Step 6
Making Your Personal Plan for Positive Change
The final step in our Positive Change Pathway is to create a personal plan that will help you get from where you are to achieving your new goals. Rather than deprivation and simply trying to control yourself, this approach focuses on strategizing to implement your new goals and care for yourself most effectively.
Points to consider include: how you think and plan; what you will do differently; how you enlist support from others for your new goals; who you spend time with and who you avoid; how you care for yourself in new ways; and how you address issues related to your use in other, more effective ways.
Some useful strategies for your plan
Play with your habit: Doing this, 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 30 seconds before you engage in it. Take a breath and urge-surf when you feel like doing it; stop the action, see what you feel and then decide whether or not to do it.
Self-monitor: Identify triggering Event —> Thought —> Feeling —> Urge —> Decision —> Action sequences.
Dialogue with the urge: Consider both sides of your ambivalence about giving into the urge and see whether a decision to use now 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 it. Consider whether using is the best or only response to that feeling, thought or event and what else you might do to express yourself, care for yourself or otherwise respond to the trigger.
Eighteen alternatives: Brainstorm a list of 18 or more alternative responses you might have to the things that typically trigger your desire to use. (A patient of ours came up with that number 18 for himself.) Practicing alternatives reduces the risk of coming to depend on using, helping you to develop a range of ways of caring for yourself.
Have a game plan: Get ready in advance for each situation in which you will be using. What are your goals for this occasion? How much? How often? What are safe limits? What is a safe pace? What do you do between? When do you stop? Plan a strategy, as you did with your ideal use plan, for successfully achieving your goals. Eat beforehand. Be a good “defensive driver” by anticipating challenges to your plans and preparing 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? Do you have a safety buddy?
Who is in your support system? Making positives changes may be hard work and may take time. Many forces pull us toward the repetition of old habits. To counteract them, you may need a team around you to support your decisions. This may include friends, family, self-help groups and professionals—consider who you may find it useful to invite on to your team.