Just Don't Do The Thing ... How Hard Can it Be?

Compulsive behaviour, whatever form it takes, plays havoc with our sense of ourselves.

More specifically, it crushes our sense of agency. The idea that we have the ability to make choices, and that our will and drive will get us where we want to go.

There’s nothing like the familiar foggy horror of finding ourselves back, again, where we swore we’d never return. Driving trance-like to the bottle shop. Hearing the coin chink as it slips into the belly of the slot machine. The pipe, the porn, the pill, the junk food crammed in and coaxed back out with a finger.

The resigned despair, the hopelessness, the lies you tell yourself about this being really the last time for real this time I mean it.

Everything cell in your body seems to scream at you don’t do the thing.
And of course, you do the thing.
Again.
One last time.
Until the next last time.

So why do you keep doing the thing?

The answer is simple – but not easy to hear.
You keep doing the thing because you get something out of it.

That ‘something’ is different for everyone. Escape from a pressure-cooker life. Distraction from traumatic memories. Numbing painful feelings. Blessed peace as the chatter in your head fades to silence. Connection to something – anything. Self-sabotage to avoid possible failure. There’s different reasons for everyone, and every reason is only a piece of the puzzle.

But the point is, there are reasons. If you’re reading this, and know the resigned despair of compulsive behaviour, it’s not because you’re inherently bad and weak and wrong.

Before I qualified as a psychotherapist, I spent two years working in a rehab facility. The head honcho there had a wonderful spiel about addiction that I’ve never forgotten (but never been able to replicate). All thick German accent and white hair, he would say to whoever was crying in his office at the time: “Of course you feel like you can’t survive without getting high. You used drugs to make your life feel bearable, and it was the best thing you could do at the time. You needed them. Now you have to learn new ways to do for yourself what the drugs did, and you’re still learning – so of course life hurts right now.” He was so kind in the way he explained it – and he was so right.

The first step in beginning to overcome addictive or compulsive behaviour comes from recognising and accepting your own powerlessness. You don’t have to like the fact that you have this problem. Quite the opposite. Feel free to rage and cry and scream creative swear words into a pillow. It’s not a reality you want for yourself. But in accepting your reality, even if you hate it, there lies the possibility of kindness to yourself. Recognising that you did not choose this. This is not a problem of morals and lack of willpower, it is a problem made up of your biology, your upbringing and life history, and the specific circumstances around you at the time your compulsion first showed up.

Then, you can start looking at why. What is it you get from your compulsion? Comfort? Escape? Adrenaline? A feeling of connection?

Can you can re-create that feeling for yourself in a way that is life affirming – or at the very least, less destructive?

This is, of course, a very simplistic explanation. It takes time, support, strategies, therapeutic work and usually a degree of trial and error to overcome compulsive behaviour. But if you can accept the reality of your addiction, admit the likelihood that it serves an important purpose, and begin to think about what that purpose might be, you’ve made a strong start.  

Nobody chooses to become an addict.
But we do have choices about how we respond to the reality of our addiction.
In that response lies the possibility of finally not doing the thing.