Trigger and Urges: how can we best deal with them?
The urge is the sudden desire to pick up a drink or a drug.
A trigger is a person, place, thing, event, or emotion that causes someone to have an urge.
There are 2 viable strategies here: the first is what we will call traditional wisdom. This includes all of the various coping devices that people employ in order to stop themselves from using drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. Examples of these coping mechanisms might be:
1) Picking up the phone and calling someone from your support system or the fellowship
2) Avoiding the old people, places, and things that trigger you
3) Calling your sponsor
4) Using either prayer or meditation
5) Using one of the “tools of the program”
6) Going to an AA meeting
Photo by e-magic and furryscaly
These are not bad suggestions. They have traditionally been passed along in AA and other fellowships as suggestions for dealing with triggers and urges.
But how well do they really work for dealing with triggers and urges? Considering the dismal relapse rates of recovery, perhaps we should examine a different strategy for dealing with the random triggers and urges that will inevitably come our way. The ideas listed above are all tactics. They are reactions to situations that we are suddenly faced with.
Now ask yourself these 2 questions:
* What if you could prevent the situation from occurring altogether?
* What if you had a built-in safety net, already in place, to help you with any situations that do happen to occur?
The strategies below allow you to do both of those things. They are extremely powerful because they can help to prevent urges before they start, and also eliminate most–if not all–of the typical triggers you might encounter.
Note that these strategies actually worked for me, and have guided me through to seven solid years of sobriety:
Photo by NancyK! and Aaron Jacobs
Strategy #1 – Immerse Yourself in Support
Sever all of your unhealthy associations. Surround yourself with new friends in recovery. If necessary, attend several meetings daily. This creates a huge safety net and support system.
Strategy #2 – Long Term Treatment
Live in a facility with other recovering addicts and alcoholics. This creates a huge safety net and encourages accountability.
Strategy #3 – Spiritual Experience – Transform Your Personality
Start helping others as soon as possible and connect with a higher power. Cultivate gratitude. This breaks the old thought patterns and will diminish the tendency to have random urges.
Dealing with triggers and urges is important, but what happens when we get stuck in our recovery? Sometimes we run out of steam when we really should be pushing ourselves forward. Next week I’ll be posting a complete guide to fighting complacency in recovery.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
“Sever all of your unhealthy associations.”
That’s the most important, I think, and has been the hardest for my youngest son to overcome. Great post.
Thanks for the comment, Sue. I know it’s really hard for young people to sever those old connections, because I was somewhat young myself when getting clean and sober (24 years old).
The key for me was long term treatment. It gave me a whole new set of friends–people in recovery who were trying to get sober like myself. Without those new associations, I would have been to miserable to try staying sober.
It’s so hard when you’re young. It’s not fair to ask a young person to give up their friends, even when those friends are unhealthy. But that is what has to happen. I don’t think you could ever force it though. A person has to want it bad enough to walk away from those friends.
The argument that “those people aren’t really your friends” doesn’t wash. I’ve been there. Those bad influencing people still are your friends, and it hurts to walk away from them. It hurts terribly. And it is the scariest thing in the world.
Good luck to you and your son. I really hope he finds the path. It is so tricky when people are young though.
I like your breakdown of urges, triggers, and coping mechanisms.
I don’t know if you’ve explored Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), but I think you’ll enjoy “internal processing” strategies. In NLP, strategies are very specific recipes or scripts for our programmed responses. We don’t install all our own programs, but we can certainly shape them, once we are aware of the. I find the precision in NLP to really be the helpful part.
Thanks for the comment, JD. NLP sounds like a very useful model for addicts in recovery to help them deal with their triggers and urges.
By the way everyone, click on JD’s name in the comment above to check out his website–it is full of value and looks like an excellent resource for anyone looking to enhance their recovery.
Hello Patrick,
This is my first time reading your articles and I enjoyed several so far. I think you are doing a great service to people by sharing your successes. I just started a blog myself and I can see that I would learn a lot by watching your articles. I will subscribe.