How are self-addictions broken?

The process for breaking self-addictions will take effort. There are diet books that trumpet “easy weight loss” and relationship books that talk of “easy marriage.” For every development topic there is an author who has written about an “easy” path. In reality there is no easy marriage, parenting, weight loss, or leadership. These all take hard work, effort, and dedication, and rarely are these changes permanent. Steven, the recovering alcoholic from earlier in this chapter, hasn’t had a drink in 17 years, but every day is still a new challenge for him. Change doesn’t happen overnight. That’s why the method for breaking your self-addictions may be simple, but it is not easy. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just takes effort and a targeted plan for you to be surprisingly effective at changing your behaviors.

The challenge is this: addictions have a strong and powerful hold on you. In order to break them, you need to be even stronger. Unfortunately, your addictions aren’t just inside of you, they are all around you. Your behaviors result from a combination of who you are and how your surroundings push you to act. Over your lifetime you have tuned yourself to be extremely sensitive to any cues that push you toward your addictive behaviors. At the same time, you have suppressed or eliminated the cues that push you toward more beneficial behaviors.

In order to overcome this imbalance, you need to create an environment in and around you that cues your new behaviors. You need to surround yourself with an environment that rarely lets you forget about the change you are trying to make. You need to make it so that the cues for your new behaviors are regularly, if not always, in front of you. Only then will you have the strength to force yourself to continue to confront the addiction until you have truly broken it.

This book helps you develop that strength as you raise your awareness, build support around you, and take consistent actions. These are the three circles that make up the Circles of Strength model for change and make it possible to break self-addictions. All around you there are cues that support your behavior or at least elements in your environment that allow your behavior to continue. You are surrounded by things that enable your self-addiction. When you build your Circles of Strength, you recreate yourself and your surroundings to support your new behavior and break the self-addiction.

Circles of Strength

Each of the next three sections of this book, Raising Awareness, Building Support, and Taking Action, will describe one of the Circles of Strength, and each section will contain three steps to build that circle. You will go through nine total steps to help you break your self-addictions, make the changes you want in your life, and become the person you want to be.