Step 3
Self-Assessing Your Substance Use
Your motivation to make specific changes in your relationship with substances should ideally be based on your own assessment of the place substance use has in your life.
Before you can decide how to change this relationship, you must be clear about how your current use is problematic, if indeed it is. You may ultimately decide that stopping is the best choice for you. But a commitment to stop is not necessary for you to begin making positive changes in your use.
As you identify negative aspects of your use, you can make small changes to reduce the harmful consequences. Self-assessment will help you become aware of negative consequences, of how your pattern of use is causing them and of other aspects of yourself or your life that may be contributing to them. Your substance use may be intertwined with all other aspects of your life, so understanding your relationship with substances will provide clues to positive changes that you might make in other life areas, which in return may positively impact your substance use.
Substances play many roles and carry multiple meanings in people’s lives; these need to be clarified if we’re to understand what anchors a current pattern of using.
Substances may help people relax, introspect, or feel more connected to their bodies. They may provide a sense of connection to a community or a sense of identity; represent a rebellion against parental control; help people to access creativity; provide a bridge or bond between people; provide a sense of self-reliance; soothe emotional distress, such as anxiety; enhance sex and intensify pleasurable experiences; aid work and more. Substances can help and hurt at the same time.
How does your use positively and negatively impact your health, emotions, self-esteem, relationships, work or school, finances, social life and identity? What roles and meanings does your use have for you?
Identifying the multiple meanings of your use can make it possible to consider other solutions that may relieve some of the pressure to use.
These two strategies can help with this process:
Strategy 1: Tracking, charting or journaling
Simply keeping a record of your substance use has been found to promote positive changes with no other intervention. Over the course of a week, you might simply write down the day, time, amount and method of using for each instance of substance use.
If you feel up to it, you can also note the feelings, thoughts, expectations and circumstances preceding use and the immediate consequences of using (how did it work out?).
Strategy 2: Microanalysis
This strategy is designed to clarify how you typically use substances and how they fit into your life, both in terms of which factors affect your desire to use and how substances affect other aspects of your life, positively or negatively.
Using the information you gathered through tracking/charting/journaling, write a detailed description of your pattern of use. Address the following:
Describe the pattern: When, where and how much do you tend to use?
Identify triggers and motives: What contributes to your desire to use in terms of what you were feeling? During the week you tracked, what did you want from using? What were your justifications or reasons for using? And what was the context, in terms of who you were with and what was happening around you?
Evaluate the results and consequences of your use: Describe the qualities of the effects/high; did it deliver what you wanted? How did it positively and negatively affect other aspects of your life, such as health, freedom, finances, relationships, intimacy, school or work, emotional life, self-esteem, social life, recreation and ambition?
Evaluate the quality and severity of your use: How often does it come from conscious choice? How often does it come from impulse and habit? Do you find yourself using when you think and feel you shouldn’t because of the potential harms? Is this related to some clearly identifiable triggering feeling or event? Does using typically enhance a social situation for you? Is it an occasional problem in some way? Do you feel cravings, or that you are “out of control”?
What might you like to change about your use?