Self Sabotage

Lovely J - reader, e-mail friend, and fellow breast cancer survivor, sent me this fabulous article by Martha Beck on self sabotage (click here).

Martha's thinking is based on the famous 'rat park' experiment.

(Johann Hari's TEDD talk on addiction was inspired by the same game changing rodents. If you haven't seen it yet, go to my post: Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong).

Rat park was an experiment designed by a Canadian called Bruce Alexander.

He looked at the myriad of studies into heroin and opiate addiction, where rats, given the opportunity, would drug themselves into oblivion.

Eventually they'd ignore all the food and water until, pretty quickly, they died. Game over. Ex rats.

Alexander noticed something significant: in all these experiments the rats were on their own in small, featureless cages.

So, Alexander designed Rat Park, a rat nirvana. He put lots of rats in it with loads of fun stuff to do, and gave them a choice of water or morphine.

Most of them chose the water.

(I suspect that if I'd been in that cage, however much fun I was having, I still would have wanted to party with the morphine from time to time. I would have been rebel rat).

Reading about this experiment was Martha Beck's lightbulb moment. She says:

The Rat Park studies profoundly influenced my view of what many people call self-sabotage. I believe that most of us live in cages of our own creation.

Ignoring our actual desires, we try to do what we think is right (or good or healthy or admirable—pick your poison). Sometimes this arrangement works. Sometimes it doesn't.  

Martha reckons that we fall back on our bad habits (drinking, smoking, overeating, shopping, whatever) when our conscious self is fighting against our inner desires.

In effect, we're sticking our rat-self in a cage and not letting it near the rat park. All this does is make our inner rat rebel and dive for our bad habit of choice, as a sort of ratty f**k you.

So, for us, the greater the divergence of our actual lives from our perfect rat park, the more likely we are to reach for the booze.

I get this. I also think it becomes a vicious circle, because the more we drink, the less likely we are to create a stimulating and varied rat park. Over time, our cage becomes increasingly dull and empty.

Instead of doing anything constructive about the situation, we shrug our shoulders, feel a bit sorry for ourselves and pour another drink, just like the self destructing rats with the morphine water in the original experiments.

So, how does Martha suggest we break the cycle of self sabotage? How do we get out of the cage and into the park?

She says the key is to make yourself aware of your inherent desires, and when you're disallowing them.

So, sit down with a pen and paper, and write down all the things you're planning to do tomorrow, big and small.

Then, think about drinking, and what triggers the addict voice in your head.

Read through the list carefully, think about performing each activity, and how much it makes you want to self sabotage.

If it doesn't make you want to drink at all, give it a zero. If it immediately makes you want to dash to the nearest wine shop and drown in booze, give it a ten.

This exercise will reveal some scary, and helpful, truths.

You may find, for example, that your evening bubble bath and your yoga class are zeros, but calling your ex-husband, and meeting your friend Chloe, are tens.

Martha suggest that you take each self-sabotaging item on the list and think:

1. In a perfect life, would I do this thing at all?

2. If so, what would I change to make it more enjoyable?

3. If not, what would I rather do?   

Let your imagination run wild. Dream. Be adventurous. Create your perfect Rat Park in your mind.

Then keep that amazing place in view, and make as many tiny changes as you can over time to get yourself closer to it.

Do more of the zeros, and jettison the tens, or adapt them to make them more manageable.

Because, as Martha says, If you cease to betray yourself, the self-sabotage in your life simply stops.

Simples?

Happy, sober Sunday to you all,

SM x

Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong

That's the title of the most fascinating TEDD talk by Johann Hari (here's a link)

Hari is a journalist who, having experienced the fall out from addiction first hand, spent three years researching it, coming to some extraordinary conclusions.

Hari says that a lot of what we believe about addiction comes from early studies on rats. Typically, a rat would be put in a cage with two bottles - one filled with pure water, and one laced with heroin or cocaine.  Within a short space of time the rat gives up bothering with food, or anything except the drug, and kills itself. In one hundred percent of cases.

Then, in the 1970s, a Canadian psychology professor called Alexander makes a crucial change to the experiment. Instead of putting the rat in an empty cage, he creates what he calls 'Rat Park'. Rat Park is rat nirvana. It's filled with rat buddies, rat games, lots of food and sex on tap. And in rat park almost nobody dies. The rats usually ignore the drug water, or - if they do use it - they use it sparingly. They moderate!

Hari points out that a similar 'experiment' was done on humans, in that during the Vietnam War 20% of American troops became dependant on heroin (and who can blame them? They were in a horrid cage). But when they got back home, to friends and family, ninety-five percent of them stopped using. Without too much trouble.

Another professor, called Peter Cohen, in the Netherlands believes that addiction should be called 'bonding.' As a species, he argues, we have a primal need to bond. To make connections with other people. If, for some reason, you can't do that, you will bond with something else that gives you relief - like drink, drugs, gambling or shopping.

This theory has huge implications, argues Hari. Instead of punishing drug addicts with prison (a cage), social stigma and isolation, we should be working on improving their cage, making their lives better and more fulfilled.

This is, in effect, what has happened in Portugal where drugs were totally decriminalised in 2000, and the money which had been spent on enforcing drug laws was spent on re-hab and improving the lives of addicts. Drug use is down by fifty percent.

So what does it mean for us?

Well, it strikes me that so many of the e-mails I get from people talk about how their alcohol use (abuse) accelerated after events like divorce, redundancy and retirement. In my case the trigger was quitting work to become a stay at home Mum.

Don't get me wrong, I loved it being home with my kids. I chose to do it. But I was in a communications industry. I was used to constant adult interaction. My job was bonding. Being alone for most of the day with people who couldn't yet talk was a bit of a shock.

In all of these instances, divorce, redundancy, and so on, our cages had changed. We'd lost many of our 'connections' and turned to alcohol as a bond.

The dynamic that Hari ignores, is the one we know only too well: once you start 'bonding' with alcohol, your cage gets smaller and smaller. Emptier and emptier. We alienate friends and family, we stop going out as much and we quit our hobbies and interests.

And the worse the cage becomes, the less incentive we have to step away from the drug water. A vicious circle.

This doesn't mean that if we improve our cage we can go back to being moderate drinkers (once an addict, always an addict). The Vietnam vets didn't start using heroin 'moderately' on their return. They stopped completely.

No, the lesson is that it is really hard to quit without building connections. This is why AA has saved so many lives, and the reason why the blogosphere, and sites like Soberistas, have been so crucial to me.

The other lesson, for me, is that it exposes the belief that you have to reach rock bottom as a dangerous fallacy. Because 'rock bottom' is an empty cage. If you quit well before your cage is empty, you have a far better chance of success.

So, my friends, work on improving your cage. On de-cluttering, on gardening, on painting walls and filling your house with flowers. Build bonds and connections, as many as you can, real and virtual. That's the key to success, not punishing and isolating yourself.

Because, as Hari says: The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.