The authors say that one of the key ideas of the model is the Positive Drive Principle, or PDP for short, and they define it simply as a drive to pursue happiness.
They say this about the PDP in the book:
We consider the following observation to be self-evident: every single person, in everything they do, is just trying to achieve/maintain a happy existence.
As simple as that statement is, it's turned out to be the most important insight we've had over the past three decades of running our retreats. It's important for understanding heavy substance use habits, and it's important for making changes in substance use habits. We call it the Positive Drive Principle or PDP for short, and define it simply as a drive to pursue happiness. We definitely aren't the first to make this observation. Great thinkers over the ages have noted it frequently.
In more personal terms perhaps they they also describe it like this:
From our beginnings of helping people almost 30 years ago, our approach has had a single defining theme in the pursuit of happiness. We have shown people that if they can develop the conviction that a change to their substance use habits will produce greater happiness, then they will happily, easily, and permanently change their habits for the better. They will get “unstuck” and move on. That is the natural way of personal change.
I would like to share this. Just to briefly outline the problem I was having, when I quit drinking my main reason was to save my marriage. I was in the throws of divorce brought about as a direct consequence of my unreasonable behaviour when drinking and I fully accepted this at the time.
I wanted to save my marriage and promised my partner that I'd stop drinking if she'd have me back. She agreed and so I quit. Now I really don't want to sound like I'm whinging but I want to be honest so here goes. Up until recently I've always felt not entirely happy in my abstinence. I was confident that I would stay quit because I believe the tenet that abstinence should not be contingent on any other factors. If my abstinence was dependent on me feeling happy then it would be very precarious indeed. If I thought this then any unhappy occurrence could send me back to drinking and, tbh, on one occasion, it did. Just to briefly describe this unhappiness over quitting, it was a feeling of loss and some resentment that I was committed to doing something that I didn't really want to do. I wanted to save my marriage but not to quit.
So when I was reading about the PDP I thought, is this right? I felt securely abstinent but not all that happy about it so was I going wrong somewhere and doing something that I could change? According to the PDP, my decision to quit was led by the pursuit of happiness but I didn't feel that at all.
This is turning into a longer post than I thought so I'll be as quick as I can. I looked at my sense of resentment that in some ways I felt coerced into quitting. Now was that true? When I looked at it directly I realised that it wasn't. It was actually my decision - no-one can make my decisions for me and it was freely made. So was it made in the pursuit of happiness then? Again, when I thought about it in the light of the PDP I saw that it was. I freely choose the happiness I wanted from my marriage over the happiness I got from drinking and every moment since I was also choosing my marriage over drink. I was free at any time to start drinking again if I wanted to if I chose to value that over my relationship. So what was the happiness I had been feeling all this time then? Again, when I looked at it in the light of the PDP, I realised that it was just illusionary. It certainly felt real and it was real in a way but not in the sense that it existed in an independent kind of way that I couldn't do anything about. It was dependent on the beliefs I had about quitting. I saw it as a deprivation and as something forced on me by circumstances. But by looking at my initial decision and my subsequent experience of quitting as all being done in the pursuit of happiness, these unhappy feelings dissolved away and I don't feel them any more. It's actually quite hard to remember them even though it's only been a week or so
