Craftsmanship as a Life Skill II

5 August 2023

If we examine the tools, used in SMART Recovery, to guide a person from addiction to recovery, we have a starting point for growth.  It’s not perfect, but few things are.  Let’s begin with what’s read aloud during the introduction to every meeting: the four-point program.

1. Building and maintaining motivation
2. Coping with urges
3. Managing thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
4. Living a balanced life.

If you look at the table of contents, of the SMART Handbook, you see that there’s an important preliminary step that happens before working on motivation: understand the problem.  SMART Recovery starts by looking at the consequences of immediate gratification, labelling, and the stages within recovery.

The probable reason SMART began their manual (Hardin, 2013), with the problem of immediate gratification, is that this behaviour is the opposite of a crafted life.  If you gratify every urge without restraint...ultimately, you end up in a hospital in need of physiological and psychological therapy.  So what about gratifying some urges with restraint?  Determining which urges are healthy versus harmful is a starting point.  How that restraint is married to those urges is the essence of craftsmanship. Think about the urges a person has in a single day: violence, anger, lust, greed, escape, avoidance, and denial—to begin. 

Much of psychology in the last 75 years tells us that, when carefully examined, these urges are often based on mistaken understandings.  The classic example is the rude driver on the highway who cuts in front of you, at high speed, like she owns the road.  Cutting in is the A, or activating event.  Your shout and braking is the C, or consequence.  B is your set of beliefs about that driver’s motivation. 

Most of us assume that driver is entitled, inconsiderate, and stuuuuupid...but that soon changes if we learn that she just had a call from the emergency ward after being told her son had been brought in by ambulance…  Can you imagine other instances of impulses toward violence, anger, lust, greed, escape, avoidance, or denial where your own beliefs may be holding you back—or promising much more than exists?  Of course you can because this battle never ends—but the intensity of that battle can be significantly subdued. 

At the base of our beliefs (B in the ABCs of REBT, above) is our own contribution to each scenario we encounter in life.  Automatically, we make assumptions about each person, place, and thing we come across.  Both Stoics and Buddhists caution that most assumptions are illusory.  This has helped me.  When I see something I immediately want (a convertible E-Type Jag on a sunny summer evening, as illustrated above) I tell myself—and this has taken years—that that gorgeous car is an illusion.  Not that it is in any way unreal but that I have added or omitted bucket-loads of vital information about that car.  For example, let’s say I could buy one for $100,000.  Do I possess that kind of money?  Do I want to borrow that much money?  At what rate of interest?  Do I want that much money tied up in a car I would drive only occasionally?  Where do I store that car on the other 8,700 hours of the year that I’m not driving it?  Who services those cars?  Where do you buy premium gasoline?  You get the picture.  Everything comes with conditions,  requirements, and costs.  When we act unthinkingly, in the face of the problem of immediate gratification (PIG), we dismiss, deny, or avoid all of that in favour of one beautiful moment than can possibly ruin years of your life.  That’s the long answer to why SMART starts with the PIG.

So how does SMART recommend moving past these impulsive urges?  Interestingly, two factors arose in the example above: priorities and values.  And when we drill down, into point one of the four-point program, Building and maintaining motivation, we find values, the three questions, the change-plan worksheet, and a cost-benefit analysis with long- and short-term benefits and costs (all available at https://www.smartrecovery.org/smart-recovery-toolbox/).  Per SMART’s categorization, these four tools return your awareness to what you find important and how much you’ll pay to get what’s important.

For example, if you start attending SMART meetings with the goal of harm reduction your goal is to keep using at a controlled level.  You are still willing to pay the health, social, and self-esteem costs of using—but at a hopefully reduced rate.  If you’re willing to enter a detox, work with a team of professionals, and start living clean, you’re no longer willing to pay the price of decreased health, social, and self-esteem costs.  And make no mistake, I know people in this community who have lost their equity, homes, marriages, and careers before quitting becomes one of two games in town, the other being final hospitalization. 

The quickest way to distill and convey this message is with the three questions:

1. What do I want for my future?  While this question doesn’t take you directly to your values, what you want makes the inference of values a piece of cake.  For example, if you want to get clean, you value health, relationships, career, and order.  If you want to get the hell out of this meeting so you can get high, you value more avoidance.
2. What am I currently doing to achieve that (future I want)?  I’m taking action by talking to my doctor, therapists, rehabilitation centres et cetera versus calling my dealer.
3. How do I feel about what I’m currently doing?   And this is where it gets sad.  The first person feels terrified, encouraged, unsure, and wobbly but has a weak sense she’s moving in the right direction.  The second person feels awful about himself, his values, his relationships, and his face every time he dares look into a mirror—which isn’t often. 

So what’s the takeaway?  Values.  If you can list your own genuine values, in order, craftsmanship in the directive actions of your own life becomes possible.  The degree of success, like most things, is in your hands.  Next week we’ll continue with the four-point program.

Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding 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

Hardin, R. (Ed.). (2013). SMART Recovery handbook: Tools and strategies to help you on your recovery journey. Third Edition, Alcohol & Drug Abuse Self-Help Network.