Introduction to Puppy Training

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than he who conquers his enemies;
for the hardest victory is the victory over the self

- Aristotle

The goal of our collaboration is nothing less than changing the course of your life. This ambitious challenge requires that we each play our parts well.  My job is simple and without conflict—to provide you with tools that are effective in helping you do your heroic work. Your challenge is much more complex and full of conflict: You are both the entity we seek to change through our collaboration—the puppy, aka the Experiential Processing System—and the entity responsible for acting in accord with your interests and principles —my collaborator, aka, the Rational Processing System [see Two Minds for a more detailed description of these entities].

I stress our collaborative relationship because of the common tendency for lay people to turn responsibility to change the course of their life over to an external agent [expert, treatment provider, spiritual leader]. If you want to solve a problem of dependence, you must be the one to define the objective of our work, and to direct our efforts to the particular problems and circumstances that you encounter along your passage.

The Hard Part of the Course

In contrast to conventional self-help books and treatment programs in which each participant gets essentially the same treatment, the premise of this course is that there is no single solution for everyone and no external salvation from dependence. The path described here is to help the user discover the cause-and-effects principles that pertain to his or her particular addictive traps. Once you appreciate the traps you have created or fallen into, you get to the hard part of this course: To train the creature you inhabit so that it is able to avoid these traps. And, on those occasions when you cannot avoid them, to escape them.

If you lacked a Rational Processing System, you would be like a puppy that has no choice but to follow the path of least resistance.  But, of course, you are smarter than a puppy and so it is easy for you to understand that your relationship with the incentive produces more costs than benefits. The challenge is to get the creature you inhabit to act in accord with this understanding,

You are both bound by the cause-and-effect principles that determine the behavior of a creature such as yourself, and a competent adult who is responsible for acting in accord with your interests and principles even during crises. To fulfill this responsibility you can use what we know about the pertinent cause-and-effect principles to prepare the creature to cope with predictable and unpredictable high-risk situations.

When your cognitive resources are unavailable—as will be the case when you are in a high-risk situation—the puppy, not your fabulously resourceful Rational Processing System, will be in the driver's seat. The puppy wants to do its best, but it is vulnerable to a range of traps that may be quite obvious to the rational part of you when it reviews the events in hindsight. If only the rational part of you could prepare the puppy for the challenges it is sure to encounter and do it in a way that did not scare the puppy or make it feel defective, incompetent, or shame-worthy.

The rest of this section describes tools and strategies to prepare the creature for the challenges ahead as rapidly as possible, and in ways that protect it from the recursive traps commonly associated with such efforts. Among the goals of this training:

  • The ability to keep your head despite local conditions that might evoke a high-risk, state—e.g., craving, depression, boredom.
  • The ability to recover your head—that is, to shift from a high-risk state to a more resourceful state, in which you have access to your good cognitive skills and your core motivation.
  • The ability to perform as intended, even when you don't feel like doing so.

Notes for the Puppy Trainer

Puppy training lacks the glamour of the insights and epiphanies of talk therapy. However, the puppy needs the attention and the firm but gentle training. Generally, my greatest challenge as a therapist is training the trainer. Learning how to talk to and discipline the psyche is an important skill in the development of will. The trainer must be especially kind and patient [lean over backwards here] because the puppy may not want to play if it gets too much punishment. Keeping the puppy engaged in the training is the most important task of the puppy trainer.

The experiential processing system is much stupider than the rational processing system, and the benefits of training will come much slower than the you expect. Many trainers are inpatient and find it difficult to hang in there long enough to do what needs to be done. You may take it for granted that you will follow through on the puppy training, especially since it sounds so sensible and easy when we discuss it. Think again.

Perhaps by now you will agree with me that performing as intended during the high-risk situation is much more challenging than most people realize. However, I would like you to go a step further and consider your intention to do what it takes to train the puppy. Even though you may be highly motivated to do the exercises at one moment, the motivation to adhere to commitments tends to slacken with time. If follow-through turns out to be an issue for you (and it probably will), the Intentions & Action Form will help. 

Note: To add insult to injury, any failure to perform as intended is demoralizing. Demoralization is our foe's most powerful weapon to get you to capitulate and relapse completely.  Because I have so much respect for the difficulty of this task, I have included this section of forms and protocols to help you structure your training sessions. This may be the most important part of the course for you.

As one Rational Processing System to another, my advice is, "Don't be reasonable with the puppy." You must make it as easy as possible for the puppy to learn by rigidly applying simple implementation intentions, with no possibility of negotiation. Even though you must be patient and forgiving in training the puppy, you cannot be moderate in your dedication to puppy training. You must do whatever it takes to develop the faculties and skills you will need during the crises you are bound to encounter. However, you as the Rational Processing System can and should be reasonable about how intensive the puppy training needs to be.

We do not want the training to be painful, boring, or excessive. In fact the art of puppy training is keeping the puppy engaged by protecting it from excessive, overly detailed, or onerous training sessions. A good goal for the trainer is to do the least amount of training necessary to assure that the puppy can cope with the high-risk situation to be tested. Not knowing how much detail you will need, I will be describing procedures with the maximum amount of detail. Feel free to streamline the methods described. However, if you encounter setbacks, use the more detailed procedures described.

This is a formidable challenge, but you can succeed if you accept responsibility at two levels:

  • Be a good Master: It is your responsibility as Master to author the plan by which you will achieve your goals. Forms are included to give you some structure, but the specifics must be yours. Your goals, your training regime, your responsibility.

  • Be a good Puppy: Training can be difficult, frustrating and sometimes boring. Hang in there and do what you have to do, with good humor. The role of the heroic puppy is to do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, whether you feel like it or not.

A switch in metaphors from puppy training to martial arts training is appropriate at this point.  Bruce Lee performs well during the emotional crisis of a fight, because he has developed a range of competencies such as  appreciating the kinds of attacks that are likely, identifying the particular threats and how to cope with them, executing his coping responses well at the critical moments, etc..  Just as a dedicated martial artist can develop complex skills to the point that he can perform them spinally during a crisis, you can—and must— do the same.  Skill development does not come out of thin air; you have to acquire it through practice. 

Some of the coping tactics our collaboration develops for you to test may be surprising, or require that you do things you’ve never done before.   We will not know if they are effective until you try them out during high-risk situations.   This is expensive research, because it requires that you execute the coping tactic, when doing so is particularly difficult— during high-risk situations. The stressors and temptations of a relapse crisis will be so disruptive that you will have to practice the coping response slowly in a safe controlled environment for a while before it is strong enough to test under the adverse conditions of a personal experiment.  While I encourage you to be creative in developing personal experiments, do not think that you will be able to execute the intended coping response during a real crisis without considerable preparation.

Preparing the Puppy to Cope with Crisis

The Implementation Intention is the format for coping tactics: When situation X occurs I will execute response Y. So we need two pieces of information:

Warning Signals > >

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