Patterned Investments of Attention

13 October 2021

Last week we learned about window washing.  Internal window washing.  The kind you do by taking things for granted, not the bucket & sponge version, because these windows are invisible and located just behind your eyes affecting how and what you see.  Today we revisit John, who is still trying to kick his cocaine habit.

On another morning after, John has a sick feeling inside that if he keeps doing this, he will not last much longer.  He sits alone on an expensive lounge chair facing his unmaintained swimming pool while the sun bakes the sweat into the clothes he’s been wearing for the last three days. 

The women he lured in with money, drugs, and the promise of a great party eventually wake up, take one look at John, and quickly check out.  A few of his party-animal buddies try to hang in a little longer knowing John always has something to get them high.  But before too long, John is alone in the backyard of his big house where he hates all his neighbours because all they do is complain about his partying.  John needs to do something, and he is not a stupid man.  John calls his doctor’s office and tells the nurse what’s going on.  She gets him in that afternoon.

The doctor wants to see John regain his life, so he pulls some strings to get John into a rehab in a nearby city.  John spends a very difficult and frustrating month in that rehab.  You see, John’s money and privilege has convinced him that he’s smarter than most people.  The truth he’s having his nose pushed into, at rehab, is that it was all John’s cleverness that got him here.  Now he is being told he’s not so smart and needs to change the way he sees the world and thinks about it. This is hard for John to believe.  But the evidence is also plain to see.  John needs to change.

…abilities do not become effective unless developed through appropriate, socially constructed activities—i.e., through patterned, voluntary investments of attention that result in learned skills (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p. 170).

What John is hearing is that he needs to rebuild his social circle, his habits, and his thinking.  He finds this very frustrating because they’re basically telling him to change himself and his whole life.  “How can that be right, if I’m such a smart guy?” he wonders.  Here are the hard facts John’s facing:

1. John needs to change the way he relates to himself, others, and the world.  He needs to shed his attitude and accept life as it comes, realizing that most of what is happening outside of his own hula-hoop isn’t his to control.  Let it be.  These are the socially constructed activities cited above (in the quote).  They do not happen in a month.  Or a year.
2. Patterns are repeated templates of behaviour.  They are also your best friend.  They can be dull, boring, and a helluvalot of work, but, at the end of the day, you are always glad you ate clean, worked out, and read something that stretched your mind.  Recovery (the word itself implies success) means you have learned and integrated healthy psychic, social, fitness, and professional patterns into your radically renovated life.
3. As anyone who has been part of the recovery community knows, only those who really want it get clean.  It is a major work project but it’s also voluntary, again per the quote above.  If you do not volunteer to do the work, it just does not happen.
4. As we think of John, we can hear the poor soul crying alone, wondering, How the hell do I do all this?  The formula is simple, the work is hard: invest your attention carefully, wisely, and without impulsive changes.  Plan healthy routines the day before, not in the moment.  Especially for the first year of sobriety, routines are your best friends. Those patterned templates of behaviour are built, and adhered to, through the scrupulous investment of attention.  Your attention—paid to the life you want to live.
5. Csikszentmihalyi’s quote ends with learned skills.  That learning is lifelong and maybe one of the hardest part is acceptance.  Accepting that this is as good as it gets when you’ve had a hard day.  Acceptance of the joy of love, achievement, and friendship knowing this too passes.  Acceptance of the truth that being part of the flow of daily life with near full human functionality is the rarest of privileges, and one (only) John has the power to grant himself.

People who lead a satisfying life, who are in tune with their past and with their future—in short, people whom we would call ‘happy’—are generally individuals who have lived their lives according to rules they themselves created. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p. 82).

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.