Welcome!

Posted on July 16, 2011 by

We are not powerless over our addictions, nor are we helpless victims of heredity, a disease, a spiritual malady. or a slew of character defects that require the intervention of some “higher power,” and a lifetime of meetings to control. This is not my opinion, but the result of decades of scientific research into addiction, and the simple fact that 75% of all addicts recover on their own without formal treatment or self-help groups.

We learn to become addicted, and we can learn to make the changes necessary to our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that will relieve us of the burden of our addictions for a lifetime, not just a day-at-a-time. The objective of “Powerless No Longer,” is to teach you how to take advantage of your brains’ natural ability to rewire itself, its neuroplasticity, to overcome your addictive behavior, and reach your full potential.


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Mindfulness

Posted on December 3, 2011 by

Mindfulness, simply put, is the ability to “be there,” right there, in the moment, present to our lives. It’s washing dishes when we are washing dishes, and chopping wood when we are chopping wood. Left to their own devices, our minds wander willy-nilly all over the place. I’ll bet that your mind wanders from the printed page all the time. How many sentences or paragraphs have you had to read over because you caught yourself making a grocery list, or thinking about what’s on the agenda for tomorrow? See what I mean?

I’m going to teach you a simple form of meditation, designed to help you train your mind to “stay there,” wherever you are. Why is this section here? We are beginning a journey of discovery, and what better place to start than learning how to focus our attention upon what’s going on in our own minds. To recognize the feelings and beliefs that keep us chained, it helps if we are present, and aware of our reactions. Is it necessary to practice mindfulness perfectly in order to recover? Of course not! Recovery is a process, not an event, and we only need be aware that there is such a thing as mindfulness, so we can tell when we are “in the moment” and when we are not.

There is another reason I am introducing mindfulness meditation here. Along with learning to stay in the moment, it’s also important that we learn to treat ourselves with compassion. We don’t practice compassion very much when we are using, not with those around us, and certainly not with ourselves. If we can learn to treat ourselves gently, with loving kindness, we can learn to treat others in the same manner. Continue reading →

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What We Can Learn, We Can Unlearn

Posted on August 16, 2011 by

What we can learn, we can unlearn

Up to now, we have been discussing neuroplasticity as though our brain is a one-way street, but that’s definitely not the case. Our brain is totally fluid, what we can learn we can unlearn just as quickly. In the first part of this chapter, I mentioned that our neural circuits are pruned to the tune of 20 billion synapses a day, or so, during adolescence, and this practice continues, although at a slower rate, for our entire lives.

Pathways we don’t use simply shrivel-up and die. We forget people, places, and things; we lose skills, some acquired with a great deal of effort; we change habits, likes, dislikes, political parties; we adapt new ways of doing things, discarding the old; in other words, if we are the sum of our experiences, we become different people over time, and this is all a result of neuroplasticity.

Baseball players have batting practice every day, during the season, and many continue all winter; actors rehearse again, and again, and again; in fact, every learned skill must be practiced to maintain the neural circuits we have created, or we lose it, over time. Jascha Heifetz, the renowned violinist is rumored to have said: “If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.” Continue reading →

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The Neuroplastic Learning Process

Posted on August 15, 2011 by

The stimulus-driven learning process

We forge long-term memories, and learn nearly everything we retain by strengthening neural connections through repetition, and sometimes trauma or reward. Certain events can imprint permanent memories, simply by their magnitude, and their effects upon our lives and our emotions. Events such as Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the horror of 9/11 evoke strong associations, and any of us who lived through them remember where we were and what we were doing when we first heard about them. Few of us, however, could recall what we did on the preceding day. We are all familiar with that kind of memory imprinting and recall, but what about the normal, everyday kinds of things we try to remember – and sometimes fail. How does this neuroplasticity really work, and, most importantly, do we have any control over it?

The first step in memory formation is called “encoding,” which is a biological process, rooted in the senses, that begins with perception. As an example, think of meeting your first “crush.” When you met him or her, your visual system registered things like their physical appearance, the color of their eyes, the tilt of their head, and their smile. Your auditory system may have recorded the sound of their laughter. You may have experienced the smell of their after-shave or perfume. You may have even felt the touch of their hand upon your arm. These separate sensations traveled along neural pathways from different regions to a portion of your brain stem called the hippocampus, where they were integrated, as they occurred, and became one single experience – your experience of that specific person.

Imaging studies indicate that the hippocampus, along with another part of our brain, called the frontal cortex is responsible for analyzing these various sensory inputs and deciding if they’re worth remembering or not. If they are, they become part of our long-term memory. If not, they stay in short-term memory for a brief time, and are then forgotten. Do we have any control over what information is retained in long-term memory? Yes, we absolutely do, there are a couple of tools we can use to train our minds to commit information to long-term memory, one is repetition, and the other is mindfulness. Continue reading →

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The Concept of Neuroplasticity

Posted on August 9, 2011 by

This is my first excerpt from Chapter Two, “How We Learn Addiction.” It’s an introduction to the concept of neuroplasticity, and discusses why I chose to use this concept to explain not only the process of addiction, but also the process of recovery.

Nearly every recovery self-help book explains the mechanism of addiction, if they address it at all, by discussing the chemical changes that take place in the brain during the various phases of the addiction process, some of which are irreversible. Explaining addiction in that manner merely feeds into the disease and powerlessness model, when we are not powerless over our addictions at all. I’m not denying that some of these chemical changes are, in fact, irreversible, but they do not effect our ability to overcome our addictions by changing our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Fortunately there is an entirely different way to look at both the process, and the effects of addiction that is not only equally valid, but also does a much better job of explaining not only how we become dependent upon substances, but also how most of us manage to recover, on our own, from this “irreversible” condition.

Our brains have the ability to rewire themselves, changing structurally and functionally, in response to changes in our environment and our experiences. For most of the twentieth century, the general consensus among neuroscientists was that the brain was relatively fixed and immutable after a certain critical period during early childhood. This belief has been challenged by new findings and evidence, especially detailed brain imaging that has conclusively proven that our brains retain a significant ability to change, which is called “plasticity,” into adulthood, and even old-age. Neurological research indicates that experience can actually change both the brain’s physical structure and functional organization from top to bottom. It was also once believed that our brains can never grow new neurons, but this has also been proven to be false, for at least two areas of the brain having to do with learning can indeed grow new neurons. In fact, it’s happening to you right now as you read this page! This characteristic of the brain, called “Neuroplasticity,” not only is responsible for our ability to learn and unlearn, but also for the ability of some people to recover from serious injuries, strokes, and diseases that disable or disrupt some of their brain functions. Continue reading →

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Why “Powerless No Longer?”

Posted on August 2, 2011 by

The title of this book, “Powerless No Longer,” may seem a little controversial to you. If it doesn’t, you would be in the minority, as surveys consistently show that the majority of Americans believe that addiction is a disease, addicts are powerless, cannot recover without help, and 12-step is the only method that works. One of my purposes in writing this is to prove that these contentions are false, there not a single shred of evidence supporting them, and the contrary evidence is overwhelming. Multitudes of repeatable scientific studies, over the past several decades, prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that three-quarters of the people meeting the criteria for substance abuse or dependence recover absolutely on their own, without treatment, 12-step groups, or formal help of any kind.

The famous Astrophysicist and science popularizer, Carl Sagan quite correctly wrote: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I will present extraordinary evidence that you already possess within yourself all the power you need if you have a genuine desire to effect self-change in any area of your life, including your addiction. Continue reading →

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A Look At What Works For Users Who Want to Quit

Posted on July 29, 2011 by

What works? The truth is that there is no easy and simple answer to the question of what works. There is no program, drug, method, or procedure that has been proven to work for everyone under all circumstances, and there may well never be one. Fortunately, there is some commonality between the various methods used by the study subjects who quit on their own, or with minimal help, and it is these areas of commonality upon which we will focus a good deal of our attention. In addition, there are a large number of studies that try to determine the efficacy of methods and programs employed by the various recovery groups and treatment centers, and we will draw some common threads from those as well. There will be some surprises here for those who might have some preconceived notions about certain programs, but the bottom-line is that the most successful approaches seem to involve a combination of methods, and we shall go wherever the data takes us. This section is intended to serve only as a brief overview of the techniques and programs that studies and surveys have indicated are the most effective in helping us overcome substance abuse and dependence, not as a review of everything that is available.

The one element that’s common to all successful recoveries achieved by any method is that we must somehow find the resolve or motivation necessary to overcome our addictions. This is true no matter what the addiction, or the relative severity. If we are properly motivated, almost anything will work, but in the absence of motivation, nothing will! The motivation for change may come from many different sources, in fact the most common, according to the majority of studies, is a single consultation with a trusted medical professional, such as a family doctor. Other sources of motivation that rank highly in studies are family or financial pressures, a major life event, such as an illness or the death of a using significant other, or simply a “moment of clarity” that reveals to us our true situation. Continue reading →

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The Nature of Addiction

Posted on July 27, 2011 by

Survey after survey has shown that the general public overwhelmingly believes that addiction is a disease, addicts are powerless over it, it’s a result of some sort of spiritual or moral issue, it’s hereditary, and the only hope the addict has of ever being free of it is for he or she to commit themselves to treatment, and resign themselves to life-long participation in some sort of 12-step or other semi-religious organization.  None of this is true, of course, which I will address in chapter three, but for now, let’s look at these false beliefs from the standpoint of what we know today about the nature of addiction and how we become addicted.

Firstly, consider that those false beliefs stem mainly from a book that was published in 1939, called “Alcoholics Anonymous,” which became the foundation of the drug and alcohol treatment industry, and the source of most of the public’s knowledge about addiction. Not a single word or phrase in the operative portion of this book has been modified or updated in the slightest since its initial publication, seventy-plus-years-ago, in spite of all we have learned about addiction, especially in the last half-century. For its part, the addiction research community has hardly gone out-of-its-way to change public opinion either, partially because of a reluctance to challenge the established treatment industry, and partially, I suspect, due to their lack of access to the public-at-large. That last is truly unfortunate, because the truth of the nature of addiction, revealed by the available studies and research paint an entirely different picture than the one the public, and even most addicts, currently believe.

Addiction is an extremely complicated Biological, Psychological, Neurological, and social disorder, with no single cause. We are not addicts because we are weak, immoral, or fated to be so. We are addicts mostly because we learned to be, not because of any spiritual shortcoming. We became addicted because of a combination of genetics, experience, personality, opportunity, and outlook. Continue reading →

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