Too Much Is Not Enough

Some otherwise competent individuals repeatedly and knowingly act counter to their own interests. They are not intending to hurt themselves; they are taken in by an illusion. And, as is the case with optical illusions, experience does not prevent them from being taken in again and again.

The soul illusion is a critical element of mood disorders (depression, anger, and anxiety) and incentive use disorders [chemical dependence, obesity, compulsive gambling, gaming, sex/pornography, etc.].

But this time I really mean it

After Hasselbring’s second DUI he regretfully reviews how his drinking has harmed his family. He really means it at the moment when he makes his solemn vow to never have another drink. On a Friday night some weeks later he is angry at his wife and wants to have some fun for a change. Now he is a different Hasselbring than the fellow who vowed to quit drinking. The contrite state following the DUI elicits a subjective reality that is different from the positive anticipatory state just before the next relapse; what seems sensible from one perspective seems ridiculous from the other. He makes his vow of abstinence when in one state, and breaks it when in another. Needless to say, Hasselbring will discover that dishonoring his vow is a mistake, which will motivate him to make an even stronger vow to quit drinking “and this time I really mean it.” Naturally, everything will look different when he next encounters a high-risk situation and his good intentions and cognitive resources are far away.

Perceptual Bias and Will
The Rodney Dangerfield of philosophical questions: When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is there a sound? It gets no respect, because it seems to be one of those pointless questions that has no answer. But there is an answer – an answer with profound spiritual and practical implications. The answer is: There is no sound!

When the tree falls, it produces a series of pressure waves in the surrounding air. The ear drum converts these waves into a mechanical signal which is transmitted by 3 small bones to the fluid filled cochlea – the spiral bony canal of the inner ear. Hair cells of the cochlea are the actual receptors. Each is tuned to a particular frequency of the fluid waves. Hair cell vibrations are converted to electrical impulses, and transmitted along the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex where intensity and frequency of the vibrations are mapped. Neither pressure waves, physical movements of body parts [bones, hair], nor electrical signals are sound. The experience of sound exists only in the mind of the perceiver.

Perception differs qualitatively from the physical properties of the stimulus. The nervous system extracts only certain information from the natural world. We perceive fluctuations of air pressure not as pressure waves but as sounds that we hear. We perceive electromagnetic waves of different frequency as colors that we see. We perceive chemical compounds dissolved in air or water as specific smells or tastes. In the words of neurologist Sir John Eccles: “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.”

Sounds, colors, and patterns appear to have an independent reality, yet are, in fact, constructed by the mind. All our experience of the natural world is our mind’s interpretation of the input it receives.

Objective Reality & Subjective Experience
Subjective reality is not the same as objective reality, although to function in the real world we must assume it is. The soul illusion is the consequence of failing to appreciate the difference. In eastern philosophy we are viewed as trapped in “Maya.” The entrapment comes from accepting the tacit premise of subjective experience, namely that we perceive the world as it really is. In fact, our experience is a creative construction of the nervous system to makes sense of sensory input.

We perceive everything through state-dependent lenses. The same event will look different when we view it from different perspectives. When Hasselbring is looking forward to his first drink after several months of sobriety, he is blind to the consequences he “knows” will follow. Likewise, when he looks back on that same drink he cannot believe he could be so foolish to allow the relapse to occur. . . and then when he considers how to accomplish this obviously difficult task, he will be blind to the true nature of his challenge and what it really takes to prevent relapse.

No matter how many times he repeats this sequence he never seems to learn. In real time he does not appreciate what will be all too obvious to him in hindsight. The distortions are always invisible to him, because his perceptual system itself is subject to the state-dependent bias. He will continually be taken in by this soul illusion until he rises to another level of awareness. Escape from the soul illusion emerges through Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

There are many kinds of depression. When the symptoms come “out of the blue” the depression is likely to be biological in origin. However, the origin of most people’s depression is abstract rather than medical.

There are good and talented people who perceive things in ways that depress them, and, consequently, the quality of their performance. They criticize themselves for being depressed and not performing better, which depresses them. Being depressed about being depressed is an example of a recursive trap.

Self-Confirmatory Bias
Self-confirmatory bias is a component of many recursive traps associated with depression. Of all the negative beliefs that one might accept, some are special in that they motivate the person to act in ways that confirm the original belief.

Barry is a 31 year-old engineer who views himself as socially awkward. Given this knowledge about Barry, what is your prediction when at an office party a co-worker makes a joke at his expense. Will he respond with a clever comeback, or feel frozen and be inarticulate?

From the clinician’s perspective, the pain that Barry feels when he ruminates on past social failures is just the insult; the real injury is that the self-consciousness and demoralizing expectations that this kind of thinking promotes, impairs his social performance. Barry’s trap: His pathogenic beliefs about his self-worth or social desirability elicit motivational states that impair his social performance, and thereby confirms the pathogenic belief.

When he is in the right state of mind Barry can be very funny and quick witted. Whether or not he can use this talent depends, to a large extent, on his subjective reality at that moment. His retort is more likely to be clever if he sees himself as a quick wit, than if he is in his “I’m a loser” trance.

Cognitive events such as the appraisal, “I’m a loser,” or the expectation, “I will respond with a clever retort” exist only in Barry’s mind not in the objective world! However, the subjective reality that Barry experiences has a considerable influence on how he performs in the objective world.

It looks different than it feels. From our dispassionate perspective, we can appreciate Barry’s trap in a way that Barry cannot (a big advantage in working with a therapist). The details of your trap may be quite different than Barry’s, but it is likely to share this recursive structure.

People generally seek my services soon after a relapse. To help them I need to understand how the relapse happens and so after the initial introductions I ask the new client to describe the steps that led from their good intentions to their first lapse. I used to be surprised by the lack of detail I would get. Often they would express total ignorance and answer with, “I don’t know,”

It is frustrating to me that many individuals cannot tell me much about what happened during the moments preceding the critical first violation of their commitment. The observation is especially perplexing considering the extensive detail the same client is capable of providing when describing some trivial conflict at work. Can this counter-intuitive observation provide a clue to understanding failures of will?

To change your behavior intentionally you must be awake at the critical moment of decision so you can intentionally choose the path that leads to the intended outcome, instead of mindlessly following the path of least resistance.

When clever attorney, H, cannot tell me what happened along the path that led to his relapse, it suggests that he was asleep at the wheel. His conscious mind was not fully engaged; he was on autopilot. He relapsed because he failed to intentionally guide his behavior during the critical high-risk moments.

Perhaps “asleep at the wheel” is too strong. At some level he was conscious of what he was doing. H reports that he observed himself following a path he had previously recognized as harmful and vowed to never follow again. He reports that he remembered his vow of abstinence, yet he simply did not exert the effort required to perform as intended and mindlessly followed the familiar sequence to the first lapse . . . demoralization and eventual relapse.

Autonomous Behavior
Performance becomes easier with practice. In fact, with enough practice, performance can become autonomous—that is, it requires no conscious attention at all. Consider activities such as driving or using a computer keyboard. When first attempted, performance is slow, hesitant, and filled with error, but with practice speed increases, variability decreases, and execution becomes increasingly effortless. What once demanded considerable attention can now be performed rapidly and accurately with little or no awareness of the component actions.

Conscious attention is not required to initiate an autonomous sequence. Mere exposure to the triggering stimulus is sufficient, and, once initiated, the action has a ballistic quality, tending to run on to completion all by itself. For example, when driving, a red light is sufficient to elicit a complex sequence of events that does not require my attention for successful performance. Conscious awareness is not required for my foot to move from the accelerator to the brake pedal or to guide the pressure on the brake to bring the vehicle safely and smoothly to a stop. Rapid, accurate, effortless performance that makes no demands on valuable conscious resources has obvious advantages. The down side of overtraining a behavioral sequence becomes apparent when you want to change it. For example, an experienced driver would take longer to learn to reliably stop at a green light than it originally took to learn to stop at a red light. Until the driver has acquired the new habit, [s]he must pay attention in order to override the well-practiced behavior of driving through a green light.

Stephen Tiffany , whose views have been paraphrased in the preceding paragraphs, suggests that after considerable practice, addictive behavior becomes autonomous. While autonomous behavior can be overridden, it requires conscious attention to do so. The karma of repeatedly using an incentive is that the path that leads to it becomes progressively easier to follow. As a result, whenever your conscious resources are occupied by a demanding social situation or powerful emotional state, or are diminished by fatigue or intoxication, you will tend to follow this default path.

A mindless relapse occurs when mindful processing, which is necessary to interrupt the autonomous sequence, is not deployed when needed. This may occur when the individual was simply not conscious of the original commitment until the relapse sequence was already well under way. Less dramatic, but probably more common: The individual is more or less aware of the unfolding sequence of events leading to the lapse, and is also fully aware of the intention to abstain, yet simply fails to put forth the effort of will required to interrupt the autonomous chain of events.

The decision to restrict access to a rewarding incentive sets up a conflict. On one side there is the well exercised behavioral sequence that leads to incentive use. Against this is pitted a poorly exercised behavioral sequence that would motivate the individual to respond to a crisis as intended. This is a lopsided conflict; the path of least resistance has the advantage. The ability to keep your head in the face of provocative stimuli is essential.

Understand this: You will not have the resources to respond mindfully during the crisis. You must strengthen your intended overt and covert responses through rehearsal and exercise, to the point where they will be of use to you when you need them.

As a professional boxer can hire sparring partners to help him hone his skills, you can improve your skills by focusing on good performance during the high-risk situations you encounter in real-time. Unlike the boxer, you will not have to pay for your sparring partners—they will come up without you having to do anything special. As you continue to respond mindfully to the challenges as they arise, you will be developing and strengthening your coping skills. The Karma of performing as intended during high risk situations is that doing so becomes easier over time. With sufficient practice, performing the intended behavior becomes effortless—autonomous. The real objective of these articles is to help you transform your default path so that it takes you where you want to go.

Use It or Lose It
Habit strength, like muscle strength, increases with exercise. Each lapse strengthens the sequence of behaviors that lead to the lapse and each successful coping reaction strengthens the intended behavior sequence.

Every high-risk situation is a contest with a finite duration—generally seconds or minutes, rarely hours. You will either win by performing as intended or lose by lapsing. Each win enhances self-efficacy and exercises the responses that produced it, but each loss is demoralizing and strengthens the responses that will lead to future failures.

To change your default path you will have to dedicate the resources required to respond as intended during high-risk situations. Each time you do, the intended coping reaction is strengthened. It will take a finite number of exposures for the new reaction to become stronger than the old one. How many exposures? It takes 42 consecutive willed reactions to establish a new default reaction. Of course, I could be wrong. It might take 112 or 23, but it will not take a million. You will get better at this with practice and after perhaps 42 high-risk situations in which you acted as intended, you will find that your default path has become your path of greatest advantage.

You can succeed at this task, but you must stay mindful during this initial phase and manage each and every high-risk situation you encounter. While you are going through it, it may seem as though it will never end, but if you follow your intended path, you will look back on this stage and see that this part of the passage did not last very long, and the struggle against the pull of the incentive was not without its own rewards.

If you don’t get what you want you are disappointed, but if you don’t get what you need you will die. Food, water, and oxygen are examples of needs, while respect, love, and being right are examples of wants.

The fight-or-flight reaction is an exquisite orchestration of biological processes, which makes an organism physically stronger so that it will be able to fight powerfully or flee quickly when its life depends on it. If you ever encounter such a situation, you will be glad you have it. This power, however, comes at a price; during a fight-or-flight reaction the body is sacrificing everything else—including digestion, immune response, and higher cognitive faculties—to be physically strong now. But some people react to trivial stressors as though they were life and death. This costly error exhausts the body, making it vulnerable to disease, and exhausts the cognitive resources needed to override the influence of local stressors and temptations.

Rational Emotive Therapy
Dr. Albert Ellis described a useful way to defuse excessive emotionality: When you experience a fight-or-flight reaction, ask yourself, “Is this about something I want or about something I need?” If you don’t get what you want, it is disappointing but not a matter of life and death. Indeed, it is often advantageous to be cool and calm in the midst of a crisis. Sadly, some people destroy what is genuinely important to them because of their fight-or-flight reactions to trivial slights.

According to Dr. Ellis, traps of emotional over-reaction result from attachment to outcomes that are not of vital importance.

Stoicism
If your boss falsely accuses you of some sin you did not commit, it is indeed frustrating but it is not a matter of life or death. Even if you lose your job over it, it is still not a matter of life and death. The Stoic, Epictetus, observed: “A beggar doesn’t have a job, but he is alive.”

Epictetus preceded Dr. Ellis by about two thousand years, and his philosophy produced heroes. Consider an archer who strives to shoot excellently and will not be disappointed if he shoots well, even if he doesn’t win the competition. Winning is desirable, but there will be times when an excellent archer shoots well and still—for reasons beyond his control, such as a sudden gust of wind or an extraordinary performance by an opponent—is not awarded first place. A non-stoic archer views this as a failure because he did not achieve the intended outcome; whereas, a stoic archer views it as a success because he shot well. The stoic is focused on performing well, not on the outcome of the performance.

In Epictetus’ words:

On the one hand, there are things that are in our power, whereas other things are not in our power. In our power are opinion, impulse, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is our own doing. Things not in our power include our body, our possessions, our reputations, our status, and, in a word, whatever is not our own doing.

Straightaway then, train yourself to say to every unpleasant impression, ‘You are an impression, and by no means what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by asking whether it concerns things that are in your power or things that are not in your power, and if it concerns something not in your power, have ready to hand the answer, ‘This is nothing to me.’

Remember that, on the one hand, desires command you to obtain what you long for, and on the other, aversions command you to avoid what you dislike. Those who fail to gain what they desire are unfortunate, whilst those who fall into what they seek to avoid are miserable.

A person’s master is the one who has power over that which is wished for or not wished for, so as to secure it or take it away. Therefore, anyone who wishes to be free should neither wish for anything nor avoid anything that depends on others; those who do not observe this rule will of necessity be the slaves of others.

When you are about to undertake some task, remind yourself what sort of business it is. If you are going out to bathe, bring to mind what happens at the baths: there will be those who splash you, those who will jostle you, some will be abusive to you, and others will steal from you. And thus you will undertake the affair more securely if you say to yourself from the start, ‘I wish to take a bath, but also to keep my moral character in accordance with nature.’ Do likewise with every undertaking. For thus, if anything should happen that interferes with your bathing, be ready to say, ‘Oh well, it was not only this that I wanted, but also to keep my moral character in accordance with nature, and I cannot do that if I am irritated by things that happen.’ Say to yourself, ‘This is the price for peace of mind, and this is the price for being free of troubles. Nothing can be had without paying the price.’

Remember that the insult does not come from the person who abuses you or hits you, but from your judgment that such people are insulting you. Therefore, whenever someone provokes you, be aware that it is your own opinion that provokes you. Try, therefore, in the first place, not to be carried away by your impressions, for if you can gain time and delay, you will more easily control yourself.

According to Epictetus, the traps of emotional over-reaction result from attachment to outcomes that you do not control.

Attachment to outcomes hinders ongoing performance:

• Emotionality: If the archer needs to win, the prospect of failure is threatening and produces a biological reaction, nervousness, which undermines the steady hand required of the task.
• Distraction: The archer will perform best when his attention is focused on shooting to the complete exclusion of everything else. To the extent the archer thinks of winning rather than shooting, the prize divides him, and the need to win drains him of power

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According to Chaing Tsu, the traps of emotional over-reaction result from attachment to outcomes.

Psychology is the discipline by which the Psyche (the soul) seeks to understand the Psyche. While the study of experiential phenomena is interesting in its own right, some people become psychologists because they seek to relieve the Psyche’s suffering. Paradoxically, incentive use disorders, the cause of much of the Psyche’s avoidable suffering, is maintained by the Psyche’s motivation to relieve its suffering.

Negative emotional states are not necessarily pathological. Fear, for example, is an adaptive motivational response to threat. The bio-psychological changes that result from an encounter with an objective threat, a dangerous animal for example, are adaptive in that they prepare the individual for fight or flight, and, importantly, the emotional reaction dissipates after the threat has passed.

The fear evoked by worrying about events that may occur in the future is different. Here the emotional state was evoked not by an objective threat, but by the worrier’s predictions about a potential threat. The fearful emotional state does not dissipate with time because there are always potential threats in the future. Rather than energizing adaptive behavior, the emotional state evoked by thinking this way depletes the very resources required to deal with objective threats.

Depressed individuals tend to see the world through negative filters and react to environmental challenges with negative expectations, an orientation that may interfere with good performance. Anxious individuals have a different set of perceptual biases and response tendencies, but their emotional reaction also hinders their ability to cope with challenges. The fact that individuals continue to react to events that happen in ways that make them miserable suggests that they are not learning from their painful experience.

Subjective Reality
Some of life’s problems are self-correcting. You catch a cold, and the body’s immune system learns to recognize the pathogen and defeat it. A child learning to ride a bicycle may fall a few times but will eventually get it. People who have fallen into a neurotic trap may never get it, because their pathogenic beliefs cause them to act in ways that confirm these beliefs. For example, the belief that you will not be able to cope with a challenge may impair performance and produce the unwanted outcome.

We assume that our experience is a natural reflection of objective reality. In fact, the limitations of our sensory apparatus filter what comes through from the objective world to our conscious awareness. The subjective reality we experience is a creative construction of our nervous system. Everything looks different when we expect success than when we expect failure. We appraise environmental threats and our abilities to cope with them through one set of lenses when we are confident and through another when we are anxious. Because the lenses are invisible to use, we assume that we see the objective truth despite the continual shifting of lenses as our state changes from one situation to another. [For more about state-dependent perception, please click here].

Recursive Structures
Suicide bombers and corporate executives are made of the same biological material, but are biased by different beliefs and hence experience different subjective realities. There are many ways to misperceive, but some distortions are special: They have a recursive structure and so can maintain themselves indefinitely.

Blushing is an example of a recursive structure. If blushing is embarrassing for me, then any feedback that I am blushing enhances the physiological reaction. The more obvious the blush, the more embarrassed I feel, and the more embarrassed I feel, the more I blush, and so on.

Consider how a self-sabotaging recursive structure can continue to diminish the quality of life throughout an individual’s biography:

Barry, a 31 year-old engineer, has low self-efficacy regarding his social skills, and worries about making a fool of himself at the Friday office party. Thinking about it evokes emotions, appraisals, and behavioral tendencies that impair his social skills. In fact, Barry can be very funny and quick-witted when he is in the right state of mind, but when a co-worker made a joke at his expense at the office party he was inarticulate. Although he would have loved to respond with a clever comeback, his expectation of humiliation determined which state-dependent talents and abilities were available to him at the critical moment.

Barry’s story illustrates the cause-and-effect relationships that tend to evoke self-confirmatory bias. Barry’s belief that he is socially inept impairs his social performance, which confirms his handicapping belief. His social life is continually influenced by his expectation of social failure, and the objective evidence that Barry does, in fact, perform poorly in social situations continually validates this expectation. Because it has a recursive structure, it can persist indefinitely and continue to have a negative impact on Barry’s actions and how his life unfolds. Fortunately for Barry, he had the intellectual gifts to appreciate how this trap works and to change the cognitive structure that maintained it.

Self-Reference and Reciprocal Feedback
Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is more generally used to describe a process of reciprocal feedback; for example, when two mirrors face each other a recurring sequence of nested images appears in each.

One kind of reciprocal structure is the Circular Chain, which, like a snake swallowing its own tail, has no end and so may repeat indefinitely. Self-sabotaging sequences that have this structure are particularly destructive because they can continue indefinitely. Low self-efficacy and dependence on external agency have a reciprocal relationship of this kind. For example:

H has become dependent on alcohol because it helps him cope with the difficulties of his life. He seeks a solution to his problem from an intensive treatment program. He does fine while in treatment but does not develop the coping skills required to manage high-risk situations independently. Soon after the external supports provided by the program fade away he relapses. The relapse is demoralizing and supports his belief that he is powerless and must depend upon an external agent to help him cope. Sadly, the mind set of powerlessness prevents him from developing the procedural skills required to finally escape this problem

Positive Feedback
When mirrors are parallel, the nested reflections do not go on forever because real mirrors are not perfectly reflective. Pathogenic structures have no such limitation. In fact, some produce amplification or positive feedback—analogous to a microphone that has gotten too close to a speaker causing a rapid and relentless magnification of the sound to the extreme. Panic attacks are produced by positive feedback of the fight-or-flight response: Specifically, the symptoms of anxiety, such as rapid heartbeat, are perceived as threatening, which results in the secretion of more fight-or-flight hormones, and so on.

Positive feedback can cause bingeing in much the same way. In the example below, the payoff—escape into mindless eating—is used as a method to help an individual cope with a negative emotion. The suffering produced by the choice amplifies the motivation to escape.

Desiree hates being fat and feels shame whenever she thinks about her obesity or sees herself in the mirror. She has also discovered that she can escape her self-critical monologue and feelings of shame by becoming absorbed in the pleasurable experience of mindless eating. The self-loathing caused by her failure to restrain her eating amplifies the bad feelings she has for herself, which increases her motivation to escape into the warm comfort of mindless eating. In this case, her emotional reaction to the failure is the amplification mechanism: The worse she feels, the more she is driven to eat, and the more she eats, the worse she feels

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Ruminative Self-Focus
A particular kind of reciprocal feedback forms the core structure of pathological depression, anger, and anxiety: Ruminative self-focus is a thinking strategy in which the focus of attention is the self, how one feels, and why one feels that way. It is ruminative in the sense that one goes over the same thoughts and images without achieving a resolution or plan of action. It masquerades as a problem-solving orientation, but very little problem solving actually takes place. As a rule of thumb, when the content of the rumination is the past, a depressive disorder is the diagnosis; and when the future provides the content, the rumination is called worrying and shows up as generalized anxiety disorder. Because of its recursive structure, ruminative self-focus maintains itself and can diminish the quality of an entire biography.

Julius Kuhl’s research on conditioned helplessness shows that when people fail, their focus shifts from figuring out how to be successful (problem solving) to perseverating thoughts about themselves, how they feel and why they feel this way (ruminative self-focus). This turns out to be a poor strategy because the rumination consumes cognitive resources that are then not available for problem solving. Kuhl found that conditioned helplessness appears to be maintained by the reciprocal relationship between failure and ruminative self-focus: Failure leads to ruminative self-focus and ruminative self-focus impairs performance, which increases the likelihood of failure.

Recent research on depression and the quality of social performance shows that negative mood leads to self-reflective rumination, and self-reflective rumination leads to negative mood. Moreover, the ruminative self-focus and the depressed emotional state it engenders are found to impair subjects’ social problem-solving abilities and to decrease their self-efficacy regarding their social skills, both of which impair social performance. Poor social performance, in turn, may result in loneliness and other negative consequences, which set up higher level recursive structures.

As you may have already guessed, any attempt to improve the self carries with it a trap that is especially debilitating to individuals who become emotionally attached to outcomes, or who are judgmental toward themselves.

The belief that “now I’ve made up my mind, so acting as I intend to act will be easy” is an example of the Soul Illusion. Have some respect for the challenge of acting as intended during crises. This is a difficult task. To perform effectively during crises, requires that you interrupt the recursive sequences that can deplete your cognitive resources. For some ancient solutions to these traps, please click here.

People often end up doing exactly what they tell themselves not to do. The intention to suppress a response has the perverse effect of making that response more likely. Edgar Allan Poe labeled this phenomenon: the Imp of the Perverse.

Thought Experiment: Negative Suggestion.
Try not to scratch your nose. Continue reading, but be aware that even letting your nose itch would indicate personal weakness. So try not to even think about your nose, and see if you can read to the end of this chapter without once touching your face in the area around your nose.

Trying to prevent your nose from itching may, perversely, produce the very thing you are trying to prevent. The more seriously you try the greater is the effect. Two interpretations of this perverse phenomenon are as follows:

Negative Suggestion: Negative representations are defined in terms of positive representations (their opposite), but positive representations are defined directly. For example, the statement, “It is not raining,” requires one to conceptualize the meaning of the statement, “It is raining.” Likewise, the statement, “Chester is not a pedophile,” associates the conceptualization of Chester with child molesting. Chester would be foolish to make such an assertion during his political campaign. To understand the instruction, “Don’t let your nose itch!” the reader must access a representation of an itchy nose, which evokes that very sensation.

Ironic process: To determine if you are successful at having a nose that is not itching, you must compare the current sensations with what they would be if your nose was itching. According to this interpretation, it is checking to make sure you are successful at preventing your nose from itching that causes the nose to itch. Ironic, isn’t it?

Reactance
Humans hate restrictions—especially of those freedoms they already have. Reactance refers to the motivation to react or rebel against restriction. In one study, two-year-old boys accompanied their mothers into a room containing equally attractive toys. The toys were arranged so that one was easily available to the child while the other stood behind a transparent Plexiglas barrier, out of reach. Which toy do you think the little boys wanted? This is one among many examples of the rule of thumb: Forbidding something increases its desirability.

Attribution Theory: The Insult Is the Injury
Smoking cessation research shows that, on average, successful quitters failed seven times before they finally made it. Most smokers, however, interpret a failure to quit as an indication of their intrinsic weakness. The belief that the cause of the failure is within the self is called an internal attribution for failure. Explanations of one’s failure, which appeal to motivation, intelligence, or character defect, are examples of internal attribution for failure. The belief that the same inadequacy that caused me to fail in the past will cause me to fail in the future is an example of a stable attribution for failure.

Internal, stable attributions for failure are associated with low self-efficacy. If you believe that you don’t have what it takes to succeed at this challenge, and, moreover, that you are not going to change, then it is understandable that you would not invest much of your own effort and instead turn yourself over to a treatment provider or a higher power. However, good long-term outcome requires that you persevere through difficult challenges, and internal, stable attributions for your past failures are demoralizing and rob you of the energy and perseverance required for good long-term outcome. Efficacy-enhancing imagery, contemplation, and other trance formative exercises are included in the kit. These tools are especially useful during times of crisis when your self-efficacy may be threatened.

Paradoxically, the belief that, “I cannot succeed at this task,” often results from an initial underestimate of the difficulty of this task. You might think, “It shouldn’t be that hard to change my ways once I make up my mind, so my history of relapse means there must be something wrong with me.” This demoralizing belief results from underestimating what it takes to end an addictive relationship.

Attribution and Self Image
Consider the following study, which demonstrates how internal attribution and counter-regulatory motivation can work together to influence one’s appraisal of oneself: Teen-aged boys were told that a book was too sexually explicit to be read by those under 21. This restriction had the effect of dramatically increasing their desire to read the book. The experimenters knew that the attractiveness of the book was enhanced because the book was forbidden. However, ignorant of the principle of reactance, the boys attributed their motivation to read the book to a specific personal tendency to be attracted to lewd content. Forbidding the book had the perverse consequence of causing the subjects to believe that they were perverse.

My academic training in cognitive and neural sciences along with the more expensive education earned over 3 decades of helping my clients escape the self-sabotaging traps they have created or fallen into has yielded a set of tools that will be of use to individuals who seek to follow a more advantageous path. I would like to make these tools available to anyone who could benefit. [These tools are unusual because they are experiential. Unlike the tools used to build a house or repair a car, these tools are designed to alter experience, a phenomenon that exists on a different dimension than concrete objects].

Among the tools are:

• Media files that invite the user to explore trance phenomena and develop his or her ability to manipulate it.
• Text files that include thought experiments to illustrate cognitive and behavioral tactics to manage crises of stress and temptation.
• Formats and protocols to promote that have been developed through the school of hard knocks to promote the exercise of will.

There are many possible formats to deliver this material. It turns out that I am a better psychologist than a web designer, and have been wasting a lot of time learning the rules of the many possible communication formats. It is time to make a decision [and thereby condemn the alternatives to oblivion]. One possibility is to send each lesson as an email with appropriate links. Alternative include an e-book in PDF format, or a series of web pages in html

I would be most grateful for suggestions or thoughts about the pros and cons of different formats. The easiest way to get a comment to me is by clicking here..

Conventional treatment for addictive disorders often makes the problem worse. The term “iatrogenic” refers to a pathological condition caused or exacerbated by treatment efforts—that is, outcome would have been better if the treatment had not been administered.

For example, most treatment for problem drinking is based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which advocates that alcohol abusers admit powerlessness over their “disease” and comply with a treatment program developed and supervised by an external agent [e.g., treatment provider, support group]. For alcoholics whose cognitive or medical condition allows them no options other than to replace dependence on a substance with dependence on a more benevolent source of control, this is the only viable approach. However some problem drinkers can develop the skills and faculties to act in accord with their interests and principles, even during crises. For those capable of exercising will, promoting the idea that they have a disease over which they are powerless can increase their dependence and expectations of being helpless during a crisis.

The Problem of Immediate Gratification (The PIG)
Addicts are suckers for the promise of an immediate payoff. True to form, most seek immediate gratification of their desire to be free of their problem. Turning responsibility for good outcome over to a powerful external agent generally makes them feel better right away., Indeed, accepting the passive, patient role does promote good short-term outcome as long as the external source of control [treatment provider, support group, rehab program] is salient. The downside of this strategy shows up some time after the program has completed and the change agent is not available to exert its influence. Individuals who are not prepared to cope with crises of stress and temptation are likely to relapse when they encounter high-risk situations on their own.

Over the past 30 years, psychologist William Dubin, Ph.D. has accompanied thousands of individuals through their passage to freedom from dependence. The Path of Greatest Advantage: How to escape addictive traps and act in accord with your interests and principles is the resource kit that has emerged from these collaborations. The ambitious goal of this kit is to enhance the user’s ability to follow his or her path of greatest advantage rather than yield in the direction of least resistance.

“Depending upon an external agent to free you from slavery is part of the slave mentality that maintains the addictive trap. You become free of dependence when you can act in accord with your own interests despite the pull of local stressors and temptations. The capability to exercise your will emerges during a developmental passage that no one can take for you nor spare you,” says Dr. Dubin.

The passage from dependence to personal sovereignty is a difficult one with many traps and pitfalls. Real escape from dependence requires that the individual, rather than an external source of control, be the responsible agent of change. The Path of Greatest Advantage provides methods and tools developed by Dr. Dubin and the thousands of collaborators he has accompanied through their passages to freedom from dependence. Reviewing the text can spare the kit’s the falls and painful lessons of cause-and-effect that these collaborations have identified and resolved. More than passive reading of text is required to develop the skills and faculties to escape an addictive trap. Supplementing the printed manual are audio and multimedia tools including thought experiments, meditation exercises, and hypnotic inductions designed to enhance the user’s cognitive and imaginative faculties.

Good long-term outcome is the byproduct of exercising these faculties during the real-time crises each user is bound to encounter. Each individual is different and each will develop a unique solution to his or her problem. The kit offers several general strategies to approach the problem, along with a wide range of specific tactics to cope with crises.

I am a psychologist who works with those who can afford my fee. My clients tend to be impressive individuals who generally accomplish what they set out to accomplish; they typically develop the necessary skills and work industriously until they achieve their goal. But when it comes to controlling their use of a particular incentive [e.g., alcohol, food, sex, gambling] they perform less well, astoundingly less well.

Perseverance and Self-Efficacy
In contrast to ordinary language in which a word may mean different things to different individuals, a technical term has a single definition. Self-Efficacy refers to the expectation that one can master the challenge. “I can fix any computer problem” is an example of the confident expectation of a person with high self-efficacy in that domain. That same person may have low self-efficacy in another domain: “I am a nerd and will probably be socially awkward at the party.”

As you would expect, self-efficacy influences performance: People with high self-efficacy can tolerate physical discomfort and surprising amounts of frustration, and yet they persevere, creatively solve problems, and stay the course until one way or another they accomplish what they set out to accomplish. In contrast, people with low self-efficacy tend to abandon the effort after minor discomforts or frustrations. “I’m not going to succeed anyway, so why suffer more than necessary?” is an example of the demoralized attitude of a person with low self-efficacy in a particular domain.

Achieving a worthwhile outcome often requires that you tolerate some discomfort or frustration. A mountain climber would never achieve the intended outcome if [s]he abandoned the task at the first sign of discomfort or frustration. It is persevering in the face of challenge that is part of the adventure of mountain climbing. But discomfort and frustration do not evoke a heroic reaction from people with low self-efficacy. Instead of triggering resolve and creative problem solving, setbacks and discomfort often elicit negative emotional reactions such as hopelessness, guilt, or self-loathing, which may motivate them to abandon the effort. People relapse because they misperceive the nature of their challenge and underestimate what is required to achieve good outcome.

A Peak Experience
Mountain climbing is a metaphor for a difficult but surmountable challenge. It would be foolhardy to attempt a serious climb without proper preparation or without the understanding that you will probably encounter physical discomfort and difficult challenges along the way. Despite the dangers and obstacles, most people who set out to climb a mountain successfully achieve their goal and remember their adventures as peak experiences. Mountain climbing is hard and often painful, but people take it on voluntarily without financial compensation because it’s fun to experience the enhanced self-efficacy that results from mastering a difficult challenge. In fact, when competent individuals have realistic expectations about the nature of their challenge, they tend to perform responsibly, and persevere—despite the physical and mental discomforts they encounter—until the goal is achieved. The difficulty of the challenge is in fact an essential part of the story, and the whole enterprise—including the discomfort—is often remembered as a positive experience.

In contrast, the vast majority of people who resolve to change their relationship with an addictive incentive do not have realistic expectations about the nature of their challenge. Consequently, they relapse, become demoralized, and lose faith in their ability to overcome their problem. The resulting diminishment of low self-efficacy makes future failures more likely, which in turn lowers self-efficacy, and so it goes.

It is important to distinguish between process and outcome. The mountain summit is the nominal or outcome goal of the mountain climber’s efforts. Performing well is the process goal. For the climber, the real goal of going mountain climbing is the peak experience that results from engaging the challenge. The function of the summit is to provide a focus that gives structure to the activity and later to the story the climber will tell friends, family, and self. If, for example, a storm developed during the climb and the team performed brilliantly by getting everyone off the mountain with no injuries, the climber would feel successful despite failing to achieve the outcome goal.

Major life accomplishments emerge over time as you systematically solve the problems encountered along the way. In domains in which you are successful, it is likely that you focus on the task rather than on self-evaluation. Actual success is encouraged by an attitude that permits you to competently and consistently perform all the actions required to achieve your goal, the pleasant ones as well as the unpleasant ones. Ironically, low self-efficacy often causes people to focus more on outcomes than process. Understand this: Good outcome is a byproduct of good performance.

Self-Efficacy Research Highlights

Individuals who have high self-efficacy are willing to tolerate physical discomfort and psychological frustration without abandoning the path to their goal.
• Individuals with high self-efficacy tend to employ an action oriented thinking style—that is, they focus on how to solve the problems.
• Action oriented thinking makes success more likely.

Individuals with low self-efficacy tend to abandon their goal in the face of even minor obstacles
• Individuals with low self-efficacy tend to employ a state oriented thinking style—that is, they focus on how they feel and why they feel that way.
• State oriented thinking makes failure more likely.

For a discussion of self-efficacy, social anxiety, and depression please click here.

Thought Experiment: Efficacy Enhancing Imagery.
Consider an area of your life in which you are usually successful—athletic, artistic, occupational, social, etc—and imagine what it feels like to be you when you take on a challenge in this domain. Elaborate this imagery until you experience the confident state associated with high self-efficacy. Now, imagine that you are presented with an impressive new challenge in this domain: What is your attitude toward it? How would you expect to react to the discomforts and frustrations you encounter

The Problem of Immediate Gratification [The PIG] is a defining feature of Incentive Use Disorders. So, naturally, those suffering the negative consequences of their excessive appetites want immediate gratification of the desire to be free of their problem. Overeaters want quick weight loss, but weight loss is not a cure for obesity! The vast majority of the participants of diets and weight loss programs will weigh more a year later than they did when they began their program. One- and two-year outcome research for substance abuse, gambling, and other addictive disorders shows similar patterns of short-term behavior change (while the individual is under the influence of the program) followed by an increasing likelihood of relapse with time from program completion, typically reaching around 80% within the first year after treatment.

There is no external salvation from dependence on an external agent. To the extent an external agent—a treatment provider, program, support group—was responsible for the behavioral control, relapse is likely when the salience of the external source of control diminishes with time.

The Nature of Your Challenge
An alternative to admitting powerlessness over a disease and turning responsibility for outcome over to an external agent is to admit you have freewill and accept the responsibility to develop the faculties required to act as you intend despite the influence of local conditions.

Volition is a controversial topic and many people believe that willpower is a destructive illusion. Most everyone with an excessive appetite has tried what they call willpower—”white knuckling it”—without success. [The "brute force" method may, perversely, provoke counter-regulatory motivation.] However, if willpower is defined as acting as intended despite the influence of local conditions, then the term describes a faculty worth developing. Simply stated, you have a two-phase challenge: First, you must decide how you intend to act when you encounter high-risk situations. Second, you must get yourself to act in accord with that decision, despite the influence of the local stressors and temptations.

You learn to exercise will during your encounters with a wide range of high-risk situations. At these critical moments, you have the opportunity to observe the cause-and-effect principles that govern your actions when exposed to stress and temptation. An important component of exercising will is to shift from an emotional trance to a dispassionate trance. This shift in perspective can enable you to become aware of your core motivation and act accordingly.

Addictive traps are easy to fall into and hard to escape. No escape plan works for everyone, because each trap is unique. An external source, such as a book or generic program, cannot show you the way to good long-term outcome, or even tell you what good long-term outcome means in your particular case. To act in accord with your interests and principles, you have to first define what they are. No external agent can do this for you; the path to self-determination is for your steps alone. Experiential invitations designed to encourage contemplation will enable you to focus your cognitive resources on how you want to use the remainder of your lease on life—your core motivation.

Appreciating what you want and doing what it takes to get it are different challenges. Acting as intended despite the influence of local conditions that would motivate you to lapse defines the “exercise of will.” This kit has the ambitious goal of enhancing your power to intentionally influence the course of events.

An Efficacy Enhancing Treatment Strategy
The strategy of this kit is strikingly different from that used by programs based on the 12-Step model of Alcoholics Anonymous. According to the latter view, incentive use disorders are diseases. Treatment emphasizes getting the patient to admit powerlessness over the illness and to comply with the plan developed by a treatment provider. Rather than encourage you to accept powerlessness, or recommend that you turn your problem over to a higher power or treatment provider, here are tools and methods to enhance the power of your will.

Preventing relapse requires that you are able to make good choices in real time, which turns out to be much more difficult than it sounds. In your fantasy, you will respond heroically during your future encounters with stress and temptation. When you are in the midst of a crisis, performing mindfully will not be as easy as it now seems. To follow your path of greatest advantage rather than yield in the direction of least resistance requires the exercise of will.

The challenge ahead is among the most important and the most demanding of your life. It takes more than wanting it to achieve the benefits of good long-term outcome. Preventing relapse demands that you act as intended during the critical moments of crisis when your energies and cognitive resources are depleted or otherwise occupied.

Exercising will is a heroic undertaking. The text and other media contained in this kit provide conceptual models, concrete tools, and experiential invitations that will strengthen your ability to act in accord with your interests and principles, rather than yield in the direction of least resistance.

A major advantage of a self-directed approach is that it encourages the development of the faculties required to exercise will.

Consider Mr. Hasslebring who has been clean and sober during his stay at a 30-day rehab program. Sadly, the content discussed in the psycho-educational groups was of little value during the critical moments of the actual crisis he encountered in his home environment, and the program staff and structure were not available to help him.

The vast majority of the graduates of inpatient and intensive outpatient chemical dependence and weight loss programs relapse soon after the influence of the external agent disappears. Evidently, their treatment left them insufficiently prepared to cope with the high-risk situations they actually encountered. Good long-term outcome is the byproduct of good performance during high-risk situations.

Question: Why is it that the thing you are trying to find is always in the very last place you look for it?
Answer: Because once you have found it, you can stop looking.