Originally Posted by
AlericB 
ATI: Addiction Treatment Industry?
From your experience at the retreats, what's the best way to do a benefits to benefits analysis?
Is it to look at the kind of life you want first and then see what substance use outcome best fits that picture?
Just wondering if this way would bring about the most motivation to make the change you want or whether another way of doing the analysis has proven to be more effective.
I don't think there is a universal best way to do it. People arrive at an attempt to do something about their problem in various states of readiness/experience/insight. Some will find the formalized exercise we have in the book to be very useful. Some will have made up their mind before they've even picked up our book. Some will start thinking it through in less formal ways as they're introduced to the idea of making their choice about benefits rather than costs. How someone figures this out while using our book is going to differ based on whether they're still using or not at the time too (if they're in our retreats, they're not using, but in other settings they probably are).
Our goal is to introduce people to the idea that they can stop trying to scare themselves into quitting, because that doesn't get them over the finish line - but a belief in the possibility of change being better can motivate them to change. Except for a few very naive young people, most everyone who has a substance use problem is extremely aware of the costs of their behavior. Their awareness of the costs hasn't solved their problems yet - deterrence only seems to get temporary results. So we just want to get them thinking about the benefits, and there's a number of ways we do that/stress the importance of it throughout the book. Once somebody understands the importance of this, they usually develop their own unique ways of figuring out a change is worth it in their own mind.
I want to note also that while everyone doesn't think of it in the terms that we're laying out here, I think that if they permanently solve their substance use problem, they've realized on some level that the change they've made (be it abstinence or moderation) makes them happier than going back to heavy substance use ever could.
In my personal case, I didn't do a formal one-time benefits to benefits exercise. I invested in the idea that life could be happier without heavy substance use, and decided I'd give abstinence a try for one year and do my best to test that out. I found out very quickly (within months) that it was better, and knew I'd never go back to heavy use.