Using Influence to Disrupt Patterns in the Cycles of Addiction

I have spent time with addicts and seen how influence can cause changes in long established patterns, changes which cause shifts and alter these patterns.

The problem most people have in trying to help an addict is that they can interrupt a pattern, but the pattern will later return.

The approach here is how to cause a shift in the pattern itself that leads to new outcomes.

The first question to address here is, what can you do from your position?

You know that you can't take on their problems.

All that is left is what words you use to influence them. The question is what impact will your words have on them.

Then you consider, What do people think will help a person? Does this effectively help the person? Are the results positive?

People think that giving someone life advice will help a person. Does this method have a proven track record and help the person?

It does not. Changes in what the person does simply temporarily interrupts the pattern.

Tell an addict to get a job, that job will temporarily interrupt the pattern, not give them a solution. Consider what other things people say to attempt to help an addict. Do these words and statements help?

Let's say you tell the person that they should stop doing drugs. Is this effective?

First consider that you will never see this person again, you have one set of words to give them to impact them and that is all. Now consider pressuring them to stop using drugs and pointing out the negative consequences for these actions.

Is this the best thing you can give them with your words?

That depends.

This depends on the commonality rate of those words. If you are telling them the same thing that everyone else is telling them, that anyone would tell them, your words are of common value, they are meaningless, not meaningful.

that is a waste for yourself and them of time, breath, energy, life. You have the considerations that you can neither solve their problems, nor will giving them life advice help. Any other option at this point is going to have greater impact and value than all that has been eliminated through the process of elimination here.

Any option you could think of from here, including doing nothing, would probably have a greater impact than the common options you have ruled out.

Most of those common options are actually playing into their pattern of addiction, they are actually part of that story of addiction.

If they were not part of the pattern, they would cause a change to the pattern. They are a part of a pattern.

Consider how a bad day comes. What is a bad day? What causes you to determine and admit, it's a bad day. Even mediocre days, we try to be positive, we try to call it a good day.

But some days, you feel like you don't have the energy to fight to make it a good day. You swing into the other direction. The forces in your world, your feelings, events, perceptions, thoughts, they push you in that direction. There is a point in which frustration causes a break.

This is like the pattern of an addict.

Most addicts, even mentors and psychologists, don't know what causes a relapse. Even the big book of AA admits people don't know what causes a relapse.

They don't know because everyone makes excuses and creates stories for why things happen. The reality is that a person becomes overwhelmed by their personal problems and suffering and attempts to apply a solution to the overwhelm.

This creates a behavior which becomes a pattern. That is all.

The rest of it is the mind bonding and increasing its connections with that which it has chosen, creating more chains and associations to that addiction. The more association to the addiction, from groups to identity to feelings to places, anything, the more firmly held the pattern.

Have you ever seen a person go crazy, and all of the negative content in their mind spills out of them? All the sudden, the person releases hate speech and vulgar you have never heard before. This is similar to cooking in a pot. What can happen is there can be a switch. First your body is healthy, fighting off a cold. The cold is in you but you are not sick. Then there is a moment when your immune system breaks, there is a change and the fighting turns to falling.

There are too many choices, It is too difficult to be a person. A person has expectations, and expectations cannot be met. A person desires to do things and cannot seem to do what they desire to do. A person feels they are not living the life that is best for them, A person feels that they are not living and expressing who they really are. They want to escape the feeling of who they are not, They want to escape loneliness and emptiness and the constant pressure of what looms behind the corner. They make up all sorts of reasons why they choose to attempt to escape, and all kinds of stories.

Often times the honest case is that there is a feeling and story they have been holding back, holding out of conscious attention for so long, A story like "I'm not good enough", and eventually they don't have the energy to hold it back,

and when they lose the energy to hold it back and it confronts them, they choose any option out of it, addictions included.

Ammunition as a metaphor is what you use to support your choices. The troops you send in to sway the tide of battle. There are different kinds of ammunition, but there are certain kinds that are highly effective in reinforcing the behavior of addiction. One already mentioned is the escape from psychological pressure and expectations from society. One of these pressuring expectations can include not using drugs. One of these pressuring expectations can be not repeating the addiction.

The more powerful in the moment ammunition really takes the form of emotions such as self-hate, self-loathing, self-disgust, self-rebuke, self-shame, self-guilt, these are the best emotions to reinforce the addiction pattern. Once these emotions are added as ammunition during the overwhelming state, the addict can use this as the rationalization to give up and fall into the established pattern.

The first way out of the pattern for that person will be the dissolution of those emotions and their reaction towards themselves in the midst of this situation and moment.

This is something only they are capable of doing. There is a way that you can show a person this possibility.

You can recognize what to do yourself if you look at this data;

An addict relapses and is shamed, An addict "recovers" and receives praise. “Good job! Good job!”

Both the shame and praise reinforce the pattern. There is actually a reason to relapse following the potential attention to be gained following it, Attention into the story of one's personal suffering.

"They must have really been in pain to be going so strong and relapse! Wow they must be so strong for being sober after relapsing!"

To be the exact same level of faith and trust in them as you would if they were on top of the world, as if they are perfectly on course,

As if they are still okay even though their pattern has been repeated, This doesn't change how you look at them or treat them.

You have no positive or negative judgement to them, Not that you are uncaring to them, Because you are still showing them the same level of trust and support that you gave to them before. You neither withhold nor give extra.

A benefit to you is you will win the person's heart. Going beyond that, you have given them the opportunity to recognize themselves in the midst of that moment, that they do not actually have to react with the condemnation that others have given to them. That is not the perspective they have to look through, They don't actually have to look at themselves through the eyes of condemnation. They can look at themselves and give grace to themselves.

This disrupts their pattern. This is not unlike injecting mindfulness into an old pattern and watching it dissolve.

The reason you would consider this option is after the initial considerations. They have already repeated this pattern 10,000 times. People have already given them reactions 10,000 times. If you give them the expected reaction that everyone else gives them, if you critique them or give them unsolicited advice or condemn them or anything else others are doing, your actions are meaningless. They are meaningless because the next person will tell them the same thing, just recycled noise.

This is one of the best options available to cause a shift that will cause a longer term change, a different outcome in the pattern which you may never see.

Perhaps the person will come back to you one day and thank you. Perhaps not. But you will likely not see immediate changes, because patterns change slowly, their outcomes change gradually over time.

We feel prompted to tell others what they should do because we want to make immediate changes, we want to affect the person in the now, but such action can be regarded as a kind of selfishness.

Taking the action of this kind of influence may be action that you do not get to see the future results of,

but if you come to understand why you take the action, you will also understand how you influence results.

There is also gain in that you took positive action alone, the action was inherently fulfilling.

Inherently fulfilling actions tend to have favorable outcomes.