Motivation, Intention, Why
Why?
Why do you want to stop?
Who will you lose if you don’t stop? What will you lose if you don’t stop? What opportunities in life will you miss out on because you simply don’t want to feel the way you feel? What do you really want? What motivates you? Why?
If you were to ask me why I behaved the way I did while I was using drugs, I wouldn’t have an answer. I was living unconsciously. My life was about avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. I didn’t spend much time thinking. In hindsight, the real answer as to why I was doing what I was doing was comfort. I wanted to be comfortable. In fact, whether you know it yet or not I think the number one value of an alcoholic and an addict is comfort. If you were to ask me why I was doing what I was doing to myself I'm not sure I'd have an answer better than why not? I’m not sure I had the cognitive ability to understand why I did anything. My life was spinning out of control for so long, I kept my addiction under wraps for so long that once it was busting out into life and destroying my relationships I didn’t have an ability to contend with the feelings I had to feel. My life was in such shambles that using was the only thing I knew how to do to make myself feel alright. Since I wasn't aware of what I was really doing to myself, I didn’t understand that I could live a better life. I didn’t have a "better life" I was going towards. Happiness was nowhere on the radar, and if happiness was not on the radar the next best thing was nothingness. Shutting everything down was more appealing than being aware I could be more and choosing something to go after. A reason why, you could say. I needed a reason why.
Many people ask me how I stay motivated. I like to ask them what motivation even means to them. Often, they don’t have an answer. I direct them back to the word and we agree the word motivation comes from the word motive. Motive is a reason why, to be motivated is to be provided with a reason a why. To have a reason why is to act with a purpose.
It's interesting to me how many females can stop using for 9 months while pregnant. I've heard it so many times. I never quite understood it until now. They literally have a physical reason inside of them not to use. The consequences of drinking and using would be direct for them, and their unborn child. We need to realize that while our children are in the womb or not, they are directly affected by every choice we make because they watch us make it. If you can realize your child is always within you, you can come up with a good reason not to use, and a good reason to keep pushing forward as you will be showing your child how to push forward through hard times. This isn’t, however, just a thought or a whim. If your child is the reason you are going to recover you need to envision your child explaining to their therapist that mom or dad chose drugs and alcohol before them, essentially teaching them a value system. If you don’t change, this is a real possibility. There’s a 50% chance a child of an alcoholic or an addict becomes an alcohol or addict. As Jung said once: A child is educated by what the adult is, not by they say.
I'm one of those people that if you tell me to do something, I need to understand why. Once I understand why I'm doing something - how to do it doesn't necessarily need to be explained. The why explains it all. If you get why a thing needs to be done your solution(HOW) will be strategic to reaching the goal of WHY. For example, if I need to document behavior of a client at work - often the behavior is just day to day nonsense. But once I'm told that insurance either pays or cuts off payment based on my notes - then i put the behavior in so they get to stay in treatment. Just telling me to do it doesn't make sense - especially when I know most staff does not look at these notes, and the behavior is often redundant day to day. Once I learned why I needed to put in notes it just kind of happened because if I didn’t my clients could not continue their treatment. Notes became a must for me, when it wasn’t for others.
If you have a reason to overcome obstacles, if you know WHY your life is important, you can suffer defeats without giving up and quitting.
Your why keeps you going.
You know – I’m not quite sure I've ever believed in hell- at least not eternal hell - I’ve been in my own version of hell before. Some of you are in a version of hell as I speak. I feel for you. However, I think my hell is laying on my death bed wishing I had gotten sober sooner, wishing I had stayed sober, wishing I didn’t waste so much time being comfortable. Regret is poison. A lot of people talk of regret saying things like “No regrets I wouldn't be who I am if it weren't for this and that.” I've always hated that talk. People use it as an excuse to act shitty, justifying who they are – but what if who you are sucks? What if who you are is miserable? Don't use these cliché’s non-sensibly. If you're one of these people who says "no regrets" I hope you do it sensibly. In other words, I hope you are acting on a day to day basis in a way you won’t regret later in life. I hope you aren't using it as some defense mechanism to make yourself feel okay about your shitty decisions. I've felt real regret before. It hurts. Knowing better but acting as if I didn’t lead to regret.
I'm not sure that’s real regret though. I think real regret is being too old to change it. You feel “okay” with your regret now because you have time to make up for it. What if you were 80 though? You would just have to accept it, and wither away your last days, months, or years knowing you could have lived your life better. I don't want that feeling - that's my why.
You know, a sponsor I had at one point told me "why is not a spiritual term". Which I agree with, in the context of someone asking "why is this happening to me?" It's not spiritual in this sense because it is happening to you and you need to do something about it. I think if, internally, we ask ourselves why we act the way we do in day to day life doors can open. The alternative is just doing whatever you feel like, saying whatever you feel like, and suffering the consequences asking "why did this happen to me"
What keeps you going? What's your why? Why do anything? Knowing your why helps you organize your psyche a little bit. Knowing your why can be the same as knowing what you aim for...
Why get better? Do you have an answer for that? Why become better?
I'll tell you why: I want to avoid any suffering that I am able to avoid, and at the same time maybe it will keep others from suffering too. When I suffer - let me tell you first hand, my whole family suffers. Seriously if I don’t get better, at some point in the future I will pay for it and I will look back and regret having not become better.
EXAMPLE: Around year four of being sober I got tired of living paycheck to paycheck. Really tired. I wasn’t using drugs, I wasn’t spending crazy money on anything destructive. I just wasn’t trying very hard. It made me uncomfortable. For years, I blamed it on the fact that I didn’t make much money. The problem was, I also didn’t try to save money. I thought about it saving. I just didn’t execute. Then, I had an experience where my bank account was empty two days after being paid. I remember hating the feeling. I remember thinking I didn’t get sober to struggle with money. I hated the way I felt. I took responsibility. I knew there would come a day where I would feel like shit due to finances again. I could envision it. I didn’t want to feel it. I devoured five personal finance books and internalized some of their lessons. I began to have money when crisis came. It saved me time and time again. The treatment center I worked at closed a week ago. I literally have the opportunity to write this because after losing my job I had a pile of money saved for emergencies. My former colleagues aren’t in the same boat. My why motivated me. I didn’t want to feel like shit again for not saving money. I had already learned that lesson before. No need to learn it again.
The problem is things outside of our control can affect our life. You can do everything perfect - you can be on your way to the life you dream of and things outside of your control can make it seem like everything is going wrong. However, if you're doing everything you can that’s in your control then everything you have control over is going right and things outside of your control are going wrong. Realize this. You will find peace in knowing, in having a visceral knowledge that you cannot control all and attempting to do so clutters your mind with things you can't change. Organize your mind by choosing what's in your control and progressing within those areas of your life. Successful investor Ben Horowitz has a great quote: " The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare. " What are you going to do then? What will keep you going then? Hopefully you develop what your aiming at, a vision, or a "why" will keep you going. All of these are sort of synonymous with one another and none of my vision is under the control of others. My vision is not to be the best at communicating recovery where I work. That's too dependent on whether I get promotions or keep my job or not. None of my aims are contingent on anyone else. Only me.
A big reason why I keep going during the hard times is what I've decided my life is going to be, my “vision”. I've decided I will handle anything life throws at me without drugs or alcohol. That’s my decision and my commitment. I've decided when my time is up, I will be proud of how I lived. I've decided when my kids grow up, they will speak of me as a great father. I've decided I will be health conscious no matter the struggle. I've decided I'm always going to be cool calm and collected no matter what is thrown my way. I've decided I will act in a way that allows me to be an inspiration to all I come across. And - I've decided that during all this struggling and fighting I'm going to enjoy it. I've decided at the end - I will have no regret that could have been avoided. Period.
That’s my why. And that's my chosen struggle. Of course, my emotions sometimes are at odds with my logic, but my logic trumps my emotion- I’ve conditioned myself to be this way.
When the emotion is tough - when things are hard, you must have something to think about, you just can’t go on emotion or what you want to do. Sometimes you need a memory, or a vision to use as leverage. Here’s the thing: I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have relapsed. They give up. They choose to use. It’s not about them not knowing what to do or how to do it. They simply choose to use again. It’s not just one choice either. You must make a few shitty choices before you are one choice away from a drink or a drug. Many people simply wouldn’t allow themselves to make shitty decision after shitty decision if they knew it was leading to misery. Often, they believe they can use just once. Their history shows that’s not true. What they need is a reason not to use when they really want to use. It doesn’t matter how perfect your recovery is. Early on, you will want to use and drink. This is when you need something to keep you from doing it. You don’t need to know how to not use. You know how to do that.
You know, maybe I'm in a unique position where one, I worked at the treatment center I went through and therefore am always kind of comparing where I was six years ago to where I am now. And two, because I consistently see people coming through treatment after another bout trying to manage life while using drugs and drinking. It just doesn’t work. I am reminded of that daily. If we don’t remind ourselves (why), we may forget. The problem isn't that people think they can manage life while drinking and using. I think what happens is more that people are always looking for an escape. They hate what they are doing, it's not an investment in anything and it seems kind of pointless aside from a paycheck. Believe me, I know the feeling. Escaping seems natural. They seek a few moments of escape with cigarette breaks, and lunch, without actually realizing if they had something they were going toward then the suffering would be worth it. If you don’t have something you're going towards you are kind of just surviving. Each day you put in isn't an investment in the future, so you seek an escape every chance you get. I love what I do, I'm investing in myself, my future, and other people and I still seek an escape! I make an effort daily to recognize that what I'm doing matters, what I'm doing makes me better, and I could be doing a lot of different things that don't matter to me. This is the thing; I'm not saying don't escape. I'm saying find new ways to escape and do what you need to do during the day to get closer to your ideal life, then escape once you've earned it. I call this earning your comfort.
A lot of people don't want to hear solutions that can be boiled down to "change the way you think". It’s certainly not a quick fix and coming from the life of an addict we are all about instant gratification. What people don't realize is how important it is to think differently. The way you've always thought leads you to acting the way you've always acted and the actions you always took usually led to the kind of consequences you've always suffered. I know that this isn't necessarily what we want to hear when we try and get clean. I know you'd rather the solution be conceptualized in a more concrete way. I just haven’t arrived at that solution yet. Maybe that's my life's purpose. I've always hated how recovery is communicated. I've always hated how over complicated it's become. But I do think that one of the main things we need to do is have an emotional connection to the reason why we want to change. It’s funny the culture we come from holds such an emphasis on not changing. “I won’t change for anyone” , “ I don’t want sobriety to change who I am” etc..
Here is a weird insult: “You’ve changed “ I fucking hope so. Your life will not change until you change. You wont change until your thinking changes. Period. Once we know why we want to change - the how doesn't really matter.
"He who has a why can bear almost any how"
Nietzsche said this - not exactly this, but close. Sometimes people find it hard to understand what exactly this means. I don't think that's necessarily an accident. I assume it's the result of a lack of purpose. It's a colloquial way of saying - he who has a reason to live can bear almost any manner of life. In other words, if you have a reason or purpose in this life you can endure almost any misery. And if you don't understand that exactly you should be able to understand that He who has a reason to live can bear almost any problem.
Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who ended up in Auschwitz in WW2. He started getting very curious as to why certain people died and why certain people lived. Obviously, if you were taken to the gas chambers - you were to die. However, Frankl realized that not everyone accepted this - while others did. You were far more likely to accept death if you had no reason to live. Your entire family was murdered in front of you? Sounds like a good reason to blindly follow the screams into the gas chamber. When everything is taken from you, leaving no possibility of any kind of future worth living for, death is accepted. Frankl noticed not all people accepted their "fate" in these camps. Some did everything to avoid dying - and many of them lived because of this. Frankl was one of these people. Frankl had hoped his wife was still alive (she wasn't) and that gave him a good reason to keep going.
In essence, and this is an assumption, Nietzsche meant that a person with nothing to live for *subconsciously* prefers death. And someone who has something (WHY they continue to live) can endure almost anything (HOW to survive almost anything). I don’t know about you, and I don’t know what subconsciously preferring death looks like, but I imagine its close to the life of an addict or alcoholic.
It’s crazy how much research points to the idea that we need some sort of why to live. You die faster after you retire, you die faster after your spouse dies....and years ago when open heart surgery became more normal - when it was far more dangerous, those that could best predict who would do best as an open heart surgery patient were the psychiatrists. In one study, they interviewed patients before they were having the surgery and divided them based on their answers (HIGH MED LOW ) risk type. In the low risk groups, you found men who when asked why they were having the surgery would say things such as: You know I’m scared but for the past 8 years I haven’t been able to do anything. I haven’t been able to play golf because of my shortness of breath. If I survive the post op period, I will be good by September. I already have my tee time scheduled.
In the high-risk group, however, when asked why they were having surgery the answer would be something like: My doctor told me to.
Something like 40 % of the patients in the high-risk group died and only 2 % in the low risk group died. The low risk group had a why.
If you have no reason to live your best life, you live the kind of life that seems like you prefer death and you don't even know it. Sound familiar? I don’t want that anymore. I want to struggle, so I can feel good about overcoming. Those moments where everything you worked for was worth it. I live for those today. Those goosebumps, the smile you can't stop smiling, the recognition and validation that you continued to do the right thing despite what everyone around you was doing, and despite what your emotions were telling you in the moment. That's what I live for today, the growth. I don't want to regret not growing anymore. I don't want to end up in positions I don’t want to be in knowing that I knew better. I don’t want to feel pain from lessons I already learned anymore. And you shouldn’t either.
APPLICATION:
First, figure out where you will end up if you don’t change. You don't change and 5 years pass, where are you? Well, first off, you’re even more chemically dependent on your drug of choice. How does that feel waking up? How do your kids look at you? What’s that feel like? How much more have your relationships suffered? How many friends have you lost? How many people did you not help that you could have helped? What’s your life of misery feel like?
Second, write about those same things as if you had grown for 5 years. You wake up fresh. You aren’t addicted. No substances control you. How’s that feel? Your kids are obviously proud and look to you daily for comfort, love, and guidance. What’s that feel like? That’s a good start on why.
Or do nothing. It's entirely up to you.
If you are struggling getting started on a vision, or a reason why, let’s try to figure out why you act the way you do now.
Why are you doing what you are doing right now? What is your intention with the actions you take daily? Listen, many of us are unconscious as to why we act the way we do and that’s the first problem. The goal here is to be more conscious of our intentions in the actions we take daily. I’m sure most of your intention is to be comfortable. If you spend 4 hours a day watching Netflix and you do that because its comfortable then you’re okay with not changing. We don’t change when we're comfortable. Why boils down to intention. I'm working out because I have an intention to get bigger stronger and healthier. I'm reading because I have an intention to learn. Be aware first, find your why is second. The trick is to be able to have the focus moment to moment, for a long period of time. To remain consistent in your pursuits, that’s the hardest part.
You want to cultivate a habit of asking why. Why you do what you do daily. If the answer comes back to comfort, you may want to change the behavior so the answer to why is growth, or something that’s meaningful. Comfort is necessary at times but is never very meaningful. Comfort feels good in the moment but is rarely reflected on positively. Take action that you will reflect on positively.
The key to all of this is not expecting things to change quickly. Honestly, you shouldn’t expect anything at all. Changing is hard, and life is even harder. There is no permanent security outside of your ability to contend with life, and your ability to adapt to life.
You know it's interesting I often think about why addicts go back to using once they've been clean for a while. Obviously, their problems while they’re clean aren’t nearly as bad as the problems they faced when they were using. However, I do think that's the point. We don’t face problems when we are using, we turn the problem off. We get so used to turning problems off and not facing them that when we have a real problem to face in recovery - even if it isn't that big of a deal it's hard to deal with and we resort to changing the way we feel. Every problem you have is an opportunity to get better at contending with problems. The problem is you think you shouldn’t have problems.
I had a client tell me recently that he hated being lectured. For some reason this stuck in my head all day and I couldn't stop thinking about it. It's interesting right? Cause I hate being lectured too. I hate rules, I hate authority, I really hate all of it. Earlier in my life the hate for those things led me to avoiding them at all costs. The problem is, with avoidance, and not paying attention to rules or listening to lectures is that you end up with more rules in places that force you to listen to lectures. What this client doesn’t realize is that if you hate being lectured, stop acting in a way and making decisions that put in places where you end up being lectured. If you hate rules, stop breaking them and ending up in places with more rules. Your actions are telling me you love lectures, and you love rules.
Listen, I really despised management where I used to work. They micro-manage the shit out of everything and make work more difficult and stressful than it really needs to be. I must get documentation in daily and do my job to their standards, so I don't have to deal with them. Seriously, there are other employees who don't do certain tasks on time and get talked to, if not written up about it. All they do is say they don't have time. However, I see them waste time they could have used completing the task they keep getting talked to about. If they really hated getting talked to, they would finish what needs to be finished in order for them to be left alone. That's what I do.
I hate rules too. This one's a little tougher. However, over time I've built my life so that I have my place where I make the rules. This is my home. If you hate rules so much build your life so that you only must follow your rules. Hopefully, one day, I'll have my own business and I won’t have to abide by my employer’s rules.
Are you going towards something? Or are you waiting? Imagine living a life you consciously created instead of surviving in a life you unconsciously ended up with. Every single person who has ever changed their life has a reason why they changed it.
What’s going to keep you from giving up?
