesn’t matter how different it looks, it must be your design!

The idea of moving into a new home but not getting what you want is really frustrating. Imagine wanting a big garden but being persuaded by a friend or family member to buy a place with no garden for whatever reason. Every time you arrive home the garden would remind you that this was not your choice! That gets old pretty quick.

So how do we think about design? We start by looking at the way things were. How did you spend your time? Who did you spend your time with? This is the old design and being real about what it looked like is the first step. Next we need to imagine it as your old building. The one your ‘addicted self’ lived in. If this was a building design how many rooms would it have? And which would be the biggest room? Rooms will be labelled as work, family and personal time. Ask yourself honestly how much time you spent in the different rooms. The more accurately you do this, the better your chances of getting what you want.

Making a plan

Now it’s time to make the floor plan. Draw it simply and think of the size of the building as the amount of time you have. So the rooms represent both how many different things you do, but also describe the proportion of time you spend doing them. How do you want the new place to be different? Now you’re going to need a second floor plan. This should give you a clear view of how you have lived and how you want to change.

Floor plans comparing the old home with the new one

These drawings should be very basic, just like the ones above. Floor plans showing the rooms that you lived in as well as the names of the rooms. Be honest and use what you have learned from the FREDS list about who you really have been.

Making the Transition

Moving from one ‘home’ to another is part of what I call the ‘work of recovery’. Notice how much smaller the ‘work’ room is in the new house above. We now need a plan of how to build the new home in the way we wanted it.

Fill your calendar — Fill in every waking hour and colour code for each room.

To do this I want you to consider using a tool such as Google Calendar or something similar. Think about how you use your time. Most of you are already using something like this and, if you are like me you will probably be inserting things like meetings and phone calls etc. But you are always doing something! So now decide on your ‘waking’ hours and put something in for every hour. Even if you decide to do nothing that’s fine. try colour coding for the different rooms for greater clarity.

Now, does the percentage of time match the way you have set up your rooms. Or does it still look like the old house? Consider changing things till you achieve the balance that is right for you.

Remember, this is an aim, so go at the right pace for yourself. Don’t build too fast or too slowly.

Inside out The growth process explained Part one

by Dave Cooper | Aug 28, 2019 | A2R

Common sense is not always the best guide

Today I want to talk to you about the growth process and how it can sometimes go against our common sense. There’s a very good reason why we tend to start any change process from the outside-in. it doesn’t take a genius to work it out. We are more likely to try and change on the outside because that’s the part that other people can see. That’s the part of us that is visible to others. There are several therapeutic approaches that work this way. Generally we might call these behavioral approaches. I want to offer you a different way but let me first explain why I believe that inside-out is better than outside-in. Let’s start with a recovery principle.

No one has to do anything or say anything in order for you to recover.

That is one of the main principles of authentic recovery. if your recovery is contingent on what someone else does or says you are on the wrong track. So the best method is going to be based on you, not on others and the best place to start working on you is on the inside. If you stop thinking about behaviour as producing change and start to see it as evidence of inner change you’ll get the idea.

Making simple, powerful distinctions

No less an authority than Wittgenstein said that we need to make these “artificial tears in the universe”. In other words that clear and simple distinctions improve our thinking. These ‘artificial’ distinctions often help us to make sense of our world and give us a way forwards. So when we make a distinction between your inner world and your outer world we have a very effective place to start.

You are always working with what’s between your ears

Because we live in the ‘big wide world’ out there, we naturally assume that’s the world we are relating to. It’s not. As we experience things we construct a ‘little world’ in our heads. This ‘little world’ is our idea of how things are. It includes all the people we know and the way we think things work, etc. We could think of it as our ‘map of reality’. It is this ‘little world’ that we’re actually relating to. So in a very real sense we’re already working from the ‘inside out’, even when we don’t think so.

So much of what we do is about changing our state, making ourselves ‘feel better’. Our brains are constantly picking up on these habits and patterns of thought. Once the brain establishes a pattern of thinking it helps us by ‘following’ that pattern for us. The neuro-scientists describe it this way, they say that

‘neurons that fire together wire together’.

The top three reasons we usually start from the outside

Let’s review what we have so far. Here are the top three related reasons why it feels like common sense to go from the ‘outside-in’.

It’s what people see – It seems to get faster results.
It’s how we manipulate others – If it’s important to us that others believe this change (and it usually is) then our behaviour is the fastest way of doing this.
The inside is not visible – Which is really reason number one turned inside out. Okay fine, you got me. But it still makes sense to include it as it appeals to our common sense not to spend a lot of resources on the things others will never see.

Behaviour as evidence of change – not the producer of change.

So far we’ve looked at the common sense reasons why we go from the outside-in when trying to produce change. Now we’re going to look at the theoretical reason for going from ‘inside out’. There is a ‘behavioural’ approach which says that if we do things differently we will then become different, think differently, and have a different attitude. More recent research shows that when we force ourselves or demand of ourselves to behave differently it actually produces inner conflict, which inhibits growth and change. This is basically because these traditional approaches don’t take into account the complexity of a human being.

Negotiate – never demand

I work mainly with addicts and helping them recover from addiction. So what I’m describing here is something I work with every day. When the addict reaches crisis point they often simply demand of themselves to stop. So they stop drinking, stop taking heroin. They stop gambling etc etc. The problem comes because we are complex and there is a part of them that does not want to stop.

There is a part of them that believes that the protection they receive from their addictive behaviour is what they need. So in demanding of themselves to change their behaviour they set up a massive inner conflict. Because they’re working from the outside-in they don’t pay attention to this conflict or really understand it. Often they just feel like they’re going crazy! I hear things like this everyday….

“I promised myself I wouldn’t do it anymore an hour later there I am doing it again”.

The problem is that they are not realising that the ‘I’ that promises they won’t do it again is not the ‘I’ that does it again! Being a human being is a complex thing and when we use the simplistic sense of ‘I’ all the time we miss the point. I ask addicted people to understand that when they say “I’m never doing that again” that there is a part of them that says “good luck with that”.

So let’s start by understanding that level of complexity. What it means to be a human being. Then you will see how your brain has learned to protect you in certain ways. You need to retrain your brain in order to produce better behaviour. In this way we produce inner harmony rather than inner conflict. We learn to work ‘with’ ourselves rather than against ourselves.

Behaviour is a product of beliefs, attitudes, and training

Think about how you feel right now. Aside from illness and damage from accidents, your feelings are largely a product of the future you think you are headed for (beliefs), the sense of value you have about yourself (attitude), and the way your life has gone so far (training). To simply demand that you ‘be different’ from now on is the worst thing you can do. Any approach that does not take into account your beliefs attitude and training just sets you up to fail.

Get genuinely interested in yourself instead of just demanding things of yourself. This often means developing a better relationship with yourself. Changes of the size you are wanting simply will never happen if you do not value yourself. If you don’t think of yourself as something worth being interested in, if you don’t think of yourself as having a future worth working for. If you have been trained that you are not of value then anything you do for yourself will be shallow and ineffective.

Learn to access the adult inside you

So, how do we start? You are reading this because you need to change. Even if you are only interested in change because your partner or your boss says you will be finished if you don’t. So take that desire to change as a starting point.

Realise that there is a part of you that wants something better and believes that you deserve something better. Accept that your past does not have to dictate your future. Accept that things that were frightening and threatening years ago will probably not be now. But your brain may still be protecting you from them. Once you learn to access this part of you, you will be working with the most grown up resources you have. Believe me this will be enough to bring about the shift in perspective you need.

When we ‘protected’ ourselves through addictive behaviour our brain learned that’s what we wanted. Our job now is to retrain our brain with a different Idea of what’s important. It may take time for your brain to learn this and this is where practice and commitment follow understanding.instead of fighting this part of you or dismissing it or denying that it exists, I want to suggest that you get to know it better and work with it because it’s part of you.

I want to talk more about this process, which is the most effective and authentic recovery process. But rather than make these things too long I’ll save that for next time. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

The number one commitment : Learn from everything!

by Dave Cooper | Apr 23, 2019 | A2R, Advanced Recovery, Building Recovery, Communication, Foundation, Ground Floor, Method, Theory

So you want to recover from addiction? You want to lose that dependency? What is your number one commitment? Say no to drugs? Come home at a reasonable time? be more honest? I say that your number one commitment in recovery is to learn from everything!

This post follows on from the idea that we can get caught in a trap of success and failure. I now want to talk more about what the solution looks like. Learn from everything!

Traditional treatment methods

Residential Treatment Centres go back to the 1860’s when the first asylums were founded based on the size of the problem in America at the time.

The Keeley Cure

From around 1880 the ‘Keely cure’ as it was know was not only popular enough at the time to become huge (over 200 Centres were founded across America and Europe) but, with it’s emphasis on time (31 days) and fresh air and exercise, this approach largely formed the basis of Treatment Centres ever since.

How do treatment Centres work?

Before launching into a critique of treatment Centres, let me first say that, for the right person at the right time, they can and do work. Later in this piece you can read some of my experiences of working for, in and with some centres and what was achieved. My main difficulty with them is that in my experience only around 20% of those wanting help achieved recovery. This would mean that rehab is not the most appropriate treatment for 80% of people who go there!

There are lots of treatment Centres offering treatment for alcoholism and addiction generally. The approaches are varied in length and approach but the idea that they are based on is the same (I am discounting methods that include medical approaches offering a ‘cure’ such as Ibogaine, and only include talking therapy approaches here).

The approach is generally based on two things, both of which are questionable. namely, stress reduction and theory. I will explain both briefly.

Stress Reduction

Essentially, this is the idea that people who become addicted are not coping with the stress of their situation and need to be removed from it in order to really concentrate all their efforts on their recovery.

The problem with this is that most addiction is based on avoiding problems and difficulties. So when someone arrives at rehab they not only have a tendency to put their feet up (since there is no stress any more) but what is worse they now have a sense that they are doing much better than they really are (they often report that they “don’t even feel like using”). And since they are officially ‘in treatment’, they assume this must be the ‘treatment working’. How wrong so many of them are!

Theory

The theoretical approach is again varied and based on different therapeutic approaches etc. The confidence in it helping is based on the idea that the patient can use good information to help themselves. Well as the saying goes ‘it’s dynamite on paper’. But when you realise that the basis of most approaches to addiction is the the addict is ‘powerless’ over their addiction, it makes less sense.

Now I’m not saying theory isn’t a good thing. Coherence and theory are part of every approach. My approach uses theory but it’s theory that is immediately applied in ‘real life’. The problem I have with residential treatment is that it’s all theory! It has to be because the patient has been removed from real life! You will realise the difference between theory and practice when you get home and try to practice it. By then it’s often too late. But there’s always the option of going back to rehab? If you have the money.

The problem with these traditional approaches

Using the ideas mentioned above traditional treatment sets up and promotes an internal conflict that most people lose or are forever struggling with. The two extremes of denial or fighting are both very difficult and unnecessary as there is a much better and stress free method. That of developing a better relationship with yourself.

Think about it. How much are you going to do for someone you don’t like? If addiction is an inappropriate relationship then relationships are where your recovery can develop. And the first relationship you should start with is the one with yourself.

I don’t want to say too much about this. For more detail see my post on this subject “the trap of success and failure”.

My experience of this trap

I wanted to say some things about my own personal experience of being caught in this trap and how I learned to avoid it and help others to do the same. Let me assure you, you can do the same.

When I was struggling with dependence on drugs and alcohol I was a young man with ideas that plague many of us. Like I would only be acceptable if I was a success. The word ‘success’ means different things to different people but for me it was sporting success.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to blame others for all of this. The money that sporting success brings would allow me to live a life separated from most people which, at that time was very desirable to me. I didn’t like people and I wanted to be separate. I didn’t realise that I was being slowly attracted into a dead world.

The problem with trying to change

Like a lot of people I didn’t like myself and knew that I needed to change. There are no end of books selling this idea that you can change and you have the power to do so. And there are no end of people making a lot of money from people who are failing to do so.

The basic psychological approach is to develop various methods that will promote change in the individual. Largely they promote the trap I write about in the link above. But I was no different and I knew no better than anyone else. So I tried, and tried, and tried! The more I tried the worse I felt when I failed. The more I failed, the harder I tried the next time. On and on it went, as I got worse and worse.

Art to the rescue!

I love films. Especially films that speak to me of human struggle that I can identify with. One evening I was watching a film about a person who was suffering from ‘multiple personality disorder’. I can’t remember much about the film but there was a ‘break through’ moment for the main character when she returned from her ‘session’ with the psychiatrist and, entering her bedroom, saw her ‘younger self’. Just a child, and very sad looking, for a moment she did not know what to do with this ‘younger self’. Finally she sat down beside her and put her arm around the youngster.

Her break through turned out to be my break through. A healing relationship with myself began when I found an old photo of myself. In the photo I was about ten years old. I reassured my young ‘self’, saying that he ‘had no chance’. And that it wasn’t his fault. I saw for the first time that he had only done his best.

For the first time in my life I was basing my progress on something other than conflict and the demand for change. For the first time in my life I had avoided the two extremes of denial and conflict. Without realising it, I had begun to grow through the power of a healing relationship with myself.

My developing recovery

As my recovery developed over the years, I did what I could in local AA groups. For twenty years I helped to run a group and supported new people in that group. At that point I trained as a counsellor.

I was asked to supervise some of the workers at a treatment Centre and was inspired to work with them. Before long I was running them, developing treatment programs and training counselors. Just like my experience in AA I saw what worked and what didn’t. Which attitudes worked well and which didn’t.

What I learned from running Rehabs

I worked in the field for over ten years. Again I won’t dwell on this period but let me tell you some of the main things I learned from all this.

The most difficult phone calls I used to take were from friends partners and relatives of the clients. Often these callers had spent their life savings on sending their loved ones to treatment. In some cases several times.

The main theme of these calls was usually “how are they doing”. But my main memory of them was learning about the way that, with the best of intentions, they were often making things more difficult.

I also saw that, although their loved one was obviously the one that needed the ‘help’ that they were suffering and struggling just as much in their life struggle. But the difference was that they were getting no help!

Later, or in some cases sooner, following treatment, they would be reunited with their partner or child. But because they had not been party to any development or growth often what the client had learned about the ‘theory’ of recovery got overpowered by the emerging of old patterns of relating to each other. Resulting in another ‘failure’.

Avoid extremes!

In places like the AA fellowship I was told that it didn’t matter what others said or what they understood. You could ‘get well’ in spite of all of this. I also learned that it was a ‘family illness’ and that no man is an island. All true! But didn’t they seem to contradict each other?

As extremes they may seem to. But they work together once you understand that the difficulties and the solutions belong in the area of relationships! You have been attracted into a dead world! Your recovery starts when you decide to come back into the world of the living!

Ask yourself how you could improve your relationships today. Just a little bit. How could you be a little more honest with people? Who could you be a little more authentic with? What relationships are asking too much of you? Which ones do you need to do more in? Could you be a little more vulnerable in your important relationships?

Growth means learning from everything!

So, what does this mean for you and your recovery? Some people recover and never return to their habit. Other recoveries include lapses. Don’t be like the rehabs and throw away the most valuable learning you have. If things go wrong. As they do for everyone, Ask yourself what you can learn from the experience. I have a technique which can help you with this. It’s called the recovery box.

Stop worrying about success and failure and how good your recovery looks like to other people. Stop stressing about how long it’s taking and make a commitment to learning from everything! Whatever happened you can’t change it now. So learn from it. Squeeze every last drop of learning out of it.

When you commit to this approach you will become unstoppable and your recovery becomes inevitable. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

The trap of success and failure

by Dave Cooper | Apr 8, 2019 | A2R

Most things exist in a form which can be thought of as a duality. Would you know what ‘up’ is if there was no ‘down’? Dark if there was no ‘light’. Left and right, wrong and right. I think you get the idea.
My name is Dave Cooper and I am a recovery coach and psychotherapist. I believe that setting our success goals too tightly and narrowly in recovery is a trap. Having seen hundreds of people caught in it and helped them to get out of it I want to talk about the nature of the trap and how it can stand in the way of genuine recovery. Do you feel caught in a trap when you attempt to recover from addiction? Would you like to know how to avoid this trap? Read on for the answer!

How is the trap set up?

So how does this narrow definition apply to recovery from addiction and dependence? What is the typical situation once addiction has been discovered? Common sense tells us that ‘drugs are the problem’ therefore we conclude that I-he-she-they need to stop! But what have we done here? We have defined success and in so doing we have also defined failure.

Why abstinence is not a good target!

Your problem started when you defined abstinence as ‘success’. Because success is one half of a duo. The other being… you guessed it, failure. So when we invite success in we end up entertaining failure as well. They go together and cannot be separated. So you enter the trap when you believe the idea that you are only ‘acceptable’ as a human being when you are ‘clean’.

I believe that abstinence is much too narrow an aim. So learn to think much more ‘relationally‘ for authentic recovery.

Now I want to focus on the trap itself which is set up by this ‘common sense’ thinking. Aiming for abstinence. How did you get caught in this trap and what makes it so deadly? How does it work? Would you consider doing a short experiment with me? You could try this now if you like. Like a lot of these exercises it is very simple but very effective.

The cycle of addiction

One of the first things I do with new clients is to ask them to draw up their cycle of addiction. This is an exercise that will help you to make sense of the pattern of your dependence. So you will learn about yourself by drawing up the whole cycle from start to finish. Including the four phases of the cycle, Success, Coasting, Flagging and Failing will help you make sense of your experience.

If you haven’t done anything like this yet give it a try. It will really help you to make sense of your pattern of success and failure. Which is the trap you have fallen into in your life. You just need a pen and paper.

Start by drawing a large circle on the sheet of paper. Next place the figures as you see them below with 12 at the top and so on. Just like a clock face. Now in order to make sense of this idea it is important that you start and finish at the top. 12 o clock represents that moment when you have just stopped using or acting out and have decided to stay stopped.

The length of your cycle

Your cycle could be as quick as 24 hours if it involves something like cocaine. Or as long as six months if you are a binge drinker. If your addiction or dependence is more behavioral the length of the cycle could be more contingent on things like how long a project took at work. Or how long you were out on tour.

Don’t worry about the time it takes to get around your cycle, just think about the way you move through the four sections which I will now describe.

Success period

The first section is ‘success’! This one runs from 12-o-clock till 3-o-clock and may be full of hope and include a detox or treatment. It is the time where you have got clean and decided (for whatever reason) that you need to stop. You are committed and have a good reason to stay stopped. You have the recent memory of what a disaster using or acting out has been for you, and it is a fresh start!

Typical feelings and drivers at this stage are: Wanting to impress those around you that you are back and functioning again. Needing to get people to trust you and believe you. Needing to convince people that it won’t happen again. Hoping that people will not carry out the threats they have made like sacking you or leaving you.

Coasting period

So what happens? The next period I call ‘coasting’. this is often after a period of being ‘under scrutiny’ from others. maybe you have made promises etc. or are on trial at work. Once the heat is off you will enter a period of ‘coasting’. Which means that you are no longer trying so hard and you may have stopped practicing certain methods or guidance from a therapist or group. But you are still feeling good about what you are doing and you may still be getting encouragement from family friends or work colleagues.

Typical feelings during this period are: I’ve cracked it! This is easy. I am strong and I can do this. Everyone is congratulating me and I like the attention. Everyone appreciated the effort I am putting in.

Flagging period

What happens next? I call this period ‘flagging’ because after a while everyone stops congratulating you. They don’t even seem to notice that you are not doing what you like to do! They don’t appreciate you and the energy that kept you coasting has now run down. This means that things are still hard and may be getting harder but there is no longer any apparent benefit. The other thing that may be happening is that people around you are talking about how well you are doing whilst you are feeling worse and worse! as things get difficult you start to go back to old strategies like isolating or deceitful methods.

Typical effects of this phase are: Noticing unhappy or negative feelings more than positive ones. resenting people for not noticing your efforts any more. Feeling unhappy that people still do not trust you even after all this effort. Feeling bored or fed up with your recovery work. Finding that things are too much effort.

Failure period

At some stage this turns into out and out failure and you start using or acting out again. It all gets too difficult and one day using seems like a good idea again. This is often accompanied with lying or some kind of deceit. Of course the acting out or using shifts you more into the ‘dead world’ and so your living relationships start to suffer. At some point the whole thing comes crashing down and you decide you must stop and change. this may or may not include ultimatums from loved ones or your boss at work. either way, you are back at 12-o-clock.

Once you understand this pattern in general terms add your particular details in the way you see below. This can be done initially with whatever comes to mind as you meditate or become mindful around this cycle. Later you can do many of these cycles from all kinds of perspectives, such as an emotional perspective. How does it feel when you are in these different segments? Or from a relationship perspective. But first understand the basic idea

Typical feelings during this phase are: Justifying your attitudes because you are not understood. Feeling that you are being forced to be dishonest. Isolating because no one cares.

How does this fit with your cycle?

Now try adding some of your particulars to this idea. To help you get started I have included another diagram below with some of the typical things I see in my clients work. Such as – Getting back to work, being part of a team again. Functioning and earning. Of course it is likely that you will be trying too hard to impress everyone that ‘you are back’!

Notice below how the client starts off by ‘feeling great’! This is one of the biggest problems with the ‘abstinence aim’. What I want you to see is that the better you feel when you start at 12-o-clock, the worse you feel when you start using again! This is how the trap works.

If you completed the exercise you can probably see how your experiences fitted with the four phases of success, coasting, flagging and failing. Of course your cycle may look somewhat different but most of you will have got a lot from this exercise. Now apply this learning to the main idea of this piece, which is the trap of success and failure.

Putting it all together

I am going to give you an example of this which sometimes explains better. If we take the story of our client who says “I have to stop” to the next stage, what usually happens? Well, he stops! So what’s the problem you ask. He has achieved his goal on Monday eight-o’clock day one! Not bad. But what happens? Notice that this is not a growth goal, it is achieved instantly and instant ‘triumph’ brings a sense of pride. You often see this at this stage. And it’s often made more intense by the family who understandably want to see more of it.

Okay, so what happens now? He starts to count the days and maybe starts to wonder what all the fuss was about. This was easy! But he starts to feel worse. Maybe the family don’t appreciate his efforts as much after a few weeks. Maybe the boss is being too hard on him. At some point the inevitable happens and he is drunk again. Now he plummets from being a great success to being a terrible failure. Depression and isolation can follow.

Dealing with our success and failure

No one put it better than the poet Rudyard Kipling in his poem ‘if’.
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEFMVIfl2UY

Triumph and disaster are ‘success and failure’ and he calls them both ‘imposters’! He suggests that we treat them both the same, by which he means that we should reject them both.

If I ask you to think about the product of these states you will probably end up with something approaching pride and shame! That’s where they lead! The last thing you need is to get caught up in these as you cannot thik clearly about your situation and how to help yourself from these ‘states’.

I hope that you can now see the trap of success and failure and maybe you know that you have been caught in it. Please try your best to avoid feeling bad about this, rather concentrate on what you have learned today! (Did you notice what I did there? I got you out of the trap!)

I help people to see the trap for what it is and how counter productive it is. Similarly you can outgrow this trap for yourself. The way the trap works is through the addictive cycle and your efforts to succeed.

The healthy alternative

Remember at the beginning of this I called success and failure a ‘duality of concepts’. We have just spent some time looking at how these opposites can create a trap which you can become stuck in for years. But what is the alternative? I help my clients aim for something that is not part of a duality but is more of a unity or single thing. Growth!

I tell them that….

growth produces abstinence but abstinence does not produce growth!

You can think of this simply as a commitment to learning from everything that happens.

Growth as an aim

So try to avoid thinking of things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and start asking the question “what does this have to teach me”? Want to know more about this? here is a link to the ‘recovery box’.

You will only be able to get the most out of your learning if you are not working from a strong sense of shame or pride (which the trap of success and failure produces) so you can see why I asked you to do your ‘addictive cycle’ and how it could be so helpful in making progress.

As a result you will avoid setting yourself up to fail again! Remember you are not a success! You are not a failure! You are a human being! if you could go any faster you would.

Finally here are a few thoughts that will help you avoid the trap or dissolve it.

People will trust you when they decide to.

Your recovery is based on healthy thinking and values, not how long you have been ‘clean’.

People see more than what you show them.

Also at the end of every day ask yourself, “have I learned everything I can from what happened today”? And “Am I willing to apply what I have learned in the future”? If your answer is yes then you will become unstoppable. Then your recovery will become inevitable. And of course you will be out of the trap!

If you want to know more about this approach to recovery contact me at info@davecoopercounselling.org.uk

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