The Action Stage

Nothing succeeds like success.

- Alexandre Dumas

The mission of the Action Stage is to train the creature you inhabit to respond adaptively to stress and temptation, until the intended coping responses become your default reactions. What you have to do to accomplish this is sometimes called puppy training to emphasize that it must be done gently. Your job, as the operator, is to train this emotionally reactive creature to stay relatively cool during difficult situations—when powerful stressors or temptations are nearby. 

At this moment, you probably want to do the right thing during high-risk situations.  The important question is: How will you actually respond at the critical moment? The real-world crisis is where your will and objective reality meet. Heroic performance requires that you do something extraordinary: Violate the laws of cause-and-effect that determine the path of least resistance and, instead, get the creature you inhabit to follow your path of greatest advantage (considering your core motivation). With sufficient heroic practice the intended path has become your default path, and you have graduated to the Relapse Prevention Stage. The current section of the course is dedicated to increasing your capability to act as intended during the critical moments of crisis. 

This course describes the important general principles of cause-and-effect that pertain to the Psyche.  Your task is to research the specific principles of cause-and-effect that pertain to your psyche and apply them to bring about the outcomes you seek,

Among the most important of the general principles is: The Law of Practice: with sufficient repetition a behavioral sequence becomes progressively easier to perform - eventually becoming autonomous.  For example, with sufficient training, puppies eventually learn where to pee and to come when called.  Naturally, the development of the control is slow and erratic, sometimes including periods of regression.  But if the master maintains, consistent discipline, the change is inevitable and irreversible.  At a personal experience level, the process is not unlike becoming a vegetarian or an exercise buff. What may initially have seemed awkward and unpleasant becomes familiar, comfortable, and easy to perform. Eventually, avoiding meat or exercising becomes autonomous and requires no conscious effort, and may require conscious effort to revert back to the original lifestyle.

To switch metaphors: Mountain climbers competent enough to have survived the dangers of their sport often stress the importance of having developed the skills and strengths required to cope with the challenges they faced. Because they usually are well prepared, most people who attempt to climb mountains achieve their intended outcome. In contrast, most people have insufficient respect for what it takes to escape their addictive trap. They believe all sorts of things that turn out not to be true and, as a result, do not prepare themselves to cope with the challenges they are certain to encounter.  The tools contained in this section require that you invest some time and effort rehearsing them so you will be able to execute well during the crisis.

Strategy for the Action Stage

Earlier, two defining strategies to escape an addictive trap were described: The Impeccable Path (once you pre-commit your future behavior, you can permit no exceptions) and The OPEN Path (you are open to choices in real-time, and can learn about cause-and-effect by observing their consequences). The author recommends a Middle Way, The Enlightened Path, which is a synthesis of these extremes. Like the Impeccable Path, once a commitment is made, no exceptions are permitted . . . except when they occur, and then they are handled in a forgiving way. Evidently your understanding of cause-and-effect was insufficient. You must employ this information in the service of problem solving, rather than as a bludgeon to beat yourself with. This requires that you react differently to unpleasant experiences, such as failure, than you have in the past, which may have included ruminative self-focus, demoralization, and other triggers of relapse.

Once you have settled upon a strategy of learning the lessons of cause-and-effect without getting caught up in self-focused rumination, you can develop specific tactics to cope with stress and temptation. Needless to say, solving the puzzle intellectually is not sufficient; you must get yourself to perform as intended in real time. It is one thing for the cowardly young man to understand that it is in his best interest to stand up to the bully; it is a different kind of challenge for him to get himself to do so. This kit offers a range of experiential invitations that will take you beyond an intellectual understanding of what needs to be done, to developing the state-dependent procedural skills that will enable you to perform as intended during real-time crises.

The Soul Illusion is what makes this challenge so difficult, and why the experiential exercises are so important. You cannot fully appreciate the power of local stressors and temptations to alter your perception and motivation until you are actually in the crisis. The only thing you can be certain about is: Your perception will be biased by different filters than it is now. What is obvious to you now will not be so obvious then, and what will be compelling to you then cannot be appreciated from your current dispassionate perspective. Your success or failure will depend upon how you perform at precisely those moments when state-dependent phenomena—including perception, motivation, and response tendencies—will promote relapse, and your cognitive resources will be preoccupied by local events. The current version of you, with all its impressive cognitive abilities and positive intentions, will not be present during these critical moments.

In the next section you will identify your most urgent addictive trap so you can concentrate your efforts on escaping it. It is likely that you have low self-efficacy here, so be sensitive to the puppy's vulnerability to demoralization and the consequent state-dependent motivation to defect.[see True Grit].

 

The Traps and their Detector > >
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