Welcome to the Soul Directed Path

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves
after a journey than no one can take for us, nor spare us

- Marcel Proust

Accepting the responsibility to be the active agent of change may be the only genuine path to freedom from dependence. This self-guided course, which offers specific strategies to cope with situations that would put you at risk of relapse, as well as exercises to enhance the mental faculties required to do so, is a clear alternative to accepting powerlessness over a disease and turning responsibility for outcome over to an external agent of change.

I am a psychologist, and my job as your collaborator is to give you access to the tools and knowledge I have acquired over the past three decades accompanying my clients through the passage that you are about to undertake. Your job is far more heroic. You have to act in accord with your interests and principles during the critical, high-risk moments when doing so is particularly difficult.

I cannot spare you the effort of developing the requisite skills and mental faculties to achieve good long-term outcome. However, I can call your attention to the common pitfalls that cause most people to fail. . Appreciating how addictive traps work and how to escape or avoid them can spare you the unnecessary pain and demoralization of relapse.

This self-guided approach is not for everyone. Your first responsibility is to decide if this strategy of change, rather than conventional, 12-Step oriented treatment is best for you. Please click here to use the Treatment Matching Self-Test.

If you are not well matched with the approach offered here, please feel free to contact us for a full refund. If this is a good path for you, let's get started.

Where to now?

To escape your addictive trap you will have to appreciate the cause-and-effect principles that influence you. You really are different than everyone else, and we have to solve your particular addictive trap. We do not understand how your addictive trap works yet, and so we do not know which tools you will need to help you escape it. This course describes several ways of conceptualizing your challenge and many tools to help you resolve it. There is more content in this course than you will need, and I understand that the time and energy you have to dedicate to this project is limited. So I have included navigational tools to help you get to material you need quickly enough so you stay ahead of your challenge.

There are many ways to navigate through the material included. This page will help you choose an efficient path. Please read through the whole page first, then decide where to go next.

Some possible starting points.

You can use this web site as a conventional book and proceed in a linear fashion from beginning to end. The navigational bar to the left lists the chapters in sequential order. To follow this default path, click the next link in the navigational bar or the link at the bottom right of each page. If it is not urgent that you take immediate action you can develop a good conceptual foundation for the challenges ahead by following this default path.
Studying what happens to people as they go through their version of the passage from dependence to self-determination offers a cheap education about the challenge facing you. The Stages of Change model will give you an overview of the stages of this passage, as well as tools to help you through each one. If you are ambivalent about ending your relationship with the incentive, this is a good place to begin.
While each addictive trap is unique, there are some common entrapment mechanisms. To get a feel for how your trap works, complete the Trap Detector Self-Test. The trap with the highest score is likely to be most urgent. Strategies and tools to help you understand and solve the trap are provided.

Emotion-Focused Coping

If you are in crisis now, you will have to manage your emotions well enough so you can access the cognitive resources required to perform well during crisis conditions. The Mentality of Childhood produces neurotic distortions including Depression, Anger, and Anxiety that are often implicated in Incentive Use Disorders. The self-tests below provides a rough gage of the severity of your symptoms, and hence the importance of developing your Emotion-Focused Coping skills.

If you score in the moderate or severe range on either test, you probably meet the diagnostic criteria for a mood disorder that requires treatment in its own right. Failure to address the mood disorder will make the already difficult task of preventing relapse much more difficult. [If you are not currently working with a clinician, please feel free to contact our office to discuss how to manage a moderate or severe mood disorder.]