We will be collaborating for a relatively brief period of time to achieve the ambitious goal of changing the course of your life. It is quite a challenge, and requires that we each play our parts well. My job is simple and without conflict—to provide you with tools that are effective in helping you do your heroic work. Your challenge is much more complex and full of conflict: You are both the entity we seek to change through our collaboration—the puppy, aka the Experiential Processing System—and the entity responsible for the biography and so wants to train the puppy to respond in accord with its own best interests —my collaborator, aka, the Rational Processing System [see Two Minds for a more detailed description of these entities].
I stress our collaborative relationship because of the common tendency to turn responsibility for selecting methods and goals over to the experts. You must be the one to define the objective of our collaboration, and to direct our efforts to the particular problems and circumstances that you encounter along your passage.
In contrast to conventional self-help books and treatment programs in which each participant gets essentially the same treatment, the premise of this course is that there is no external salvation from dependence. The best way to escape an addictive trap is to learn the pertinent cause-and-effects principles and accept the responsibility of training the puppy to respond to them in ways that avoid entrapment.
The puppy is passive in that it has no choice but to follow the path of least resistance. The rational part of you must actively train the puppy in ways that don’t scare it or give it the message that it is no damn good. I have attempted to design the forms in the section so that you develop the experiential competencies rapidly and in ways that protect you from the recursive traps commonly associated with such efforts.
We are not limited to the formats presented below, and I am open to any ideas you have for forms and methods that may improve the effectiveness of our collaboration.
Prior to each session
Formal sessions are opportunities us to collaborate directly. We have limited time and much to do, so I recommend you invest some effort to prepare for each session.
•The Relapse Prevention Feedback Form. Feel free to leave fields blank and to include as much or as little detail as you like.
•In many cases the Incentive Use Disorder is a consequence of Mood Disorder. If depression, anger, or anxiety is an issue for you, Please download The Mood Treatment Manual. In addition, please complete the Depression Symptom Inventory and the Anxiety Symptom Inventory periodically;. we can specify the frequency when we develop our plan.
The Inter-Session Interval [ISI]
Most of my clients are articulate individuals who find it easier to perform well during our sessions than to perform well between sessions [during the ISI]. My office—and probably my presence—is likely to evoke a psychological state that is incompatible with lapsing, and so it is easy to underestimate the difficulty of performing as intended during high-risk situations.
When you are in my office you sincerely want to do what it takes to achieve the outcome you say you want. I have heard it before, so please take my word for it:. Despite how sincere you are when you decide to change your ways, that motivation is temporary. When you are in a relapse crisis, you will experience a different motivation which at that time will feel just as sincere. Motivation is state-dependent!.
Consider the difficulty of your task. Your success depends upon how you perform during extremely difficult circumstances. During the critical moments of the crisis you may be motivated to experience the pleasure or relief of using the incentive, and at the same time it is likely that your cognitive resources will be depleted, otherwise occupied, or asleep at the wheel, leaving the puppy in control.
Puppy Training Protocols
If I were with you during the high-risk situation, perhaps I could bring you down from the pathogenic trance that was promoting relapse. Of course, it would not be a high-risk situation if I or any other ally was around to help you through it.
When your cognitive resources are unavailable—as will be the case when you are in a high-risk situation—the puppy will not have access to the fabulous resources of your Rational Processing system. The puppy wants to do the best it can, but it needs a wise and gentle master to prepare it for the challenges it is sure to encounter. Here are some goals of puppy training:
•The ability to keep your head despite local conditions that might evoke a high-risk state.
•The ability to recover your head—that is, to shift from a high-risk state [craving, depression, boredom, etc] to a more resourceful state, in which you have access to your good cognitive skills and your core motivation.
•The ability to perform as intended, even when you don’t feel like it.
Puppy training lacks the glamour of the insights and epiphanies of talk therapy. However, the puppy needs the attention and the firm but gentle guidance. Generally, my greatest challenge as a therapist is training the trainer. Learning how to talk to and discipline the psyche is an important skill in the development of will. The trainer must be especially kind and gentle [lean over backwards here] because the puppy may not want to play if all it gets is punishment. Keeping the puppy engaged in the training is the most important skill of the trainer.
The experiential processing system is much stupider than the rational processing system, and the benefits of training will come much slower than the you may expect. Trainers find it difficult to hang in there long enough to do what needs to be done. Even when the know what to expect, many clients take it for granted that they will do what they agreed to do, especially since it sounded so sensible during the session.
Perhaps by now you will agree with me that performing as intended during the high-risk situation is much more challenging than most people realize. It turns out that the intention to train the puppy is also state-dependent. Even though you may be highly motivated to do the exercises at one moment, your motivation may be different at another.. If follow-through turns out to be an issue for you (and it probably will), the Intentions & Action Form will help.
Note: To add insult to injury, any failure to perform as intended is demoralizing. Demoralization is our foe’s most powerful weapon to achieve its goal of getting you to capitulate and relapse completely. Because I have so much respect for your foe, I have included forms and protocols to help you structure your training sessions. You must do whatever it takes to strengthen your faculties and skills you will need during the crises you are bound to encounter.
A switch in metaphors from puppy training to martial arts training is appropriate at this point. Bruce Lee performs well during the emotional crisis of a fight, because he has developed a range of competencies such as appreciating the kinds of attacks that are likely, identifying the particular threats and how to cope with them, executing his coping responses well at the critical moments, etc.. Just as a dedicated martial artist can develop complex skills to the point that he can perform them spinally during a crisis, you can do the same. Albeit, this competence does not come out of thin air; you have to earn it.
Some of the coping tactics our collaboration develops for you to test may be surprising, or require that you do things you’ve never done before. We will not know if they are effective until you try them out during high-risk situations. This is expensive research, because it requires that you execute the coping tactic, when doing so is particularly difficult. The stressors and temptations of a relapse crisis will be so disruptive that you will have to practice the coping response slowly in a safe controlled environment for a while before it is strong enough to test under the adverse conditions of a personal experiment. While I encourage you to be creative in developing personal experiments, do not think that you will be able to execute the intended coping response during a real crisis without considerable preparation.