New Year: a time to create lasting change in beliefs, behavior
As we begin the New Year–the season of resolutions–many of us take on the challenge of personal change. We set goals to exercise more and eat less; to read more and stare at the television less; or to shed a habit such as smoking or gambling.
The challenge, however, is how to act on our intentions past the first few days of January. Creating lasting change in beliefs and behavior is one of the knottiest problems that human beings face.
People who are in recovery from alcoholism and other forms of addiction face this problem each day. Their sanity–and their lives–may depend on how they solve it.
The topic of personal change has occupied Earnie Larsen for 40 years–first as a Catholic priest and now as an author, speaker and workshop leader. In 55 books and recordings, Larsen explains that recovery from addiction happens in two major stages–and that long-term sobriety hinges on three keys to habit change.
Stage I recovery focuses on abstinence from alcohol and other drugs. For many people, this stage includes treatment for addiction and membership in a support group such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
Yet there’s more to recovery than getting sober. “If you start by defining yourself as your disease–I’m an addict–then once you’ve arrested the disease, there’s really nowhere else to go,” Larsen says. “But if you define yourself first as a person who happens to have an addiction, then you can still continue to grow and move on as a human being. That’s what I call Stage II recovery.”
Defined in this way, Stage II applies to anyone who wants to experience lasting personal change– including people who are not in recovery from addiction.
Change in Stage II depends on readiness, insight and practice. Lacking any of these, says Larsen, can sabotage our efforts.
Readiness comes in its own time, Larsen says. It cannot be forced or predicted. In fact, some people experience traumatic consequences before they’re truly ready to change. A cocaine addict, for example, might go through treatment but then relapse to drug use–losing his job and family before finally deciding to get clean and sober for good.
Insight begins with a distinction between the past and the present. In the past, we learned to deal with pain by adopting certain beliefs and behaviors. Eventually these become self-defeating habits that take on a life of their own. Change hinges on bringing those habits to full awareness.
Practice means using that awareness to consciously choose and practice new habits in the present. For example, Larsen says that he spent years as a “workaholic,” a habit that he traces to a childhood belief that “you’re only as good as you work.” Decades later, he woke up with a “driving impulse to get up at 4 a.m. and write books on relaxation– the most bizarre thing in the world, because I was exhausting myself.” Now he practices alternatives–limiting his work hours and taking a scheduled amount of time each day to relax and do nothing.
The key is responding to events with an intensity that’s appropriate to events in the present–not with the automatic and destructive reactions that we learned in the past.
“When someone cuts you off on the highway, don’t look for a flamethrower to turn the driver into a cinder,” Larsen writes in his latest book, Destination Joy: Moving Beyond Fear, Loss, and Trauma in Recovery (Hazelden, 2003). “That’s old stuff. It’s no big deal. Let it go. Get in the now.”
In short, the fruit of readiness and insight is seeing each day as a fresh opportunity to practice. Then we can experience the miracle of personal change for the rest of our lives.
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