Ditch Addictions

My career experience with addiction spans three decades and culminated with my appointment as a Senior Nurse consulting at The Sanctuary in Byron Bay. At the time, this was the most exclusive and expensive addiction treatment clinic in the world, whose clientele included Hollywood stars, royalty and billionaires. Whilst this clinic reported high success rates with getting people off their addiction, they lacked a coaching program to support preventing people from relapsing.

Prior to my appointment at The Sanctuary, I’d been a member of the Prison Addiction Services team and worked at several prisons throughout Australia. I have experience working with addiction in residential detox units, mental health wards and emergency departments, as well as in my private coaching practice. In addition to this, I successfully overcame my own addictions and have extensive experience in the psychedelic space.

Whilst I don’t have a particularly addictive personality, I have struggled with and beaten compulsions with alcohol, coffee and pornography. I consider myself somewhat of an expert in the field of addiction treatment and have adopted an unconventional approach to resolving destructive patterns.

There are many schools of thought as to what constitutes addiction and its treatment, and they all have their place for different people. I’m not an advocate for the “disease” model of addiction, as it is, in my opinion, misleading and deterministic. I take more of a behaviourists approach to treating addiction, which is in effect, not much more than just saying no to the addictive behaviour. I hate to say it, but it seems Nancy Raegan was correct all this time. Allow me to explain, as I know this sounds too simplistic.

If we look at any addiction through a historic and chronological lens, we can see that it always starts as a single behaviour or action. For example, smoking one cigarette. When this action is repeated often enough, the behaviour becomes a habit. Keep repeating the habit and it becomes an obsession or compulsion. From this point it starts to cause real problems and becomes an addiction, then finally the behaviour is labelled a disease.

This cascade of events is predictable when we examine it from a perspective of personal responsibility. You see with each incremental step, the individual is relinquishing more and more personal responsibility for their actions until finally all responsibility is excused due to the “disease” nature of the condition. The real culprit here is the shadow characteristic of self-sabotage which seeks to abdicate personal responsibility at every opportunity and plunge a person into self-destructive patterns and victimhood. Every step of sacrificed responsibility only serves to further disempower the individual’s resolve. 

Responsibility and power are psychologically entwined in so much as that when you give up more responsibility you also give away more of your personal power. My success with helping people overcome their addictions is based on this first principle. This simplifies my treatment approach to merely coaching the person how to say “no” to certain behaviours. Sound too simple to be true? It’s simple, but not always easy, because many people with addictive traits are not very coachable. That is, they are averse to being given instruction or told what to do.

It’s one thing to tell a person to just say no, like Nancy Reagan did, but it’s another thing altogether to teach a person how to say no. Saying no is a skill and, like all skills, can be taught. Many people struggle with the word “no”. They either have difficulty hearing it, or they have difficulty saying it. Or both. The affliction here that needs to be addressed from a coaching perspective is that the person involved has a poorly functioning relationship with their word. That is, they often say they are going to do something but then fail to deliver on their commitment. This habit of regularly betraying your word will only serve to unconsciously erode your faith and trust in yourself. When this happens, “no” no longer means no. You have effectively lost the power of your word. Or given it up, to be more accurate.

When working with clients with addiction issues, the first step is to coach them on improving their relationship with keeping their word. We exercise this “muscle” until the client only has to say the word and it will be so. Only then are they ready to say no to the addictive behaviour and mean it. This approach has over time, revealed to be simple to execute, easy to teach, well adopted and highly successful with motivated clientele.

Are you ready to get to work and ditch those addictions?

For more on the power of saying no, see my earlier blog, “The power of no”.