Even if you don’t have a chemical addiction (Alcohol, Pills, Sugar, Flour, Dairy, Cigarettes etc), you might be addicted to crises, drama, or intense emotions that put you center stage.
You could even be addicted to isolation, anger, hatred, “Compare and Despair” and other emotional states…it’s universal. Ideally, no one would feel shame about their impulse issue, and more than half the battle is naming and releasing the shame around these issues. “If you can name it, you can tame it!” is one of the most hopeful slogans of my guild. We are all striving to grow, learn and heal from whatever ails us.
In my Westford, MA, DBT Skills Group (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), we recently explored addiction models, including Total Abstinence, Harm Reduction and Dialectical Abstinence.
Total Abstinence is useful when you have tried 1000x or more to practice Moderation Management but it failed. Moderation Management has you set a boundary or limit to what you can do before you are at risk. For example, if you have a challenge with alcohol, saying “Two drinks per evening, and no more than twice a week.” If you consistently zoom past that limit then Moderation Management has failed, and you cannot get well with that system.
Complete abstinence is usually for those who know that “One cookie is not enough, and a thousand are too many. ” For those people who cannot enjoy one or two cookies, for whom the desire to keep going will override all rational thought, complete abstinence from cookies is the easier, softer way. You make the decision once and for all, and then keep surrendering to it because you know it is less painful than the alternative inner haggling dialog on whether to indulge “this time” or not.
So when moderation is impossible…then you know. Usually you cannot skip straight into to total abstinence…most of us do the hokey pokey for a while with Moderation Management before we surrender. Fun fact: The whole journey is necessary for your inner process to be complete.
Dialectical Abstinence is a middle path for those who cannot, or will not, practice total abstinence from their substance abuse, or addictive behavior, yet ultimately desire total abstinence. Yes, it’s the perfect paradox, “I want to abstain, but I won’t right now.” Moderation Management and Harm Reduction are applied here to manage your addiction and prevent a complete relapse.
Harm Reduction is allowing for a thought system to be flexible enough so that if someone has one drink, or one cookie, they don’t say, “Oh what’s the use, why bother, I might as well go all the way and finish the bottle (or box of cookies)!” Harm reduction takes you out of the dualistic, all or nothing, black and white thinking so that you might have three cookies and then say, “Ok, that exceeded my limit, but I’m going to stop right here. It’s good enough for today.”
As my old beloved professor Christopher Lasch at the University of Rochester once said “We live in a culture of addiction.” Lasch was fairly well known for his book on The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), but he had a deep belief that the rise in our addictive culture was correlated to our self-absorbed lifestyles.
So much of our need to medicate ourselves or have a Pity Party for ourselves is tied into our “Me-Me-Me” anxiety and fear. Clearly there is no simple altruistic solution for our multidimensional addictions. The research and science on this vast topic has repeatedly shown that when we do aim to give service and get out of our heads for a while we can find some relief and peace when focusing on fulfilling others’ needs.
And yet, if you are obsessed with others’ well being and are codependent, then you have another kind of addiction…which requires detaching and letting go of others’ business! Oh my, it’s a slippery slope in the land of addiction!
I find with my DBT students that many of them are recovering Drama Queens and Kings. Before they started this healing process, they were often embroiled in wildly high risk and/or debilitating situations. Once they realize that they do have an addiction to Drama, they start letting go of the the need to be center stage, stirring the pot and getting everyone around them wound up. But it requires a process of compounded skill building, education, homework and practice, and re-wiring their brains in order to shift from the “Poor Me” narrative to the “Serene Me” experience.
When someone says, “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink!” they are stuck in Victim Consciousness and do not see how many choices and options they have. Slowly, slowly, with DBT training, rehab treatment, or 12 Step processes they start to see how many other options they have besides using their addiction to cope.
We live in a time where treatment for addiction and mood disorder is available, and the only way to do recovery wrong is to not do it at all. So if you or a loved one are struggling with something along the addiction spectrum, trust that there is a solution for you. As the Dalai Lama says, “Never Give Up!”
Copyright © by Lisa Wessan 2018. All rights reserved.
The Lighter Side of Transformation 
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