Video: If I want to stop my behavioral addiction on my own, what should be my first step?
http://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/2685/1/Video-If-I-want-to-stop-my-behavioral-addiction-on-my-own-what-should-be-my-first-step/Page1.html
Marc F. Kern
Marc F. Kern, Ph.D., has over 30 years of clinical psychotherapy experience helping people overcome their self-defeating habits and acquire the insights and skills to live happier lives. He has a deep personal understanding of the addictive process and continues his lifelong research of contemporary treatments for addiction and other destructive behaviors.
Site: http://www.habitdoc.com
Site: http://www.AAalternative.com
Also see Video Interviews with Dr. Kern.
By Marc F. Kern
Published on 05/7/2008
VideoJug: Stopping Your Behavioral Addiction
The first thing I would recommend is, without shame, without blame, and
without putting yourself down, stand back, get out a spreadsheet or a
piece of graph paper and start to just graph how often and the
frequency of when you engage in this particular behavior.
VideoJug: Stopping Your Behavioral Addiction
transcript
The answer to what your first step in stopping your behavioral addiction should be lies in the addiction itself. What is it all about? As we've spoken about before, the first thing I would recommend is, without shame, without blame, and without putting yourself down, stand back, get out a spreadsheet or a piece of graph paper and start to just graph how often and the frequency of when you engage in this particular behavior.
Beyond that, there's a substantial amount that you might do. That is, figure out what times you typically engage in the behavior.
If you look at an addict, generally speaking, they engage in their destructive behavior in a slice of hours. Let's say 5:00 to 7:00, or early in the morning, or something like that.
Those are the hours that the body has been taught (sort of like muscle memory) to go and to engage in these sort of behaviors, and the individual should try to find activities that are inconsistent with the destructive addictive behavior.
Another sort of strategy: they may go to the self-help book section at their local library or bookstore, they might go on the Internet and try to get some basic knowledge about what might be going on, they can consult a professional; a psychologist or a physician who is specializing in addiction.
Let's just be frank. Most physicians have no idea about addictions. They have a very pessimistic view on being able to cure an addiction. So, you need to seek out somebody who really knows something about it, and don't be sort of duped just because they have the name “addiction specialist”; they may not know anything other than one philosophy of addiction recovery.
An addiction specialist may only know 12-Step recovery. Another addiction specialist, like myself, only knows cognitive behavioral methods. So, you want to shop around, if that's how far you go, and look for methods that make sense to you; that you think you can integrate into your lifestyle, that your family can accept, and that you could hold onto well past sort of the action stage where you're actually doing something.
This is a lifetime evolution you have to conceptualize. This is not a little sprint where you're just going to do a few little things here. This is sort of a reformatting of what I do this hour, that minute, when this happens. It's a way of coping in a much broader sense than you might expect; much broader than just the addiction itself.
The answer to what your first step in stopping your behavioral addiction should be lies in the addiction itself. What is it all about? As we've spoken about before, the first thing I would recommend is, without shame, without blame, and without putting yourself down, stand back, get out a spreadsheet or a piece of graph paper and start to just graph how often and the frequency of when you engage in this particular behavior.
Beyond that, there's a substantial amount that you might do. That is, figure out what times you typically engage in the behavior.
If you look at an addict, generally speaking, they engage in their destructive behavior in a slice of hours. Let's say 5:00 to 7:00, or early in the morning, or something like that.
Those are the hours that the body has been taught (sort of like muscle memory) to go and to engage in these sort of behaviors, and the individual should try to find activities that are inconsistent with the destructive addictive behavior.
Another sort of strategy: they may go to the self-help book section at their local library or bookstore, they might go on the Internet and try to get some basic knowledge about what might be going on, they can consult a professional; a psychologist or a physician who is specializing in addiction.
Let's just be frank. Most physicians have no idea about addictions. They have a very pessimistic view on being able to cure an addiction. So, you need to seek out somebody who really knows something about it, and don't be sort of duped just because they have the name “addiction specialist”; they may not know anything other than one philosophy of addiction recovery.
An addiction specialist may only know 12-Step recovery. Another addiction specialist, like myself, only knows cognitive behavioral methods. So, you want to shop around, if that's how far you go, and look for methods that make sense to you; that you think you can integrate into your lifestyle, that your family can accept, and that you could hold onto well past sort of the action stage where you're actually doing something.
This is a lifetime evolution you have to conceptualize. This is not a little sprint where you're just going to do a few little things here. This is sort of a reformatting of what I do this hour, that minute, when this happens. It's a way of coping in a much broader sense than you might expect; much broader than just the addiction itself.