 |
How to Find the Flaws in Your Thinking
Once you have decided that you will allow yourself to think differently, the next step is to discover how to know when to think differently and what to change in your thinking when it is time to think differently.
Knowing when to think differently is very easy. You'll know it's the right time when you know that your thinking will lead to undesirable results. With just a little effort, you'll easily identify the thoughts that are leading to a decision to drink. You've done it thousands of times before, but you've almost always responded to those thoughts by drinking.
Let's say you are at work and you make a mistake, and it is too late to rectify the error. You are dreading the moment when you will be found out. Maybe that has happened before, and you know how the boss is going to respond - he's going to be very angry. Now you are really worried and upset. And what do you do when you are really worried and upset? You think about how great it would be if you were not really worried and upset, and you know that drinking will help remove those feelings. So you might put your desire for relief from being worried and upset into words by having a thought that is the seed of your plan to drink later in the day.
How often have you thought to yourself "I got really mad, so I had to have a drink" or "I knew I wouldn't be able to handle it without a drink" or "I always drink when I go to a place like that". On the surface it would seem that you go from the thought of wanting to drink directly to the deed of having the drink. But you don't go from zero to drinking all at once. You do it in increments - one thought leads to another in a pattern that you've followed many times before in a thousand different permutations, but mostly in a semi-consious way that is littered with more than a few flawed thoughts.
These flawed thoughts pop up and are answered so quickly that it doesn't even seem that the thoughts even happened. You've been through it all before and you have all the answers you need to get you to your goal of drinking. You're so good at it that you can do it semi-consciously, and the next day in retrospect it feels as if you were reacting rather than responding to the outside influence that "caused you to drink". It feels as if your thinking was not a component of your actions, that the outside influence was the cause of your behavior.
However, you may now be able to accept that you were responding quickly and predictably with your thoughts, rather than reacting without thinking. If you are aware that it was your thoughts that were driving your responses that ultimately led one after another to unproductive behavior, you might be able to respond differently than you would ordinarily have responded before you were aware of it.
From now on, if you are paying attention, you might be able to identify which thoughts are the flawed thoughts that are leading you down the path to drinking and respond with different thoughts that stop you from doing what you have usually done and lead to a different, more beneficial result.
Do yourself a favor and read the next statement 10 times in a row:
At every point along the path to drinking you have an opportunity to identify a thought as one that will lead to drinking and then change it to another thought that will not lead to drinking.
Write it on a card and place the card in your pocket. Read the card several times a day, especially when you have a thought to drink.
Let's use our "trouble at work" example to illustrate how your thinking could lead to drinking, and how changes in your thinking could lead to not drinking.
Put yourself at the moment of discovering that you made the mistake. What might your thought be at that moment? Well, it could be "Oh hell, I can't believe what a jerk I am! How can I have made such a stupid mistake! I hate it when I do stuff like this. Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I wish I was someplace else right now. I could really use a drink".
Let's take these thoughts apart and find the flaws. Here's the first one: "I can't believe what a jerk I am". This would be a good time to ask yourself "Am I always a jerk?". Then you could respond to that thought with "No, I'm not always a jerk. In fact, there are many times when I'm not a jerk. And if that's the case, I am not really a jerk, but I know I am capable of doing things that are jerky". It is now apparent that your original thinking was flawed. The thought "I can't believe what a jerk I am" was caused by being worried and upset and it was inaccurate. If you were paying attention you might have caught the flaw and changed your response to the more desirable response.
But let's say that in this case you did not catch it, so next you thought "How can I have made such a stupid mistake!". Well, you are a human being, and human beings make mistakes. In fact, it is impossible for anyone to be perfect all of the time. Being human, it is a certainty that you will make many mistakes much of the time. So this is a flaw in your thinking. If you are paying attention you might realize that and respond in a more positive way that will produce more desirable results. You might respond with "I'm only human. If I expect myself to be perfect, I am practically guaranteeing that I will be disappointed."
Next you thought "Boy, do I feel like an idiot". A thought like that could be instrumental in making you want to drink - it is a certainty that drinking will remove the horrible feeling that you get when you feel that you are worthless. But if you are paying attention you will pick up on the urge to drink that just came into your mind and you will respond in a different way than you usually respond. So instead of responding with the usual quick fix to make the pain go away, you could think to yourself in a more productive way by responding with "Just because I feel like an idiot does not mean that I am one. How I feel does not define who I am."
If you have been identifying the flawed thoughts and you have been replacing those thoughts with more productive ones, you may not have even proceeded to the next one, but let's just say that you did. The next thought in our example, "I wish I was someplace else right now", is an easy one to respond differently to. Obviously, you cannot be any other place than where you are, so wishing for that is not going to get you anyplace, it will only make you more frustrated. You might respond to that thought with "That's foolish. I can't be any other place than where I am, and I am going to have to deal with my problem." Now you are dealing with your problem instead of running away from it, and that's got to be better for you.
Finally, the big one - "I could really use a drink". It would be much more accurate to say that you could really use some relief. Is drinking going to provide you with relief? You bet it is! But is that the way you really want to get the relief? No, it isn't really - you want relief, and you can get it in other ways that will not also provide you with undesirable side effects, such as a bad hangover while you are explaining your error to your boss the next morning.
Can you guess what a good response would be to "I could really use a drink"? How about this: "A drink would provide relief, but only temporarily. There are bad things that will accompany the drinking that will cause me more problems that I will need relief from. Drinking is only going to make things worse. If what I am really looking for is relief, it does not make good sense to do something that will give me more problems that I will need relief for. It would be much better for me to find another way to get the relief I need." Then you would begin to think of ways to get relief besides drinking. Once you have done that enough times you will not have to try that hard to come up with alternatives to drinking that provide the relief that you seek.
Using this one little example you have seen how easily and effortlessly you can fall into your usual thinking, how you can spot when it is flawed, and how you can change your thinking in response to the flawed thinking. This drama gets enacted hundreds of times every day, providing you with hundreds of opportunities to find the flawed thinking and hundreds of opportunities to "change your mind" by responding with more productive thoughts that lead to more beneficial and desirable results.
You have spent years learning to respond to almost every kind of occurence with thoughts that can lead to drinking. You've responded to the bad things with thoughts of drinking, and you've responded to the good things with as much gusto. Given the time and effort that you have put into learning these responses, it would be unreasonable to expect that you could simply "change your mind" overnight. But in fact, many people do just that. If you are one of the people who can do that, great, you have my congratulations.
But if you are like most people, you will need time. When you first begin the process of trying to identify the flaws in your thinking and replace them with more productive responses, it is not very easy to do and you'll let some slip by. You'll make mistakes and you'll drink. You'll think you need a reward, or that it's been long enough, or that you can get away with it just once. Sometimes you will respond to those flawed thoughts with other thoughts that disprove those thoughts, and other times you won't. Some others will be so ingrained that you will not even realize that you are doing it for a while in those instances, but they will come up later in the process, and you'll deal with them at that time. Those might be even harder to deal with, but it can be done, and each time it becomes easier than the last time.
I'd like you to try something. The next time you are thinking about drinking, wait for 5 minutes before you decide to do it. Hopefully you will see that the thought dissipates to some extent and loses some of its urgency. The desire will subside somewhat. Take note of that, and then try it again another time. Hopefully you may see that it is easier the second time. That's the way this works. Each time you do the right thing your ability to do the right thing becomes stronger.
One Step Program™ Copyright©2002 by Jim Andersen, All Rights Reserved