A Self Directed Program for Addiction Recovery – Part 4

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This is the final part in a series that provides a template for people who wish to build their own addiction recovery program. You will find the earlier posts in this series here:

A Self Directed Program for Addiction Recovery – Part 1



A Self Directed Program for Addiction Recovery – Part 2

A Self Directed Program for Addiction Recovery – Part 3

How to Use Your Self Directed Program for Addiction Recovery

We have been using an analogy of a life-raft to describe this self-directed recovery program, and in order to make this to work you will need to treat it with this level of seriousness. There is not going be much benefit in creating your own blueprint for recovery, and then filing it away in a drawer somewhere. This program is useless until you actually use it as a basis for creating your new life. Here are a few suggestions for how you can do that:

- You need to have a copy of your program that you take with you wherever you go. You can write everything down in a notebook or create a document on a mobile device such as an iPad.

- Look over this document at least a couple of times a day – preferably first thing in the morning and last thing at night. During the first few weeks of your recovery, you will probably be looking at your program multiple times during the day.

- If there is a part of your program that is not working, you should remove this. If necessary, replace what you have removed with something better.

- Keep chipping away at unnecessary words in your document and clarify

- If you are faced with an unexpected challenge, you will need to create a new strategy for dealing with this.

The Benefits of Repetition

Anyone who has ever attended an AA meeting will soon get used to hearing the same things being said over and over again. This will not only include slogans but also readings from the approved literature. I haven’t been near one of these meetings in fifteen years, but I can still recite whole sections from the Big Book. This repetition did cause me to really absorb the program at the time. AA members sometimes referred to it as a positive type of brainwashing—that sounds about right.

I think that we can adapt this tool of repetition to help us fully absorb our own program. Just writing the information down is unlikely to be enough, we need to train our mind so that it automatically hits upon the right answers – so if we are faced with a challenging situation, we will right away implement one of our strategies for dealing with it. We can enjoy this form of self-brainwashing by frequently thinking about our program throughout the day and repeatedly reading what we’ve written about it. It might even be helpful to reach a stage where we can recite the whole program off by heart.

How to Develop the Motivation to Quit

As we’ve already said, you will need a strong motivation to break away from addiction. By now you will have hopefully begun thinking hard about what this motivation will be. Once you have decided upon this, you then need to charge your motive up – in other words, you need to give it some power. The way you do this is by thinking about your motive as much as possible, and you can deliberately make yourself feel excited about it – imagine how great it is going to be to achieve your goal and how much better your life will be as a result. Keep focusing your attention on this motive until you feel charged-up enough to quit, and then continue to focus on it to power you through the early days of your new life.

A Program for Living

This self-directed program for recovery is just the start. Once you become settled into your new life, you will want to keep things moving in a positive direction. A great way to do this is to create your own program for living. This will be the blueprint that will guide you through the rest of your life. The days of being an addict will be behind you, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from having an organised approach to living. This is a program that you can spend the rest of your life modifying, so that you end up with something that eradicates all fear and allows you to deal with anything that comes your way.

Final Words for Now

I’ve tried to spell out this program as best I can here, but this is still very much a work in progress. I know that this approach works (at least for me), and I want to provide the clearest possible description. I will be providing more details about the program in future posts, and I also intend to create a longer document that fully outlines this approach (possibly an eBook if I can find he time). If there is anything that is unclear, please leave a comment. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. If you have any criticisms, please leave a comment.