You Need To Change Your Behavior To Change Your Thinking

Why you can't think your way out of addiction.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Time again for Doc Jacques, Your Addiction Lifeguard Podcast. I am Dr. Jacques Debruckert, a psychologist, licensed professional counselor, and addiction specialist. If you are suffering from addiction, misery, trauma, whatever it is, I'm here to help. If you're in search of help to try to get your life back together, join me here at Doc Jacques, Your Addiction Lifeguard, The Addiction Recovery Podcast. to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for it is intended for entertainment and informational purposes but not considered help if you actually need real help and you're in need of help please seek that out if you're in dire need of help you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them but don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help it's not it's just a podcast. It's for entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light. All right. Have a good time. Learn something and then get the real help that you need from a professional. Part of the reality of recovery is the understanding that you have to change. And as I've talked about in past podcasts, change is really what Recovery is, right? I mean, you're changing your behavior. You're changing your attitude. You're changing your actions, your words. Maybe you're changing other things like the old saying in recovery is there's only one thing you have to change to get clean and sober. everything. And so somehow you have to be able to embrace these changes, um, and accept them, do them. And you're not really motivated at first. I mean, everybody in the early stages of, of an attempt at recovery, it's, it's a fire drill. It's, it is a fire drill. Like you get this message, you know, God talks to you or your friend talks to you or your spouse talks to you or something. You have this, uh, uh, this moment of clarity and, uh, it's like, Oh, I got this. I got to do this right now. You know, and it's like this complete fire drill of just running or it's like a Chinese fire drill. You used to run around the car as a kid. You know, everybody would stop at the light and everybody would jump out of the car and start running around the car and then get back in the car. We thought it was really funny. But that's analogous to what you're doing in recovery is you're literally just running around in the street around. just in a crazed panic and everything's wrong and you got to fix everything and and then that's where the pink cloud syndrome kicks in because you did all that and uh it's not working but it should be and now you're now you're upset and so people will come in and out of that early stage of recovery repeatedly um They'll go through that multiple times before they actually settle in to getting into recovery because of that panic and the upset that they feel when they're going through that. And it's not working. So how do you stop it from being a fire drill? Well, some of it is multiple mistakes, multiple attempts, and then it results in you finally getting to that point where you're ready. Like you're ready, ready. not sort of ready pretend ready but you're ready ready and so you surrender and in the in this 12 steps you know we have like my life step one my life is unmanageable this is my life is a mess and then step two you know realized oh i can't do this by myself i have to have a higher power and then three turning yourself over to that higher power turning yourself over to god as you understand him to help bring you back to sanity and People, you know, if you're trying to get clean and sober, it's really hard because that first part of it is like, yeah, my life's unmanageable, man. I mean, that's an easy one to get to. Like, my life's unmanageable. I get that. But then to try to turn that and convert that into manageability, you know, somebody is asking you or you're asking yourself, you need to manage your recovery. when you when your life already self-confessed has become unmanageable and and so that first entrance into it you can get to that point of like no this is not manageable man i just lost my job because i showed up drunk for the fourth time and so now i can't i can't pay my bills i'm screwed so it's easy to identify unmanageable it's not so easy to identify a need for some higher power. So my life's unmanageable and I'm supposed to get clean and sober. So I'm gonna turn that authority and that responsibility over to another person or to God, and then I'm gonna be directed magically to follow those instructions when all I wanna do is wrestle control away from everything and everybody, because all I wanna do is get high or drunk. So the people will get caught in this endless loop Step one, step two, step three, I'm out. And then back to step one. So the concept of getting wrestling control of your sobriety and getting clean away from your life of addiction. And so somebody said, I can't think my way out of bad acting. but I can act my way out of bad thinking. Bad acting, bad thinking. So people who are acting out, they think they can figure this out. And that's where that endless loop happens in the first three steps is this endless, continuous recycling, cycling, recycling, cycling, recycling of the idea that I'm going to think my way through this and the rationalizations. I talked about in an earlier episode, I'm not sure which one, about the Goldilocks syndrome. This guy who was forever hanging around outside of a rehab and it just, you know, every once in a while somebody from the rehab center would come out and say, hey man, why don't you come on in? And he's like, oh, I can't. Today's not the day. And He'd always have some reason. It was like too cold. It was too hot. It was, you know, he had a job interview. He had this, he had that. It went on for like two weeks. And finally he's just standing out there smoking cigarettes and then disappearing and coming back the next day. Then when everything was just right, he finally showed up. And so, you know, his, his inability to settle down and to get to the place where he could finally just surrender his power and And to get away from that craziness of the fire drill mentality was difficult for him. So how can you think your way out of bad acting? You can't. I think I have it figured out. No, you don't. I know how to do this. No, you don't. I don't need help. Yes, you do. But you're acting badly. You're shooting up. You're drinking. You're drunk all the time. You're destroying everything around you. You're getting picked up by Johnny Law because you were driving drunk for the fourth time. So you can't think your way out of that. And so how do you translate that to a different thing? So you can act your way out of bad thinking. Acting... to get out of bad thinking. Here's an example. If you are in recovery or you're trying to get into recovery and you don't have a higher power that you are accountable to, how in the world are you going to ever change? Because there's no accountability. So you can act your way out of bad thinking. If I go to a meeting every day, And in the recovery world, we try to get people to do 90 meetings in 90 days in a row. And so your first entrance into recovery is exposure every day to the community, the recovery community, the people that are in that community. So every day you get into that community. So you're acting differently, right? You show up in a meeting and You're going to think differently. You're going to be different. So you're acting differently. That changes the way you feel and think about yourself. If you have to think about this, if you don't go to meetings and you're not in the recovery community, and I don't care what meeting you go to, just in the recovery community, if you don't go into those meetings every day, it's easy for you to completely dismiss and minimize the effect of the addiction on you. However, if you do show up at those meetings every day, you are spending an entire hour, 60 minutes out of the 24 hours, you're spending 60 minutes of that 24 hours contemplating the fact that you are an addict. That's why you're there. You're there because you're an addict. And that is exactly what you are experiencing is I am here because I am an addict. And if you spend 60 minutes, one hour, and in those 60 minutes, you have that expression, you have that feeling, you have that experience, you're in a room with people that are just like you. You can't, after this third meeting, the fourth meeting, the fifth meeting, the sixth meeting, after a while, it's gonna start sinking in. And the acting part of it is I acted differently I came in. I did the serenity prayer. I did the traditions. I sat and listened to the chair. If it's a big book meeting, they read from the book. If it was just a general meeting, a beginner meeting or something, the chair is going to talk. He or she is going to give some recitation of like... This is what addiction was to me. This is my experience. Setting the tone for the meeting. And you're sitting there listening. You may try to tune it out. You may sit there. No, I'm going to change that. You are absolutely going to sit there and just look around the room and say, I'm not like these people. They're not like me. That guy's way worse than me. Look, he's homeless. That, that woman over there, she has actually lost her job and now her husband has left her and she's staying with her sister because she, Oh, that guy's in the hospital two days ago. You know, he was in intensive care two days ago because his, all right. So you're going to sit there and do that. And you're going to think, I'm not one of these people. But after a while, how many times can you do that? If you acted differently and you went to that meeting every day, how many days do you think it would take before you realized and you started hearing the same exact story that you have from a number of people? And if you go to a different meeting each day, you don't go to the same place, same time, but you went to different meetings. How many times do you think it's going to be when you're sitting there with 10 or 20 or sometimes 30, 40 people that it's going to dawn on you, man, I am like these people. And I'm going to tell you something. For those of you who refuse to go to meetings, that is exactly what happens. You sit there in that room and you listen to those stories and you realize, oh, oh God, I am just like these people. And now you've acted differently and And so now your bad thinking is going to start changing. It's me against the world. They're all wrong. I hate you. You are destroying me because you don't like what I do and screw you. And it's going to all of a sudden you're going to start changing that thinking. And it's going to be a realization that, you know, it's not you against the world. And in this room, it's a safe place. And these people actually care. And they're just like me. They want to help me, and I'm refusing that help. Wow, what am I doing? I'm refusing the help? So the idea that somehow you are different than those people goes away. And that was changed only because you acted differently. You made time in the day to go to that meeting, whereas before you didn't. And I've had people come into my office who flatly refused to go to meetings for whatever reason. They had a variety of different reasons. But I know the real reason is they just didn't want to get clean and sober. But they just refused. And they did that for a long time. And then they realized after they thought they could think their way out of their bad acting and they couldn't do it, they started going to, they stumbled into a meeting. They were like, well, maybe there is something to this. I'm just going to go look and see. And they just would hold their nose and walk in and just sit there. And all of the fears that they had about, you know, kind of what they thought things were going to be or how, how the people were kind of melts away a little bit. And then they, you know, I asked them, well, how, Oh, you went to a meeting. Well, how, how was it? And I'm like, well, you know, I, I just, I felt out of place because I didn't understand what was going on. I said, so they did the serenity prayer and they did the traditions and all that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So who did you see there? And invariably they will tell me about the worst case scenario. That's usually the one they start with. The guy who comes in who's probably drunk or the woman who comes stumbling in who looks like she hasn't slept in four days. They'll tell me about that person. Then they'll tell me about the next worst person. And then they'll tell me about who led the meeting. And they'll tell me something that caught their attention about that person. It's almost like a script. When I ask them those questions, it's like I always hand them the script. Go ahead and read from the script, please. It's like a script. They tell you about the chair of the meeting. And the person had like, you know, 30 years of sobriety. And they talked about that and they talked about the, you know, their, their travels and their, their, uh, their rough road that they followed to get there. And, um, I mean, it's so funny. It's, it is literally like a script. They're reading from a script because it's every single time a person goes to their first meeting. This is what they do. And the experience of like, Hey, um, this was actually good. And, uh, I was like, okay, well, you're going to go back? Yeah, I might. There's never an absolute positive. It's just like, I might. And they realized, I think, based on their experience, and maybe perhaps a little bit because of our conversation together, that it was a positive. Because previous to that, they only had negative experiences in their mind about what meetings are. either what they saw on television or movies, which is wholly inaccurate, overly dramatized, and completely unrealistic every time I see one, or they felt like they weren't that bad, or that they didn't belong there, or that they were very, very insecure and self-conscious about public admission of usage. Recently, I've heard from a few people that have come in who are in the early stages of their recovery. The thing that they seem to get from it is an awareness of like the sisterhood and brotherhood of the community and the care. And that was one thing that really kind of threw them off was they thought they were going to be judged, criticized, assessed in a negative way. by the people in the meeting. And what they found was that they were very welcomed and it was appreciated that they showed up and they were encouraged to return. See, the people that are in those rooms, the recovery community is a group of people that have been in the exact same place that every other addict has been in. the early stages and so they know exactly what it feels like and so they know that that person has been trying to figure out a way to avoid the process of recovery just to pole vault right over all the process and go straight into recovery that's what people think and that's what they try to do and they can't do it and every single person in that room every single person in the recovery community has experienced that and knows what that's like because they've done it too and so if you can get the person to show up to a meeting. That's the acting change that gives you a way out of the bad thinking. The word we use in the recovery community is stinking thinking. And so it gets you out of the stinking thinking mode. And so if you will show up at the meetings, you're acting differently. And when you participate in the meeting, you speak differently. which usually takes a while for somebody to speak up, you're acting differently, right? So you're moving towards recovery at that point at a very high rate because you're acting differently. Previous to that, you kept thinking you got it figured out, you could handle it, you could get yourself down to recreational use like everybody else and I can just have one drink or I can just, you know, I'll just use on the weekends and it's not going to interfere and that never works. Come on, man. You know that it never works. So how do you, can you think your way out of bad acting? No, you're thinking is causing the bad acting period. That's it. So it is a little bit of the fake it till you make it. Because if you just show up, just, just your presence, like be with the community, be with the people that are like you. You know, the old adage that you have to be careful who you're with because the people that you're with is who you're going to become. And in a negative way, that can be a very negative influence. But in a positive way, that is the change. And so, like, I've seen people who were just like, man, really just going such a wrong direction in their life. And they show up at church and they just didn't even know why they were there. And they just came and they just showed up and they felt something different. And they looked around the church and they saw the people that were around them and they really wanted to have whatever it is those people had. They liked it and they wanted it. And so trying to figure out how do I get that? Well, keep showing up, right? Act differently. And that'll change the way that you think. So in recovery, it's very much the same way. I just recently saw an interview with Kat Von D, who is a tattoo artist in California. And she's quite a crazy woman, man. She's a very attractive woman, but she's all tatted up, and she's lived this alternative life forever. And she reported a pretty rough childhood. Not good. And Then she kind of fell into the world of alternate lifestyle and she got attracted to the world of tattooing and went and fell into that and then went from that into... uh, you know, a cult kind of stuff. And she, man, she was all in on that. Right. I mean, she's the full, like being a witch and practicing Ouija board stuff and her occult books and she, and she's a public figure. Right. So she's just espousing this stuff all the time. And, um, and, and she always kind of had this, this calling towards something different that she kept kind of ignoring. Right. So she's acting very badly and it's changing her thinking. Um, And then she suddenly just started realizing she wanted something different. And she was married, and then she got divorced, and then she got remarried. And it was affecting her marriage and this negativity stuff. And so she just all of a sudden started reading the Bible. And she recently gave away... All of her occult books, all the stuff that she had, she just got rid of everything. And she publicly is now, she's a Christian. And she's kind of like the ideal Christian convert. She's the one who was living the full life of, you know, as she describes it, demonic kind of life. And now she's a Christian and she's changed, man. I've been aware of her for a long time and she has completely changed. In the interview, it was really interesting. There's a lightness about her and she seems pleasant and happy and healed. And that's kind of what it is. It's like a healing. If you're an addict, man, you can heal. You can. You just can't think your way into that healing. You have to act your way into that healing. into that healing, showing up at meetings, get a sponsor, start working with that sponsor, start working the steps, you know, that's, that's a tough one, but, but do those things because this is what people do who get into, who get into recovery, long-term recovery. They go through that process. They change the way they're acting and the people that they're with and the things they're saying. Bruce Lee had a saying that he, he said, never talk negatively about your body. or about yourself. He said, if you talk negatively about yourself, it will start to affect you. And if you don't like your body, if you start talking negatively about yourself, your body, your parents, your performance, he believed that the body didn't know the difference between what you are saying and reality. And so you become... the thing that you're talking about and your body, your body retains it, which is an interesting concept. Um, your body becomes what you say you're, you, it is. And so I think the same thing is true about addiction. If you speak about things and they are negative and they're, they're not something that can be helpful to you, you will become that thing. I know I did. Um, but I was, you know, in the worst of my stinking thinking, um, It was negatively affecting me. It was really negatively affecting me. And I found that when I stopped with that internal voice of negativity and I actually started getting around people that were good, were positive, it started altering my life in very positive ways. Recovery is that. That's why we do it together. Another of the wise recovery statements, individuals don't get sober, groups do. You got to be part of the group. You got to be in the group because that's how you get there. It's truly how you get there. And so can you do it on your own? Yeah, but I haven't seen it. You know, people come in to see me, but they don't go to meetings. They don't do anything else. Well, they're seeing me. So they're not doing it by themselves. They came to me for guidance instruction. They may reject what I say, but they still come in to see me. Well, that's two people, right? We're walking side by side facing the enemy, not each other and family. I see families doing it too all the time and they, they will start to, uh, work together. And that's, that's what you really got to do is get that piece of, uh, Working together. So I can't think my way out of bad acting, but I can act my way out of bad thinking. That's a good saying, man. I think that's some wise words to think about. Oh my gosh, that was a quick episode. Wow. So if you are in need of recovery and you are struggling, please do yourself a favor and get out there and get into recovery. Go to a rehab. Go find a counselor. Do something. But in a group, right? Change your acting so you can change your thinking. And if you do need help, you want to reach out to me, you can through my website, WellspringMindBody.com I am Dr. Jock DeBruyckert, your addiction lifeguard, here to help you on the beach of despair, trying to help pull you from the water of destruction. So, if you've enjoyed this episode, I appreciate it. And until then, next one, this is Dr. Jock saying, see ya.