What will you find in this book?

In the following pages you will find answers to three main questions:

1. What is a self-addiction?

2. What are some of your self-addictions?

3. How do you conquer these behaviors?

The strategies that are proposed in this book for how to conquer these behaviors are broken down into three parts: Raising Awareness, Building Support, and Taking Action.

Raising Awareness

This section is the foundation for your change. It begins with understanding your current behaviors and identifying your self-addictions. It then guides you through realizing the impact of your behavior on you and those around you, which leads you to the critical step of making a powerful commitment that will drive the behaviors to make you successful in your change.

Building Support

This section helps you identify and draw strength from a network of people who will support you in your change efforts. The value comes not just from surrounding yourself with people who will support you, but in clearly defining how each of those people can support your change. Bringing others in and engaging them to help you will make your change efforts far more effective. The Building Support section provides you with strategies that will help you find, develop, and maintain effective support relationships.

Taking Action

This section presents three types of actions that you can use to make your change: one for practicing new behaviors, one for reminding yourself to avoid engaging in old behaviors, and one for reviewing your progress. The routines you create will provide a consistency of action that will help you conquer your self-addiction.

To better understand these processes, you are introduced to The Talker, The Pushover, The Worker, and The Critic. Each of these individuals has gone through his or her own change process to overcome self-addiction. These characters are composites of many xv people I have known as clients, colleagues, friends, and family. Of course, I’d be lying if I said that the characters didn’t also have a little of me in them. However, they are not intended to depict anyone specifically; rather, they are intended to give you a glimpse into some of the experiences people can have as they work to change themselves. I hope you find them illustrative, encouraging, and even motivational. Most of all, I hope they help you develop the confidence, strength, and know-how to make your change.

Finally, you are introduced to a gentleman I met when he became my client. I have since come to consider him a friend. He is a recovering alcoholic and a strong proponent of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I share bits of his story, not to equate alcoholism with self-addiction, but because we can learn valuable lessons from the success that AA has had over the years.

I wrote this book to provide a process to help people change. Just think what you could do with a system that guides you to identify valuable changes you need to make in your life, make those changes effectively, and then sustain them over time. I truly believe that anyone can change, and I wish you luck in making your change journey exciting, rewarding, fun and, most of all, successful.

Noah Blumenthal
December 2006

P. S. As you read this book, you can also join the change community online. Share your success stories, challenges, tips, and lessons you’ve learned in the Virtual Partners Forum at www.YoureAddictedToYou.com.