Old 03-29-2021, 05:36 AM
  # 31 (permalink)  
Aellyce
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Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 10,912
Thank you, dwtbd and MesaMan, for the excellent posts. I absolutely believe and agree that recovery is about behavior modification first and foremost. How we all achieve that varies, but ultimately it's about the same simple acting / not acting. I definitely think now that my problem, for a long time, was not having the mindset to stay quit for any significant amount of time. That's why I didn't use even this great forum the right way, to support my sobriety, more as a social venue, but even that was not satisfying because I never resolved the main problem, only faked it.

I like the idea of adding 'not drinking' to a list of things I don't do. I'll make such a list, reminds me a bit of the list in SMART called "hierarchy of values" that I found very interesting and effective as a motivator. I find these things more powerful than mere cost-benefit analyses (which is also a part of SMART), because they are directly linked to some of the strongest internal motivational forces that generally drive many other individual successes as well. I dumped from my toolkit engaging with the AV in any excessive form (like analyzing it in writing), but these things are different, because they engage us with the internal motivations that can greatly help overcome the AV's maneuvers.

Yes, striving to remove addiction, or the cause of it, is futile. The good thing is that ultimately, successful long-term recovery and living a fulfilling life can potentially feed back on those causes on some very organic, biological levels, called 'epigenetics' (just like any other environmental effect). Some of the newer treatment drugs and approaches these days are also designed to affect those mechanisms chemically, but most of those biological changes take quite some time, and they'll never happen/last if we keep combining them with the original addictive substance/behavior, so the behavior modification is still the most important factor. I like AVRT now because it is definitely the simplest and potentially most efficient method ever described and made available to anyone, and it's not contingent upon anything else like many other programs.
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