While homeless and in drug treatment court, someone broke free from methamphetamine by closing their eyes repeatedly to vividly imagine their future: a house, a car, a job, conversations with family. They visualized mowing the yard, the details so real they could feel them. This internal rehearsal, they say, reprogrammed their subconscious and made everything else irrelevant.
How did you stop using Tina? That is the number one question I'm asked, and I'm going to give you the number one technique I used in my recovery. When I first stopped using Tina, I was homeless, and I was going to drug treatment court, and I was going to rehab, and I was working 2 jobs. And there was nothing in any of those things that helped me recover more than just closing my eyes and imagining and dreaming who I was going to be in the next year. I used all my 5 senses and I imagined what my life was going to be like. I knew what I wanted. I saw the house that the kids and I were going to be in. I saw the car we were going to drive. I saw the job I was going to have. I started having conversations with the kids in front of the TV. I started having conversations with my coworkers that I didn't have yet. I started mowing the yard that I didn't have. Whether it was 5:30 AM on the public bus, or it was on a break in drug treatment, it was on the break on one of my jobs, or right before I went to bed, I imagined viscerally who I was going to be in the next year. And that, that was the number one way, the number one reason I got free from using Tina. Because you can't— nothing on the outside is going to make any difference until the internal landscape changes and you know where you're going. How do you move forward if you don't know where you're going? And how do you reprogram your subconscious to get out of the patterns of using if you don't give it a new goal? And once you imagine the end goal, who you are in a year, everything else falls into place. Your job is to accept everything that comes in your life as happening for you, no matter what it is. Ah, this is part of my process. This is part of my path. This is something for me to learn from, no matter what, even relapse. After you imagine that end goal and you keep imagining it, then you respond to life in that way that you accept that everything is happening to you is pushing you along that route.
