Craving (19 page)

The things that you know about yourself but others don’t know belong in the second “secret” or “hidden” quadrant. Sharing some of what’s in the second quadrant can be very frightening. Self-disclosure of this sort is, of course, emotionally risky. What do I mean by “emotionally risky”? I mean that if you share these secrets, people might criticize you, shun you, or not want anything to do with you when you tell them about these parts of you. You could get your feelings hurt. Actually, you
will
get your feelings hurt. That’s why it is so important to pick the right people to be open with and to constantly evaluate the relationships to make sure they are safe and loving enough to risk this sort of disclosure. This is
not
a recommendation to go and share your darkest secrets with the world. But at the right time, and in the right context and with the right people, taking these types of risks is absolutely essential to our growth. Start slowly and take it easy. You’ll know when it’s right if you listen to your inner voice, and you can do a little at a time to try it on for size. This process is exactly how we grow emotionally and become more mature in our response to life and its opportunities and challenges.

By the way, this type of self-disclosure is also the essence of being tough. Despite what you see in the movies and on TV, toughness does
not
mean holding back your emotions and being an impenetrable stone wall. That would be the opposite of courageous: the total avoidance of emotional risk.

Rather, toughness is about seeking the right relationships, where vulnerability and openness can be risked. It means being willing to experience pain when it’s the right time. It’s very easy to become falsely convinced that being tough means hiding emotionally.

This sort of deception is remarkably powerful and seductive, and a constant battle when it comes to craving. It tricks you into believing that your truth is not strong enough or worthy enough to share. Truth, however, is tough. That is its nature. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said it best: “Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at the touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening” Find a safe place and a loving, trusting friend. Take your truth out and share it. Kick it around a bit, on
your
terms. The results will be remarkable.

One sometimes surprising and nearly inevitable side effect of this type of self-disclosure, when done in a safe relationship, is intimacy. As you learned in
chapter 6
, spirituality and connectedness (and, by extension, intimacy) are essential to releasing your cravings. That’s why this second quadrant is so essential to dealing with cravings. Remarkably, the very information that you are afraid of sharing because it might push people away is itself the cement that binds friendships and creates the opportunity for true intimacy and connectedness. This is the healthy way that wounds become scars.

You have another set of truths about you that you are not aware of. Everyone has these. Nobody can see everything about themselves, and without the perspective of others (even if they aren’t always right—and they aren’t), we would certainly be blind. So the things that others know about you that you cannot or do not see in yourself belong in the third quadrant, the “blind” quadrant. These truths are in your blind spot. Finally, there are aspects of yourself that neither you nor those around you have figured out, and these go in quadrant 4, which is called “unknown.”

Ever since those two psychologists developed this way of looking at what is known and unknown about ourselves, this technique has been used in nearly every addiction treatment setting. The reasons are simple. First, since we all suffer from cognitive bias (as explained in
chapter 3
), the Johari window offers a useful way of seeing that there is much about us that we don’t see but that others do. Because this is true, we may be able to start getting glimpses of the side that we are currently blind to by simply asking others for their insight/perspective and genuinely listening. You can’t trust everything someone else says about you, but if several people whom you trust make observations about you that are consistent, they are worth paying attention to,
especially if you disagree with them.
In addiction treatment settings, you will often hear this adage:

If one person says you’re a duck, you can safely dismiss him. If another says it, you might want to pay attention. If a third person says you are a duck, better start quacking.

Actually, ducklings don’t begin quacking until several weeks after birth. They have to grow up a bit first. Exploring and facing what others know about you, and what you may not know about yourself, is an important part of growing up emotionally, and, as I’ve noted before, the fundamental problems of life are never really solved—they are outgrown.

Of course, your friends and the people you trust will also have a limited ability to offer you their perspective if you are keeping secret or hidden important facts about yourself. Your reasons for keeping secrets might be very good ones, or they could simply be driven by anxiety and fear. Either way, if you can’t tell the people you really trust about these parts of yourself, they won’t be able to help you. Perhaps more important, that degree of secrecy can be a source and a symptom of shame that, as I noted earlier, is toxic and partly responsible for driving cravings. I want to emphasize again that this is not a recommendation to tell everyone your darkest secrets. But if there isn’t one nonjudgmental, trustworthy person in your life whom you can count on and open up to, maybe it’s time to try and form such a relationship. In Twelve Step programs it can be a sponsor, in religions it can be a pastor or other spiritual leader, and for many it’s their counselor—or even their hairdresser. Regardless of who it is, you need to have someone in your life you can trust; someone who will tell you the truth as they see it, even if it hurts your feelings; someone who won’t shame or judge you, won’t criticize or blame you, but will simply offer you their frank, honest appraisal of your situation. When you find such a person (or persons) and feel confident that you can trust them, you’ve got to tell them the truth about yourself. This truth includes your secrets, the dark spots, the stuff you are perhaps most ashamed of, maybe even the stuff you swore you’d never tell another human being. Religions have emphasized the value of confession, and psychologists, psychoanalysts, therapists, and psychiatrists have often noted that, without the truth, little progress can be achieved. And in Twelve Step groups, a frequently heard adage is “Your secrets keep you sick.” In my experience, these observations are very true. The more you can illuminate these hidden aspects of yourself in a safe, trusting relationship, the easier it will be for you to surrender and step off the craving cycle.

The journey of becoming free from cravings requires change and growth. Certain aspects of yourself you cannot know right now, and your friends and trusted loved ones can’t see them either. These are elements of yourself that may become uncovered over time, as you grow and learn more about who you are. That’s what the fourth quadrant of the Johari window, the “unknown” quadrant, is all about. The Johari window offers an invitation to discover, explore, change, and ultimately grow. In my experience working with addicts, as you do you will learn things about yourself that you couldn’t imagine when you began. You will grow emotionally and react to life in a more mature and fulfilling manner.

Perhaps the most important role that the Johari window can play in combating the naïve perception of immunity is to awaken you to the idea that you really may not know enough about yourself and your cravings to prevent you from acting out on them. I’m not trying to be pessimistic or crush hope, but experience confirms that it’s often when you think you’ve got it all figured out that you are most vulnerable and most at risk. If you can broaden your perspective enough to see that you might need help from others, then you can begin to develop some resiliency against being tricked yet again by your cravings.

The Risks That Accompany Success

It’s worth mentioning that you’re actually most at risk of the naïve perception of immunity when things are going well. For example, consider the alcoholic who has been sober for three months and is about to relapse by taking her first drink in ninety days. At the moment, things are going great. She has never felt better. She’s so glad she’s finally licked the alcohol problem. She’s been rehired at her job, and her marriage and family life have improved as well. She is even getting back on the beam financially. If you were to do a physical exam on her, you’d find she is in great shape. Her blood pressure is finally normal, and if you took a breathalyzer reading at that moment, it would read 0.000, just as it has every day for the last ninety days. She is sober, and by all outward appearances, she is doing great.

However, if you could read her mind, you would find that it tells a different story. In her mind are a variety of thoughts placing her at extreme risk of taking that first drink (and the ones that inevitably follow) and ruining her sobriety. For some people the thought might be “I’m finally okay; I’ve proven I don’t
need
alcohol.” For others it could be “I don’t care—I deserve a drink.” Other lies that your brain can generate may involve a desire to celebrate, commiserate, take the edge off, “prove” that you don’t really have a drinking problem, or confirm that you had been overreacting to the problem. These types of lies can come in every form you could imagine, and then some. Often they occur after a period of success or when things are calm. On the other hand, they may occur in response to stress. These thoughts can even be so subtle that you don’t notice them. The one thing they have in common is that they serve to convince you to take the first drink (or that first cigarette, or that first piece of cheesecake, or whatever your craving is). And that’s the naïve perception of immunity.

One particularly dangerous idea that sometimes develops in people who are about to relapse and give in to their cravings is the sense that if they can just learn enough or acquire enough information, they’ll be able to fix their craving problem, or resist their urges, or choose something different than the object of their cravings. Sometimes this comes in the form of believing they can think through, rationalize, or talk their way out of any craving-related thoughts. To be sure, information and knowledge are important. You do need to learn which actions will be helpful in eliminating your cravings and the chance that you will act on them if they do recur. But the idea that facts alone can solve your problem and eliminate the ongoing need to change your behavior is the essence of naïveté and overconfidence. A prominent Ukrainian geneticist named Theodosius Dobzhansky said, “Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.” In this case, that solution is ongoing action.

So it seems that you are most likely to believe you are immune when things are going well. Does that mean you should be constantly afraid of achievement and never be able to enjoy your successes? Does it mean you can never regain confidence? No, the truth is just the opposite. The secret lies in the difference between confidence and overconfidence.

On the face of it, overconfidence might seem to be the same as confidence, only too much of it. However, confidence and overconfidence are more different than similar. The sense that you no longer need to form healthy habits, that you can simply resist on your own, and that you can revert to old patterns of behavior is overconfidence. The notion that your craving was a phase, a temporary problem, and now you can finally rest is overconfidence. The belief “If I can just acquire enough information about cravings, I’ll be okay” is overconfidence. Overconfidence is naïve. It’s this very overconfidence that results in the naïve perception of immunity. Overconfidence is extremely dangerous, and everyone is at risk of experiencing it. The most extreme version of overconfidence is hubris. This type of false pride is responsible for much of the relapse or return to compulsive behavior we see when it comes to craving and addictive behaviors.

So what exactly does healthy confidence look like? What are the characteristics of someone who is experiencing true confidence? First of all, it’s important to have some real success in dealing with the craved behavior. A few days or weeks of improvement in a behavior usually aren’t enough. If it’s been two weeks since you last acted out on your craving, there is much to celebrate, and you should be proud and keep up the great work. But that’s usually far too short to result in real, healthy confidence.

There is no definitive cutoff for how long a new behavior pattern should last before it leads to healthy confidence, but in my experience it’s rarely weeks or a few months. Usually (but not always), it takes many months or years. The key is to develop enough abstinence or success in eliminating the craved behavior to be confident, but to always be vigilant against overconfidence. Another aspect of healthy confidence is that healthy behaviors and habits no longer feel mostly like chores; rather, they will usually become joyful and something you look forward to. You may find yourself as attracted to the actions that produce success as the success itself. You’ll learn more about this in
chapter 10
, when we’ll explore joy, hope, and recovery. But to give you a sense of what to look forward to, you can begin to trust that your confidence is not overconfidence when the actions you took to develop your behavior change and reduce your cravings—the actions that produced these joyous results—are themselves fairly consistently joyful and pleasant. I call it being in the confidence zone.