The last step in the positive change process is to create a Personal Plan that will help you get from where you are to achieving your new goals. Strategies can include how you think and plan, what you will do differently, how you enlist support from others for you new goals, who you spend time with and who you avoid, how you care for yourself in other ways and how you address issues related to your use in other more effective ways. Rather than deprivation and simply trying to control yourself, this approach focuses on out how you strategize to implement your new goals and care for yourself most effectively.
Below are a list of strategies that many people find useful to combine in Personal Plan.
Strategies
Playing with the habit rather than enforcing change can make the process easier and less of a set up for frustration. See what happens if you wait five or thirty seconds before you engage in it. Take a breath and Urge Surf when you feel like doing it and stop the action, see what you feel and then decide to do it or not.
Self-monitoring triggering event-thought-feeling-urge to use-thought-choice habit sequences
Dialogue with the urge. Speak to both sides of your ambivalence about giving in to the urge and see if a decision to use at this point seems to be the best choice given all of your interests.
Identify your triggers. Turn your attention away from the urge and consider what triggered the urge. Consider whether using is the best or only solution to that feeling, thought or event and what else you might do to express, care for or otherwise deal with the trigger.
18 Alternatives. Brainstorm a list of 18 or more alternative responses you might have to the things that typically trigger your desire to use. 18 is the number that a patient of mine came up with for himself. Practicing alternatives reduces the risk of coming to depend on using as the only response to your triggers/way of caring for yourself. Alternatives give you a range of ways of caring for yourself and keep you thinking about the best ways to care for yourself.
Have a Game Plan. Plan in advance for each situation in which you will be using. What are your goals for each using occasion? Plan a strategy for successfully achieving your goals as you did for your Ideal Use Plan. Think about your intended goals for the event. How much? How often? What are safe limits? What is a safe pace? What do you do between? Eat before. When do you stop? Be a good “defensive driver” by trying to anticipate challenges to your plans and prepare strategies to meet them. For example,what will you say when a friend questions you about your limited use? How will you respond when you know you have had enough and you feel the desire for more? What will you say to yourself to support the plan? Who is your support for the plan? Do you have a safety buddy?
Who is in your support system? Making this change may be hard work and may take time. The forces that pull for continuing to repeat old habits are many. You may find the need for a team to support your decision to make positive change. This may include friends, family, self-help groups and professionals. Consider who you may find it useful to invite on to your team.
The Abstinence Alternative is a framework for you to use as a guide for evaluating you relationship to substances and considering what your healthiest relationship to substances may be whether that is cutting back, using more safely or stopping altogether. We considered setting the internal stage for change,learning specific skills for changing, self-assessment of your current pattern of using and its positive and negative impact on your life, embracing ambivalence to change, setting positive change goals and a variety of strategies to use to evaluate and achieve these goals.
