Dependence & Slave Mentality

Whatever has the power to give you happiness or take it away will be your master

- Epictetus

There is nothing wrong with self-serving motivation. However, life is tough, and sometimes the desire for immediate gratification or relief is great enough to motivate actions that are contrary to your interests, intentions, or even your vows. The great challenge of adult development, and the ambitious goal of this interactive course, is to help you develop the skills and faculties that enable you to follow your path of greatest advantage rather than yield in the direction of least resistance.

You are addicted to a substance [drug, alcohol, food] or an activity [sex/pornography, gambling, shopping, etc.] when the primary determinant of your behavior is the incentive rather than your word. Once you begin sacrificing what is dear to you [health, wealth, relationships] for your relationship with the incentive, you are are sliding toward dependence. Time is your enemy; if you are not actively escaping your addictive trap, you are falling deeper into it.

As difficult as it may seem, it is critically important that you develop the skills and faculties to cope with whatever life has in store for you, without depending on the incentive for relief. The collaborative approach laid out here is an alternative to accepting powerlessness and turning responsibility over to an external agent of change.

Ahead is perhaps the most interesting and difficult passages of your life: from childish dependence on external agency to the internal agency to act in accord with your interests and principles. This challenge demands that you develop the skills and faculties required to perform mindfully during relapse crises. This is a course on how to develop those skills and faculties..

Included are tools for both your Rational Processing System and your Experiential Processing System. The text includes explanations of the cause-and-effect principles that pertain to addictive traps, how to escape them, and how to prevent relapse. However, you will have to go beyond intellectual understanding and actually perform as intended during the critical moments of crisis. To develop and strengthen the procedural skills to influence subjective phenomena, the text is supplemented with invitations to research and manipulate your subjective experience.

Experiential Invitations

When you are calm, and free of distractions, behaving as you intend is a trivial task.  It is more difficult to act as intended during a crisis. To prevent relapse you will have to develop the ability to stay cool during high-risk situations so you can intentionally perform in ways that produce good outcome for you, rather than mindlessly follow the path of least resistance to relapse.

The exercise of will requires access to good cognitive resources, which will be comprised when you experience strong emotions. This course offers opportunities to explore, and practice manipulating your current psychological state. Thought experiments and audio presentations invite you to research the principles of cause-and-effect that operate in your experiential universe.

Some people take drugs to influence their experience. The payoff of using meditative protocols as a path to altered psychological states is greater. Everyone can do this to some extent, but some people are gifted with a imagination, intellect, and the ability to focus attention. Do not be intimidated. With some practice you may become quite good at this and discover talents and abilities you never knew you had.

Everyone experiences the exercises differently; for some users the experience will be subtle, for others profound. In any event, the Trance Formations you experience as part of this course are preparation for your encounters with the high-risk situations that you will certainly encounter as your future unfolds.

If I do a good job describing the experiential methods, and you do a good job exercising your mental faculties, something extraordinary will emerge from our collaboration: You will become free of the cause-and-effect principles that define the path of least resistance and exercise your ability to over-ride local stressors and temptations and follow your path of greatest advantage.

Needless to say, your part of the collaboration is more difficult than mine — executing the intended coping response during crises is your heroic challenge.  However, my part is not trivial: It is not easy to use abstract language to communicate meaningfully about subjective experience experience.  Each individual experiences a different subjective reality and uses a different vocabulary to describe it. To cope with the limitations of everyday language, I have used metaphors, stories about specific clients, and even technical jargon liberally throughout the text.  

The Rationale and Format of this Course

It is better to learn to fish than to be fed. If you are fed, you will just get hungry again. However, when you learn a skill, the change is irreversible!  If you have a self-directed disposition and the cognitive ability to follow this text and engage the exercises, the self-directed approach presented has significant advantages over the conventional disease model to help you prevent relapse and achieve good long-term outcome as you define it. .

Paths to the development of core skills and perspectives are presented as a sequence of pages. The links in the left column will take you to the beginning of a path. Like an ordinary book, you can follow the pages in the sequence presented. Additional pages with supporting information as well as short-cuts are available to take you through the text. Forks in the path will usually be marked with a questionnaire or self-test to help you determine how best to proceed.

After three decades of collaborating with individuals through the passage you are about to undertake, I can tell you that each passage is different. The adventure that is waiting for you is different than anyone else's. Methods that work for someone else may not work for you. If you try a method that does not help you, try something different. To give you a wide range of methods from which to choose, I have included many more tactics and tools than you will need. The downside of offering so many options is that their descriptions can become mind numbing.  To avoid becoming bogged down in reading, or put to sleep by passively consuming abstract text, I encourage you to navigate through the material in ways that keep your focus on developing the procedural skill of manipulating experiential phenomena.

Learning to Steer > >
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