Hi, and welcome to today’s session. My name is Gilles Brideau, I’m a psychotherapist, coach and hypnotist that lives and works in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
Today I wanted to talk a little bit about the cycle of addiction or the cycle of despair. For a lot of my clients when they come in, they’re struggling between kind of a balance of two emotions.
On the one side they talk about depression, so that can be depression, it could be sadness, it could be loneliness. What they typically feel is these negative emotions. What usually happens is that if they were to stay that and weren’t getting those needs met on effective basis, it usually goes to the other extreme which is anger, irritation, and in some cases, anxiety. Understand that the loop goes like this. What does that really mean?
It means that a person will feel depressed, down, sad, lonely, and then they get the surge of energy where they say, “You know I need to pull my socks up, I need to get on top of this, I’m just tired of feeling this way.” They feel frustrated, irritated, all that kind of stuff, but you can imagine that these negative emotions are extremely draining, so their life would be just this, “Ugh, I’m so exhausted from fighting all the time.” That leads them to feeling back to that connected state of depression, sadness and loneliness.
You could see that the cycle just spins again, and again, and again. Often times what clients describe this is despair. Know that this video today has been adapted from one that I’ve seen from, of course, one of the trainings that I’ve took which was with Tony Robbins. One of the videos that you may see on YouTube, he does this work with a lady named Tawny, and Tawny struggles with depression. If this looks familiar, you can use that as a reference point.
I know in working with addictions and explaining the model in this way, it helps them not only highlight what the problems are but also ways to get out of it. Honestly, people don’t really want to stay in this negative loop again, and again, and again, so what they typically do is they do a down strategy which is usually called a distraction, and I’ll explain what that means in a minute.
Distractions are like going downhill. They’re initially easier, they seem to be less effort, they’re usually the ones that people want to try first. The up strategy is the six human needs, so we’re going to talk about them a little bit more in detail. What could distractions include? The most common one that I see is alcohol and drug use. With the alcohol and drugs, it just kind of removes people from this cycle of pain and it allows them to distract for a while.
I’ve never yet met a client who’s figured out a way to continue drinking while sleeping, so the effects of this distraction wear off in time, and then they’re back into the cycle, plus now guilt, and possibly shame. They find after a while that the strategy doesn’t work or they have an epiphany and say, “Well, I need to look at another strategy that maybe will be more effective.”
The next common one that people switch to is work. Again, if you stay busy enough and become a human doing rather than a human being, so just the sense that your value is perceived by what you do not who you are. Work gives you value, you earn a paycheck, the neighbors will say, “Wow, he’s got this possession, this possession.” It seems like you have it all together, but all the while when they are not busy distracting they still feel this cycle of going back and forth. Again, that works for a while, but usually here people feel burnt up so they might use a different distraction.
Television. Now we can continue. Facebook, internet, shopping, gambling, eating or food, relationships, religion, porn, sex. Know that with all these distractions that I’ve put, none of them on their own are actually bad or morally wrong, it has nothing to do with that. It’s just simply a person is using this strategy of a distraction to lessen their pain.
When a person comes in and says they consume too much, or they gamble too much, or they’re having problems with their relationship, I just simply look at it as they’re using a strategy that’s just not usually working, that they’re just simply using a distraction rather than looking out what the possible needs are. The up strategy is a much more effective one.
I have a video on my website and on YouTube about the six human needs and how they’re important not only in relationships but in all areas of your life. When your needs get met in a more efficient way, you’re much more likely to get to happiness and joy. The six needs quickly are certainty (and I’ll have this [in the distraction 00:06:34]), uncertainty of variety, significance, love/connection. These are the four needs of the personality. The two spiritual needs are growth and contribution beyond self.
Very quickly, certainty is your ability to predict how things will outcome. It’s really around the avoidance of pain. We all have our need for certainty by far, but this one really looks at the avoidance of pain and how you really want and like to have things predictable in your life. Uncertain variety is the opposite. If you always did the same thing in the same way, ate the same meal everyday even if it’s your favorite meal, always watch the same television program repeated because you always know the outcome and that’s something that you really enjoy, you would become bored out of your [trait 00:07:37]
We always have to have a little bit of spice, so that’s variety. Some people fulfill the need for variety by reading more books, seeing more films, that kind of stuff. Others it’s to jump out of planes so to really get the heart racing, so it just depends what your level of variety is. The next one is significance, so it’s how you feel loved, valued, respected, it’s really how you are or feel like the king or the queen of your castle.
The next one is love/connection. Why is there a slash between love and connection? Because for some people that four-letter word love is a scary one because they usually have it associated in their life to pain. Some people settle for connection, so to feel connected to a person, to a group or to a cause. Some people that are single usually make the question that it’s impossible for me to have that as a high need, but that’s actually false because maybe it’s their connection to a peer group, or a cause or anything like that.
Usually what we look at in terms of discussion is these four needs and what meets their needs in a highway. Know addiction as a core meets a lot of these needs in a highway. Meaning if you are addicted for example to cocaine, how sure are you that you’re going to feel better? Cocaine is a drug that you could feel at your lowest of lows, and once you use it you could feel better than you’ve ever felt in your life. The caveat is once that drug wears off, it’s called the crash, you’ll feel worse than you did before. You know that the only thing that will allow you to feel great again is to use again, that’s how powerful that drug is.
When you’re using substances of course there’s variety, you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know what’s going to happen next, you don’t know if you’re going to get caught, you don’t know if it’s going to cause struggles in your relationship. There’s an immense amount of variety. Significance, especially if you’re within a peer group. Like for young people that I work with, if they’re drug dealing and stuff they become the go-to person, the big man on campus. A lot of times what kids have said to me is, “I don’t mind giving up the substances, I just don’t want to give up the lifestyle of dealing” because it’s how they get their identity.
Lastly, love and connection. With a lot of clients that they say that when they are using they feel more connected to themselves and to their peer group because it could be that it gives them a lot of courage, it could be that they feel more connected to themselves and others. This two last needs around growth and contribution is really how you get to a happy, living a fulfilled life. It starts with pushing out of comfort zones.
What I congratulate clients when they come to their first appointment is that you pushed out of your comfort zone by coming to see me the first time. You challenged yourself because you wanted a little bit more. It’s anytime you push past the year and do something that’s really scary. The last one is contribution beyond self. We don’t live in a me society, we live in a we society. The more that you can give back, the more you can get fulfillment.
That’s why a lot of these self-help programs are so wonderful because it is based on contribution and doing 12 steps. The 12 steps is how do I give back what I’ve been blessed with. That’s it, just a little explanation of the cycle of despair. I hope that this has been helpful, please continue to perused either my website or my YouTube channel for more information on addictions, mental health and business.
Thanks so much for joining me today and have a wonderful day.