Do you struggle to stop smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling, pornography, or sexual addiction?
All addictive behaviors serve the same function—to interrupt an inner experience that we don’t know how to handle well—such as feeling lonely, lost, overwhelmed, confused, inferior, hurt or scared. There are other ways to help manage addictions but the only complete and permanent solution is to learn that new skill of confidently and successfully being with that inward intensity instead of interrupting it.
Everyone’s natural first impulse (the “natural man”) is to escape or shut off experiences that seem to be too intense to handle. “Intense” is not what we think at the time—”painful” or “scary” is what we think—and immediately interrupt the feeling if we can. Anything that can achieve this interruption can become addictive.
Of course we focus on the problem behavior and how to stop it. But we don’t succeed until we learn to start the new behavior, what we must do instead. This requires coaching, to guide and support us in doing what we could not think of on our own and which may be scary.
