Why Good Intentions Always Fail in Addiction Recovery

How many times have you decided to stop repeating a harmful behavior? At the time, you were sure that your good intentions would result in a completely changed lifestyle. You made some firm decisions: no more alcohol, cutting on screen time, getting up early and starting the day with a meditation, some exercise and a healthy meal. But a week or two later, you found yourself repeating the old unhealthy patters, again. Why don’t all the good resolutions we make lead to the expected result?

What is the difference between 'trying hard' and doing what has to be done?

So, you decided to do something about ending the endless circles of promises and disappointments? But what now? Whether it is about a bad habit, or a behavioral addiction, it is not easy to just stop it. (See Why is it so hard to change?).

The difference between the promises that we make to ourselves and a real solid recovery plan lies in the accountability. A plan has to have deadlines and you need to be accountable to yourself (or, possibly, somebody else – a therapist, your partner or other recovering people) that you will stick to it. We usually commit to try hard, but this is not enough if you want a permanent change. When we reach our limitations, we feel as if we have done everything we could – but to really change, you need to do what has to be done - even if it’s hard and it pushes you beyond limits. 

For change to occur, a long-term recovery program is necessary. A carefully developed plan will help you endure the bad times when they inevitably come, giving you a structure to adhere to when your willpower begins to fail you. Like Ulysses, who asked his friends to tie him to the mast to prevent him from following the deadly songs of the Sirens into the ocean, you must find something firm to anchor yourself in times of crisis. This program is something solid to which to tie yourself! This is the difference between good advice and real help, and the difference between failure and success: the presence of something to hold onto when you begin to falter.

Create your own Personalised Recovery Plan

A personalized recovery plan (see Serenity – How to Recognize, Understand and Recover from Behavioral Addictions, pages 364 and HERE).

As a medical doctor with four decades of experience in rehabilitation, a psychotherapist who has worked in recovery from behavioral addictions for thirty years, and a recovering codependent who has maintained sobriety for thirty-five years, I can help you create your own personalized recovery program out of whatever resources are available to you. I guarantee it will work if you work it!

There are many different commercial recovery programs available to choose from. But not everyone will have the time to abandon their regular lives and go on a retreat for a month—or the money to afford such a program. And even if you did, after the program ended, your problems wouldn’t magically be gone—so you’d still need to take responsibility and make sure your recovery needs were met. The program I propose in my book will consider everything commercial recovery programs offer, but you’ll be in charge of finding the right professionals within your own reach and organizing them into a network to fulfill your needs. You alone can take on the responsibility to create the circumstances necessary for your success. There’ll be no one but you there in the wee hours of the night when your cravings start yelling inside your brain and every cell in your body cries out for oblivion—just this once!

Finally, people are different, so to accommodate different kinds of people, recovery programs must be different, too. Indeed, to achieve maximum effectiveness, they must not only be merely different—they must be personalized. One size does not fit all. The needs of a sex-addicted, high-profile lawyer in a competitive firm may be very different from the needs of a codependent schoolteacher in suburbia. But in recovery, they’ll go through similar stages and face similar challenges, so their programs will have something in common.

The elements of your personalized addiction recovery program and where to find them

Let’s start with the definition of addiction: a disease with consequences across all four dimensions of a person’s life—the body, the mind, relationships, and the spirit.

Everyone has these dimensions, and the personalized recovery program we create will be oriented around them. But we’re also very different when it comes how much we develop each of these dimensions. Our best, most developed characteristics—and our possibilities for improvement—can vary greatly.

Like a frog, which always leaps into the water when threatened, people tend to have a favorite dimension to which they automatically retreat when things go wrong. For me, it’s the mind. I tend to find my way out of trouble by thinking my way out, and I also overuse that pathway as a defense mechanism when I daydream and fantasize.

Please take some time to reflect on which of the four dimensions you most trust to get you out of trouble. Is it the body? Do you take pride in your fitness, relying on it and knowing it has never failed you? Is it the mind, as it is with me? Is it relationships, in which you tend to rely on others to rescue you? Or is it faith in the divine order that gets you through? Whichever dimension you choose, this is the dimension you don’t need to worry as much as the other dimensions because it is your primary strength.

Usually, a person will have two intermediate strengths as well. Mine are relationships and spirituality, both of which are quite important to me. You can do yourself a favor if you consistently put effort into upgrading your skills in these categories. You can, for example, learn how to strengthen your relationships by reading self-help books, improve the quality of your friendships, and establish a circle of reliable friends to help you through the tough times.

But what will make the most difference to your recovery is the energy you invest into your least developed strength. The weakest link decides when a chain breaks or how far the whole system can progress. This is why you must be mindful not to neglect your least developed dimension or omit it altogether.

For me, the body is my weakest dimension, so turning to it to get out of trouble is the last thing I’d do spontaneously. In fact, I would prefer to think of ways to avoid it. But during my own recovery, I learned that the things I tended to avoid were precisely the things I had to put most of my efforts into changing. After all, sometimes you just have to run! So I run, and I exercise. And when I start neglecting my body, I know I’m heading for troubled waters.

Your personalized recovery program elements are:

• Body: Regular exercise, balanced diet, sleep and rest, play, yoga and martial arts

• Mind: psychotherapy, learning about addiction, journaling, emotional regulation

• Relationships: therapy groups, support groups, marriage and family counseling, friends and family, work relationships

• Spirituality: meditation, creative expression (art), prayer, religious community

Make sure you don’t exclude any of the dimensions, and be sure to put most of your efforts into your weakest one.

In my next blogs, I will elaborate on the specific elements listed above. You can find a lot of recommendations, exercises and extensive explanations in my book Serenity – How to Recognize, Understand and Recover from Behavioral Addictions, page 364.

Dr. Sanja Rozman is a medical doctor, psychotherapist, and author of 9 books on behavioral addictions. Her newest book Serenity: How to Recognize, Understand, and Recover from Behavioral Addictions, features state-of-the-art descriptions, advice, and exercises, together with a template for your personalized recovery plan. Compassionate and easy to understand, it is your go-to manual for overcoming behavioral addictions.