Maybe not right now, or maybe there has been a lot of it, but there are going to be times when you convince yourself that today is different, that you there are good reasons to go back to your old habits. You’ll blame some disruption or some change around you. You’ll tell yourself you’re actually going online to look up something that’s not as bad as your old habits. We are so creative!
And then you’ll see how those reasons and rationalizing can take you right back into the old habits you wanted to leave behind.
Learn from those experiences. Brains love compulsions. They love to go back to old, familiar, comforting compulsions, even when those compulsions are a cage that holds us back in life.
For me, the most helpful thing with relapses was to not see it as some problem with myself. Getting caught up in lots of judgments just adds even more work to the huge changes we’re making. Instead, relapse is an opportunity to learn, to see the big picture, and then make changes further upstream.
For example, I thought I had to put all of my effort into resisting urges and compulsions while I was on my computer. But if I looked further upstream in the evening, I could see that the compulsions really began when I turned my computer on as soon as I got home from work or school. Instead of struggling with changes later in the evening, a more useful change at first was to not turn on my computer when I came home. That was very difficult at first. It felt like I had to. I couldn’t imagine making a meal or doing anything else without some music or a movie playing in the background. But like we were talking about at the beginning, so much of the compulsive pattern is us wanting to control and avoid feelings. I was doing that right from the moment I got home. So it made sense I would struggle to not do that later in the evening.
If you find you’re running into challenges talking yourself into the old habits again and again, check out the Relapse Diagnostic Course. It’s a series of exercises I found helpful when I would wander off the path into the swamp.