A recent book had some very interesting content that really helped me to understand change and the reason so many of us go through periods of not drinking only to relapse hard.
It basically says that change is created by conflict tension. You want to do one thing and to also another thing that goes against each other. You want to stop drinking, but some underlying issue leads to drinking.
Imagine you are standing in the middle of a room with two strong elastic bands around your waist. One band is attached to one end of the room in front of you and the other band is attached to the wall behind you. Both bands have equal tension.
Now, imagine the wall in front of you has the goal of not drinking on it. The wall behind you has drinking on it. You want to stop drinking so you start walking towards the wall in front of you. As you walk forward the band behind you gets tighter and tighter.
As you walk forward, the thought of drinking grows and grows until the tension in the band behind you overcomes your strength (willpower) and starts pulling you back to the wall behind you. The underlying issues as to why you drink are still there. You relapse.
However, as you go back to drinking and being closer to the back wall, the band attached to the front wall starts to increase in tension again. You now have feelings that you want to stop drinking. The conflict grows. Eventually the tension in the front band will start moving you back towards the front wall and you stop drinking again.
And so you live in this oscillating pattern of not drinking and drinking. In the long term, you have not gone anywhere, but you don't really notice this.
The conflict remains. You really want to stop drinking. But AL is being used to medicate something. And as long as conflict remains you will take this path of high tension to low tension, to high tension and so on.
I haven't read the solution part yet. But this analogy really makes sense to me and describes my futile attempt to change perfectly.
What do you think?
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