Mate's Method and More for Dealing with Addictive Impulses

A participant in an online forum asked, "Is there anything you tell yourself to delay using on a taper schedule (or when completely sober and thoughts of using pop up)? Any mantras?" I answered...

Big time addiction expert Gabor Mate (pronouced "Mah-TAY") teaches a five-step method for this in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts:

1. Relabel the thought or urge to use as just a thought or urge and not any sort of accurate appraisal of actual reality.
2. Reattribute that thought or urge as nothing more than a product of what goes on in the conditioned, (possibly) in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized and neurally “hard-wired” default mode network in the addict's mind / brain.
3. Refocus onto a healthy distraction to give the neuroemotional energy of the urge time to dissipate... because it almost always will. (Marsha Linehan came up with this thirty years ago for the hyper-emotional victims of childhood trauma who tend to be intense reactors to triggering and addicts of one sort or another.)
4. Revalue or, actually, DEvalue the long-term consequences of rewarding and reinforcing the addiction process like poverty, wretched lifestyle, increased violence, broken relationships, wrecked careers, etc.
5. Recreate a scenario of a life that is less stressful and more comfortable.

I doubt if either Mate or Linehan would have predicted they'd be partners in solving the problem addressed in the material at the link immediately below, but they are widely regarded as the "match made in heaven" among many I know in the professional addiction and trauma treatment biospheres.

Will the Addict Ever Stop Using SOMETHING if He or She remains Depressed, Anxious & Belief-Bound?

Or that they would be the leaders of a movement that is loudly questioning the at-least-50-year-old staple of treating the two issues separately and in chronological order of addiction first, trauma second. But another big name in the field, Pia Mellody began to move in that direction in the late 1980s when she saw how many substance abusers were dangerously codependent, overly peer-influenced survivors of some form of child abuse.

I've been on board with Linehan and Mellody since the late '90s, and with Mate for the last several months due to several Reddit posts made here and elsewhere by those already familiar with his work. Low and behold, the dots seem to connect quite nicely, at least for me.

All that said, Mate's method seems to be more applicable to those at the third, fourth and (especially the) fifth of the five stages of therapeutic recovery adapted from Prochaska, DiClemente & Norcross in A Basic Addiction References List. So what can one do aside from find an expert in Miller & Rollnick's "motivational enhancement," which isn't that difficult nowadays, although -- IME -- that method is difficult for those are still in the first two stages of those five to grasp and master.

While I was already into the fifth of those stages relative to substance abuse when I hit the wall on another form of addiction a few years ago, I was able to use this mnemonic system to deal what had been a very dense default mode network around that addiction matrix. And one doesn't really have to have any more than the first six of those "down" experientially to get effective results, at least at first.

In my experience, however, it is also crucial to get involved in Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Marijuana Anonymous, Pills Anonymous or SMART Recovery as soon as possible. And to find a detox on the SAMHSA website if necessary.