Nick StumboExecutive Director driving healing from sexual brokenness

There's A Pattern To Your Emotions

11 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this personal narrative excerpt, the speaker recounts a pivotal conversation with board member Ben Bennett in Dallas, where Bennett introduces the FASTER scale—a tool for mapping emotional states. The speaker experiences a surge of hope upon recognizing that their relapses follow a discernible emotional pattern rather than being random, but this hope quickly turns to anger and devastation as they feel deceived by their previous self‑belief that they were hopeless and incapable of change. The moment marks a profound shift in self‑perception, highlighting the emotional turbulence of confronting hidden patterns in addiction recovery.

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I remember sitting with Ben Bennett, who's one of our board members, in Dallas, Texas, and he was like, "Hey, have you ever heard of the FASTER scale?" I was like, "No." And he starts walking me through it, and I got increasingly angrier as he walked me through it because it was the first time I experienced hope, but I was so devastated that I felt like I had been deceived my whole life because what was he doing? He was showing me this pattern of emotions and how I was ending up in relapse, and I'm sitting there as a 21-year-old going like, "Are you kidding me? Like, my relapses haven't been random?" Because at that point, I just thought I was bad and utterly, like, hopeless and was never gonna change.