“I’ll never get well,” you think. “It’s never going to happen. I will always be an addict. I can’t recover.”
Many who are recovering from addiction have these kinds of thoughts. The words “never,” “always,” and “can’t” are absolute terms, meaning that they hold no nuance. If you say you always do something, it means you never stop. If you tell your brain that you are incapable of doing what you thought you couldn’t, you’re only taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back. Over time, you can feel totally incapable of changing your thoughts and behaviors. This is known as “polarized thinking.” There’s no in-between.
When you think in absolutes, your life becomes absolute. You’re either good or bad, perfect or a failure. In psychology, this is known as a “cognitive distortion.” Essentially, you begin to think that your negative thoughts are true—that you’re less of a person, that you’re incapable of stopping using alcohol or a drug or both. Not true. No matter who you are, no matter the degree of addiction, recovery is always possible.
How can you reshape your thought process and learn to be nicer to yourself? There’s actually a series of exercises as known in the practice of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The exercises are aimed at helping you to regain your confidence and essentially, rewire your thought patterns so that your mind doesn’t automatically turn to a negative thought.
First, it’s crucial to identify those thought patterns that are keeping you locked in a negative state of mind. There’s “overgeneralization,” or the belief that since you “failed” at some task, you must be an entire failure. You feel as though you are bad at one thing (recovery), so you must be bad at all things. Other types of negative thought patterns include catastrophizing and personalization, among others. The first refers to viewing every bad event as the worst thing that’s ever happened, and the second refers to believing that all others’ actions are a personal attack or affront, when that’s more often than not the case.
This very common thought in addiction recovery happens for a specific reason, because a majority of addicts do relapse at some point in the process of recovery. A study found in 2007 that just 33% of addicts who refrain from using for less than a year will remain abstainers.
But many addicts will tell you that just because you slipped up or fell into a state of relapse, this is not reason to despair. Rather, there are lessons to be learned from a relapse or slip-up. In Alcoholics Anonymous, cognitive distortions are known as “stinkin’ thinkin.’” A crucial element of recovery is learning to deal with these thoughts.
It might seem impossible to essentially teach your brain how to think differently. But you’d be surprised: when you begin to counter one pervasive thought pattern, over and over, you start to shift your mindset. The brain can learn quickly, but it takes time and specific effort.
