10 August 2022
If you are a person attending recovery meetings, you’re in the business of change. As a facilitator of such meetings, and a training psychotherapist, I’m also in the business of change. How, why, and when people change is still not well understood. We’ve made more progress with this phenomenon, in the last hundred years, than probably at any time since philosophy emerged from ancient Greece and Rome.
One of the most helpful sets of ideas emerged in the last third of the 20th-C, the stages of change model, also known as the transtheoretical model (TTM). As most people in recovery know, the stages of change allow for lapses and relapses as change is almost never a one-way journey. That journey tends to be cyclical in that troubling issues return until they are well understood and worked through, allowing growth to occur. (If you want a refresher How we Change I is here, with diagrams: https://understandings.ca/2021/09/01/how-we-change/
But there are also hacks (or strategies) being revealed as research continues. Some of these were discussed by Elizabeth Weingarten (2021) in her telephone interview with Dr. Katy Milkman, who has recently published How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. The main idea seems to be that different people require different approaches to change. As Weingarten shrewdly emphasized, when it comes to changing human lives, one size does not fit all.
Examples of internal obstacles include a weakness for instant gratification, laziness, forgetfulness, and procrastination. Change hacks discussed by Milkman include upping the cost of non-commitment, “copying-and-pasting” another person’s strategy, or making a game of it. I’ll speak to the last one, as I have experienced it and seen it in SMART Recovery meetings. Inadvertently, I was using one of Dr. Milkman’s techniques as I combined a “fresh-start” with a self-friendly challenge.
Without any conscious preparation (though I had tried to quit cigarette smoking two or three times) I awoke one morning in September of 1984 and said to myself, I’m going to try not smoking a single cigarette, just for today. That day was the one on which I also began training in jiu-jitsu—a fresh start. I saw the gamification aspect as the one-day-at-a-time challenge. When I did it for the first day, I thought I’d try another day. The first 21 days were a bitch but then the withdrawal symptoms lessened, and I haven’t had a drag since, though there are rare times when the smell of cigarette smoke is still appealing. To complete the argument, I believe part of the reason this “gaming” approach worked is that my first abstinent night I was required to go on a decent run with the group of martial artists. I still remember the effort that took. And the pain. Knowing that quitting smoking would decrease that effort and pain was a significant incentive.
Milkman’s (2021) point is that the first day of a new year, your birthday, first day of a new semester...are all times we can combine techniques to help the change to stick.
A few years ago, the same thing happened in an addictive behaviours group. A newcomer, who had only attended a few meetings, went home and tried the same thing: I won’t have a drink today. It worked. And it worked the next day and the next and I believe she’s now approaching three years of sobriety, and well into recovery. But she has some basic faith in her own competence or what Bandura defines as self-efficacy: “...beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments” (1997, p. 3).
Self-efficacy, or a belief in your own competence to sweat through and integrate that change, was also noted by Milkman (2021). That internal readiness is consistent with the stages of change, described above. If we’ve moved from precontemplation, into and through contemplation and into somewhere between preparation and action, belief in possibility is increasing. And this is where self-honesty, and honesty with others, is critical: If, in our own hearts, we’re not ready to change, all efforts toward change are counter productive.
To go through the motions, for the sake of your spouse or your parents, wastes your time and leaves a bitter taste in your mouth about the nature of change, a process that is probably one of the most thrilling and essential components of human growth. My experience is that people with addictive behaviours know when they’re ready. It’s an internal message that the 12-steppers have characterized memorably: they’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. So they make something happen.
Milkman referred (indirectly) to faith in at least two instances. The first, above, was self-efficacy: our own belief in self. The second was through positive connection. Speaking of a professor famous for having an uninterrupted line of successful graduate students, Milkman asked him how he did it. He claimed he was working with students of such excellence that he did nothing. Cleverly, Milkman saw his answer in two lights. The first light was as the professor claimed. The second, inferred my Milkman, was that the professor’s confidence and faith in his students spilled over into the culture of the students’ relationship with the prof. His good faith in them helped keep them positive, productive, and successful. This same positivity can happen in recovery from addiction.
Finally, in describing areas of needed research, Milkman talked about resilience or the ability to re-enter the struggle after failure. Angela Duckworth (2016) has done some work on this with the most memorable summation being an expression she borrowed from Japanese culture: fall seven, rise eight. The point is that the number of failures is less important than the number of recoveries. This is all part of how, as humans being, we change our lives.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman and Company.
Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. Scribner.
Milkman, K. (2021). How to change: The science of getting from where you are to where you want to be. Portfolio/Penguin.
Weingarten, E. (2021, May 17). Speaking with Katy Milkman about “How to Change.” Behavioral Scientist.
Comments