biminiblue

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dwtbd

You wouldn't have to deny your 'love' in order to cut that person out of your life. There was 'something' 'there' at some point, yeah ?
You would agree that the destruction is what you do not desire, regardless your affection.

StevenSlate

It's not that I don't believe heavy use can be immoral. It can be. My quote in that section is "I DO NOT believe that substance use per se is immoral or bad, nor that heavy substance use is necessarily immoral or bad either." I used the word necessarily to denote that it could be immoral contextually. This list of beliefs is an attempt to preempt the attacks I constantly receive in comments and hatemail. The disease model defenders have a strawman they constantly use, which is to say that anyone who doesn't believe in the disease model thinks addiction is "a moral failing." They then proceed to portray critics as wanting to send every substance user to jail, and call them pieces of trash and generally be mean to them. These are not my views, yet they get ascribed to me often, and so again, that whole bit is to preempt these attacks.

I don't see addiction "as a moral failing", and I don't want to bring morality into the discussion, because it's a topic with a lot of baggage mixed up in religions and cultures and whatnot. And, this goes into my category of "costs" that people who use substances problematically are already well aware of, and which haven't made them stop so far. Mark Scheeren really pressed the importance of this point on me, as his experience was that harping on moral issues usually does no good. People already feel guilt and shame over their behaviors and this just heaps on more. But our insight is that people choose to change when they see the change as better (the all around happier option). I see how being more moral can be part of that for people, and those for whom moral views are important will make that part of their vision of greater happiness in change.

Also, I have my own personal views on morality that are probably at odds with yours (you being whoever I'm engaging with on changing a substance use habit) in some way. I don't want to get into arguing them since it's as personal as religion and politics. I want to get across the points that you are in control of yourself already, and if you become convinced that a change is your happier option, you will easily carry it out. I say it's easy, because it's just not making choices once you don't believe those things will make you happier - not having the fifth drink, or the first drink, or the cocaine, or whatever.

Someone else answered to this well. We're using happiness and happier option as really wide terms in TFM, they can include concern for others if that's how you see it. They don't just refer to pleasure, or relief of pain, or joy, bliss, fulfillment, connection with others, etc - the terms refer to the whole ball of wax, which is going to be structured in countless ways in each individual's mind according to their own views, values, whatever. There is clarification on this throughout the book. This is basically a "psychological egoism" philosophy of motivation here, so that even if people believe they should live fully altruistically like a Mother Teresa or something, and that's because they believe it's god's command for them to behave that way and it makes them a good person and possibly rewards them in the afterlife, then being altruistic is still what makes them (their self) happy at the end of the day.

We're not going to try to instill any particular set of morals or values in people though. We see that as overstepping our bounds. If that's what someone thinks they need, they can go get religion or whatever they find helpful for that as part of their decision-making process. We want to show people they are in control, their motivation comes from what they judge as the best choice, and that change comes in judging different choices to be better (happier).

dwtbd

You wouldn't have to deny your 'love' in order to cut that person out of your life. There was 'something' 'there' at some point, yeah ?
You would agree that the destruction is what you do not desire, regardless your affection.

Putting analogies on top on analogies will, I think, only further dilute the topic, yeah?

My comment was about the subjectivity of experience, I do not think my 'pleasure' of intoxication was in any measure affected by a societal norm( meme?) , I'm pretty sure my reaction/estimation of the sensation of intoxication was what it was , wholly subjective.

I do not see how denying that could help me attain the 'eudaimonia' Andy mentioned. Resisting a desire doesn't change the desire , just the actions taken in its regard.

AlericB

There would have been something there yes but but it may, for example have been 'lust' and not 'love'.

At the time obviously you don't want to destroy that desire because it feels very real to you and is the most important thing in your life. But you have to get free of it to be able to move on.

There are many ways to do this. Buddha recommended overcoming desire for women by thinking of them as skeletons. Perhaps thinking of alcohol as ethanol is a similar thing.

I have also been talking about "subjective experience" no? I have been talking about crushes or obsessional love so why do you say I been talking about "societal norms"?

I have also not been talking about "resisting desire". I have been talking about deconstructing desire so that it does not feel so real and solid and hence so powerful.

Analogies are not always confusing but they can sometimes be made so.

dwtbd

"Originally Posted by StevenSlate View Post
But it says you can change your preference for substance use, and end up preferring abstinence, and carry that out easily once you've realized it offers you more happiness than substance use. It offers a benefits to benefits analysis as means to figure out if abstinence is for you. It also has 4 chapters questioning our culture's view of drugs as all-purpose magical elixirs. The purpose of that is to de-romanticize substances. Part of why we have exaggerated desires for substances is because we've exaggerated their powers/benefits."

This is what I was referring to , doesn't this idea imply that abstinence is only possible in the absence of desire ?
If the pleasure of intoxication is in fact an illusion caused by societal memes unmasking it removes the false pleasure and allows for a path to abstinence? Believing the falsehood is actually what kept you using and your subjective experience was colored by naivety?

To me it is easier to acknowledge my past experiences and choose a different course of action going forward. Eg plan to not drink even in the presence of desire, the desire wasn't actually the problem all along, the drinking was

StevenSlate

Yes, I did say "Part of why we have exaggerated desires for substances is because we've exaggerated their powers/benefits."

But recognize that I said "Part" rather than "The entire reason why we have exaggerated desires for substances is because we've exaggerated their powers/benefits." Also, consider that I said "exaggerated desires", not just mild desire or a passing whim, moderate desire, or even strong desire. Then think about the following questions you posed:

You wouldn't have been drinking if you didn't desire it on some level. I've had romantic partners who "were the problem" who I nonetheless stayed with because I had a massive overblown opinion of them being who I needed to be with. I believed being with someone else or alone would be worse or even impossible because they were "the one." After finally breaking up I sometimes had passing desires to be with them that were defused by thinking something along the lines of "yeah but they weren't that great for reasons x, y, and z, and I'm happier not being involved than I would be if I was back with them." Those were passing desires, and nothing so great as "I can't possibly exist without this person and will be miserable without them." I saw through my previous infatuation to be able to let go.

TFM fits with your plan to not drink. It's saying that you desire abstinence more than you desire drinking - or that you want abstinence more, or that abstinence is your happier option - even if you use none of those words to describe it. It's saying your perspective now is that abstinence is better. If you didn't see it this way, you'd keep drinking.

I want to help people get to where you got. One way of doing that is to show them that the pleasure of substances is highly subjective, and constructed not only of pharmacology, but also of our mindset about substances. We use the "drug, set, setting" model to dissect drug effects, to show that it's possible to reach a point where they do not appear as desirable to you as they once did. To go back to my breakup example, it's like realizing that the old flame wasn't "the one and only true love for me in the world / soul mate without whom I was incomplete." But it's not to say the person has no redeeming qualities.

In TFM we do not suggest that abstinence is impossible only in the absence of desire. We say that when you think it's the best option, you'll easily be abstinent even if you have some desire; when you think usage is the best option, you will use even if you have some desire to abstain.

dwtbd

I meant this response to be included with the quote attributed to Steve, my comments were directed at AlericB's response to the quote.
He seems to be implying a lack of desire is going to be necessary, I'm trying to point out I do not believe it is, I got to where I got by acknowledging desire and ignoring it . I quit full stop, residual desire or no residual desire no more booze, ever. In this sense/context desire has absolutely nothing to do with my not drinking.
Unless I'm misinterpreting what he is saying, desire has a lot to do with his not drinking.
I'm going to bow out of further discussion in this thread, I'm starting to feel a little troll-y.

AlericB

But in my response I was talking about romanticising drinking, not desire, that is, the "exaggerated desire" as Steven put it and not residual desire which I agree with you will come and go as it will.

I hope you keep posting. Genuine debate is educative, not trolling.

Dropsie

This is interesting. My bet is that the people who developed this theory are not addicts, because addicts know that if we could just decide based on what makes us happier in the long run we would. But we be addicts. We think now. Just saying.

So IMHO, we gotta just decide that whether it is pleasurable or not, whether it makes us happier or not, we have to take action to stop based on the faith/belief that it gonna be better than where we are at.

Why do I say this? Because the action always comes first and the emotion second. I don't drink, makes me happy. But I don't get happy and then stop drinking. I can't be happy by not drinking first, the action of not drinking has to come first. And I don't know if its going to make me happy and as an addict, I think that it gonna make me unhappy, so I gotta stop first before I see, sh*t this kinda make me happy. That is where the trust/faith comes in. And its also why sometimes things gotta get pretty bad before stopping looks better.

Bottom line -- I wish we addicts be more rational, but not this one.

Good thinking here. Thanks.

JeffreyAK

I think this is an important point, and where I was at the end when I finally did stop. It didn't make me happy, in fact it made me go through horrible withdrawals, I threw up non-stop for days, I couldn't sleep, I could barely walk, I had disturbing auditory hallucinations.... It was hell, and the phase that followed was only somewhat better, but I did it anyways because I felt I had to do it or I was going to die drunk, soon, even knowing that there was one sure-fire way to make the hell stop - buy some more alcohol and drink it.

MesaMan

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I speed read some of the Posts linked below last Night. I plan to read them in greater detail. I think they are germane to the discussion here...

https://www.soberrecovery.com/forums...y-stories.html (your favorite links on moderation, controlled drinking, and the various 'drink normally' stories)
.

fini

this is interesting, the introduction of the word "better".
when i previously mentioned that happy or happier had nothing to do with it, that was true. but "better" definitely is what i was going for.
why better does not equal happier in my understanding is something i will think more about....

AlericB

I also had to think about this fini. I don't know if this will help - it may not but we're here to share our experiences . The way I equate the two is to imagine a wall where the left side of the wall represents the opposite of happiness: pain, sadness and anxiety and so on, in short, unhappiness in the widest sense. And the right of the wall represents happiness, again in the widest possible sense including whatever you think is the better or best outcome at the time.

So any choice you make that moves you towards the right hand side of the wall is your happier option, even if it's "just" a movement from pain to less pain.

The Positive Drive Principle (PDP) says that we all have a natural motivation to be happy and so, faced with any choice, we will always decide to move towards the happy and positive side of the wall, and furthermore once we have made that decision we will find it "easy" to move in that direction because our natural motivation will drive us that way.

So if we look at all our options for future substance use and decide what would makes us the happiest in this wide sense we will have come "unstuck" and can get on with our lives.

StevenSlate

This reminds me of deciding to get a tonsillectomy at 40 years old. Every doctor, and everyone I talked to who'd had done it later in life told me it was going to be absolute hell. A friend who had two kids told me it was "more painful than childbirth." But I had been getting strep throat several times a year for my entire life, and had then been getting it every other week for about a year. I was excited to get the surgery done anyway. I was in the most pain I've ever felt afterwards. I had to be rushed to the emergency room the next day and kept under supervision because I was bleeding out of the wounds. I was in incredible pain for 3 weeks and unable to do anything. Yet I was excited at the prospect of a life free from constant strep infections. The few weeks of pain was the price of getting there. Happiness was my motivation, and that's all we're saying in TFM. I made the choice to endure this pain for greater happiness in life. If I didn't believe there was a good chance that I'd be living a happier life after the surgery and painful recovery period I was promised, I wouldn't have undergone the surgery - it was elective as I was often reminded.

Likewise, if a heavy substance user doesn't think a change to their habit will ultimately result in greater happiness than continuing, they will not undergo any discomfort to make it happen. You have to be motivated. We're trying to help people find that motivation in TFM.

StevenSlate

There's a lot of stuff to respond to here, but I just want to say that I think we agree more than we appear to.

TFM is saying that "addicts and alcoholics" are in full control of themselves, acting by their own judgment. Since we control our own minds, we can choose to judge our options differently, and thus make different choices than we have in the past. To make a different choice, you have to see a different option as better - but we use the word happier in TFM, and that's where a lot of the disagreement seems to be coming from on this thread.

Aleric just did a good job of explaining that we're talking about movement towards happiness - in a better/happier direction - so I won't run that point into the ground. I'll just note, we're not saying that quitting or moderating will make you immediately blissful, or that you have to be 100% sure it will make you happier. We are just saying that for you to commit to a change, their has to be sufficient belief in the possibility that the change can be really worth it to you - that it can be more rewarding than your current problematic level of use. And accordingly, that the problematic use pattern will probably result in less happiness than a change would. The more convinced you become, the quicker and easier your change can be. The more convinced you become that anything is better than the old pattern of use, the more you take it off the table as a potential option to return to. But, it can still take a leap of faith to get started, as one commenter said.

I understand the pitfalls of the terms happiness and happier. They've been demonstrated in this thread. Luckily though, the people I meet who've read the book get it, because we deal with all the nuances of it in the book. But in brief presentations it's hard to get those nuances across, and this gave me pause about using these terms, but my co-author pushed to keep the happiness terminology. He'd been using it for almost 30 years at our retreats, he has important reasons for that, and he's right. And to boot, it had worked in my own case to see it this way when I finally quit in 2002.

We use the term happier to keep the focus on the emotional element of human motivation and subsequent behavior.

The term "better" is not technically incorrect, and in fact we use it often in TFM, but it doesn't have the same connotation as happier. It doesn't tie you to the emotional reality of how we're motivated and behave. It connotes cold rationality. Allen Carr wrote magnificently on how we all know that it would be better and logical to quit cigarettes in the long run, and yet we still light up a cigarette in the moment because we think we'll be miserable without it today. We may live 20 years longer if we quit smoking today, but we think they'd be 20 years of misery and thus worth sacrificing. We know we'd save $100,000 eventually if we quit today. There's a lot we know about how it doesn't make any rational sense to keep on smoking, yet we continue to do it as long as we think cigarettes provide the comfort we need and that living without them is going to be hell. In short, we know it would be "better" in a coldly rational sense to quit, but we think that to be anything near happy now and in the near future, we need to keep smoking.

It is for these same reasons that Mark Scheeren has always used the word happiness in what was called The Saint Jude Program, and has now become The Freedom Model - to aim directly at the emotions of the individual that are keeping him continuing at a destructive level of substance use, and awaken him to something that he hasn't considered: that quitting doesn't have to be hell. It can be wonderful. It can be happier and more personally rewarding. It isn't something that you just "have to" do because you "should" according to societal standards or cold rationality (you can keep doing it to your death - nobody "has to" quit). It is something you can be excited to do. You can really want to do it. You can look forward to it. You can be happy you did it. You can enjoy your life more instead of feeling deprived if you let go of a destructive pattern of substance use.

To choose is to look at more than one option, judge them, and pick the one that looks best from your point of view. Being human, emotion will always be involved in this calculus. We pursue happiness in everything we do. So we use the terms happiness, and happier options, to encourage the open consideration of the emotional value of our various options. The most confused, most stuck, most lost people with substance use problems try for years or even decades to motivate themselves with fear, and with focus on the negative consequences of their habits, while looking only at the heavy usage itself. They try to resist what they want to do. They try to suppress their desires. They focus on stopping one option, while never developing a positive perspective of their other options (moderation or abstinence). As a result, moderation and abstinence just hang there as lesser options where you don't get what you think you need to be happy. They then have no motivation to follow through on those options. They then fail to follow through over and over again, returning to (or sticking with) the only option they're looking at. By definition, you can never make a different choice if you don't look at more than one option. Choices are made among two or more options.

TFM is not a model based on resistance of desire/craving/wants, nor is it a model that includes strength or weakness as issues. Heavy substance users are very strong in their pursuit of heavy substance use - they show no signs of weakness in getting what they know they want. Resistance against yourself is an impossibility. When you want heavy substance use, you want it - it is what you freely will for yourself by your judgment. It isn't an amorphous "addiction" that wants it - it is you, it is your judgment of your options (of which you may think you have only one). You can't split yourself in two and fight yourself. [I understand some of these last few points may be at odds with those who subscribe to RR and its concept of the beast if I understand it correctly. We'll have to agree to disagree, even though I think there are many other significant points of agreement between these two models.]

Most models of addiction/recovery focus on deterring substance use. They teach how to deter yourself by focusing on all the downsides of substance use. TFM focuses on motivation - motivating yourself to make new choices. It is a theory of motivation applied to the problems of substance use. It shows that you can decrease motivation to use substances problematically, and increase motivation to make a change to moderation or abstinence on the grounds that those options can be seen as genuinely happier, more rewarding options. It shows that you don't have to try to resist doing what you want to do, but that you can stop wanting it, and start wanting the rewards of moderation or abstinence more. It is based in the reality that we are not coldly rational robots, but emotionally driven humans with the power to reason and find more rewarding choices to make throughout our lives.

StevenSlate

One more note - we used to harp on instant vs delayed gratification in The Saint Jude Program. It's a relevant issue, but the present is always more emotionally salient to people. So we dropped that focus. We decided to focus more on the fact that greater happiness is closer than you've been led to believe. Specifically, mainstream recovery programs say you're in for a lifetime of painful resistance, and that's a non-starter for most people. They say screw it, and continue as is.

They're now being told more and more that they'll have to endure up to two years of "post acute withdrawal syndrome" (PAWS), and that makes change even less attractive. Terry Gorski's PAWS is just AA's "dry drunk" syndrome made to sound scientific. It's a fiction that scares people rather than motivating them. You can feel physically better within days or weeks depending on how much you've been using and what level of detox help you need or don't need.

They've been told that substances are the best pleasure known to man, and that they can never feel better than they did with heroin or whatever. It's nonsense. They're being told they have to suffer, bottom line. And while there may be some immediate discomfort, it is not as grim as the recovery culture makes it out to be. We decided to tackle this, and that's what the section on drug effects is about. It's to lessen the sense of impending loss and deprivation should you choose to change. Our analysis of drug effects is based in science. It's realistic. It helps people to tip the scales to believe change is worth it. People already know there are delayed rewards to change, but they think the rewards are too delayed. They think the rewards of going back to heavy use are bigger than they really are. We show them it can all be seen differently - so that they can motivate themselves to make a change.

soberlicious

I could easily see that a part of me wanted abstinence and a part of me wanted to drink. That is common among the addicted as you will hear ppl say "Why do I keep doing this to myself?" Why was it that when I was adamant at 8am that I was going to abstain because that would make me happier, by noon I decided in fact a drink or two would make me happier? How can *I* truly want two completely opposite things? I realized that I absolutely can want two opposing things with the same amount of desire. I feel like this kind of "being of two minds" about lots of things in life has been a part of the human condition since the beginning of time. So it's not really about weighing my desire, so much as it is about accepting that I can have a desire that is not in my best interest and I can learn to separate from that desire and not act on it.

I can't rely on the idea that I can decide that "abstinence is my happier option", because there is another part of me that calls bowlshit on that, rather persistently and adeptly, and there I am again wondering wtf and why I do this to myself. Instead of waffling with this I decided to accept that I have these "two minds" about it and I acknowledged that part of me thinks drinking is super and part of me def does not. It's kind of like the tale of the two wolves (you know, the one about which one will win? the one you feed). I don't have to decide my happier option, since that can change with the damned wind blowing. I just have to recognize and dismiss the part of me that loves drinking, which is pretty easy to spot since it suggests drinking. And no amount of "reasoning" is ever going to "fix" that part. That's cool, it doesn't need to be fixed, it just needs to be ignored.

If it sounds like the above is AVRTish, that is not my intention. If you've been here since 2011 and have read my earlier posts, I did not even know AVRT was a thing when I quit in 2007. I came upon lots of these ideas in Buddhists teachings, where I came to realize just how complex the human mind is.

JeffreyAK

I'm struggling to understand how you can invalidate the personal experiences of millions of former drunks by claiming that PAWS is a fiction, or somehow related to another (different) concept from AA (the dreaded "dry drunk" label). Not everyone goes through the set of symptoms that typify early sobriety, and not everyone's symptoms last 2 years, but they are very common and there is a large body of information about it. It's a collection of common symptoms, not a "disease" or medical ailment, related to your recently unpickled brain trying to cope with reality, without alcohol. Countless millions of abstinent former drunks with personal experiences, many of them not associated in any way with AA, can't all be wrong...

daredevil

Steven

If PAWS is 'dry drunk' syndrome disguised in eloquent scientific nomenclature, then 'PDP' isn't much different. Seems like common sense and intuition more so than a 'principle,' however you want to dress it and whatever you want to call it.