Two Sides of The Equation

As your goal is permanent abstinence, you need to implement enough durable change and improvement in your skills to give you a sufficient margin of safety to continuously increase your control and decrease your craving.

There are two basic ways to increase your control:

1. Reproduce craving stimulus situations and practice managing them
2. Improve your rational thinking to reduce and combat your permission to use thoughts

Reproduce Craving Situations and Practice: Take Ten Minutes

You need to identify conditions that are a stimulus to craving and rehearse control behaviors, over and over while you are drug or alcohol rehab.

Imagine a situation in which you are offered crack cocaine or alcohol or the drugs you were addicted to and write it down.

Now imagine ways to refuse the offer and write them down.

Turn to a friend next to you, share the situation, have them offer you the drug, you now turn it down.(Pg. 35-36, “Cognitive Therapy of Substance Abuse,” Aaron T. Beck, Fred D. Wright, Cory F. Newman, Bruce S. Liese, The Guilford Press, New York, 1993.)

Practice this while in a rehab and even after you leave rehab.

Reproduce Craving Situations and Practice, Practice, Practice

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 3:50 am and is filed under Drug Addiction, Drug Rehab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.