How can addicts become motivated to change?
Propelling yourself, motivating yourself, is not an easy thing to do. Let’s start talking about motivating ourselves to change by acknowledging something called ambivalence. Okay, you have an addiction, or you’ve decided you think you have an addiction, and you know it’s not good for you, you know you’re spending too much money or spending too much time with pornography, even though you know all that. I’ve never met anyone with a behavioral addiction who is truly behind changing. I mean, the truth is we’re all ambivalent. We like it in some respects, and we don’t like it in some other respects. So part of the difficulty with getting motivated is accepting that ambivalence we have about the activity. It’s fun to look at pornography or it’s fun to gamble, and you’re going to deprive yourself of those fun things? You’re going to take that lollipop and purposely give it away? So motivation is very hard to generate within yourself. But the place I would encourage people to start is accepting their ambivalence. Ideally they would make a chart with a four by four square, and put the pros of stopping their addiction, the cons of stopping the addiction, the pros of not stopping the addiction, the cons of not stopping the addiction, and get some sort of reading on all the language you use to stay on the fence about this sort of topic. Beyond that, motivating yourself is leveraging yourself where it’s not comfortable. You’ve got to be somewhat off the edge, you’ve got to be willing to do something, but let’s say you went and told a lot of people about your behavioral addiction and asked, maybe not for their help, but let them know that you’re struggling with it. Well, you’re locking yourself in there. You’re closing the back door on your behavior, at least with these people. That’s a way you can motivate yourself. Other ways of motivating yourself include stopping for a while and seeing if there are any benefits, such as increased energy or optimism, self-esteem rises, things like that, and trying to capitalize on the outcome of that.
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