What Is The FASTER Scale and Why Do I Need It?

The reason we're doing this again is because we have found it to be such a critical tool. And FASTER is an acronym, but what it is is it is an Emotional and Behavioral awareness scale. So we all know when we've gone back to that place we don't want to go anymore, where we've promised ourselves or others we're going to change behavior, we're going to stop doing something. And at pure desire, as many other groups do, we would call that a relapse. When I go back to a place I promised God, myself, or others, I won't go back to relapsing. And so we know when that's happened. I mean, we can feel it. There are certain behaviors or things that we're doing that we know we don't want to be. What we have often missed is that there are a number of things, both emotionally and in our behaviors, that we've done on the way to that relapse. And the truth is that most of us can be blind to that pattern. We don't see the way that that is happening in a very predictable way. And so we owe a great debt of gratitude to our friend Michael Dye, who created the faster scale. And he was working primarily with drug addicts as part of his ministry with YWAM and would watch them taking these steps. And he just started to feel like there was some predictability, there was a pattern to it. And he said, could I kind of categorize the phases or stages we move through on our way towards a relapse? And so he began documenting behavior and choices and decisions, and over a number of months and years, recognized that the faster scale is how he would describe it. And so those six steps, F is forgetting priorities, A is anxiety, S is speeding up, T is ticked off, E is exhausted, and R is relapse. And we'll talk through how to use that. But that's an overview of recognizing when we move away from trusting God and others and being in healthy relationships and being healthy in our internal dialogue. We've begun to forget priorities. And when we do that, it will naturally create anxiety. And then we need to deal with the anxiety. So we start speeding up. And when we speed up, it doesn't work. We don't deal with the emotions. So sooner or later, we're going to get ticked off. And when we're dealing with intense emotions and we're ticked off, it's going to exhaust our brain and our body, which really opens us up to that old behavior that we promised not to go back to. And we relapse. And so we have just seen the incredible value that if someone can start to recognize the scale and deal with their emotions and their behaviors early on, it actually gives us incredible power, partnering with God and the Holy Spirit to begin changing that pattern and not end up back in that old predictable place. So it's really this emotional awareness that we're feeling something long before we go and do something. And if we can recognize what we're feeling and why, man, the tools that gives us to make change really, really is invaluable.

Yeah. Well, Nick did a great job explaining that. I know that for me and a lot of others that, you know, are just now, you know, just starting on the recovery or just addressing their addictions or their trauma or whatever it may be that's bringing them to working on themselves, you're not really aware of why you do what you do. That's why we're all in group. And so I just love how objective it is that anything where I can just not have to try to self identify my feelings. Because in the early stages, that's really hard to do, but I can just go and highlight what I'm doing or thinking. That, to me, was really helpful. You know, even if I'm like, I'm not ticked off, you know, if I'm experiencing road rage or, you know, constantly pushing people away or arguing or whatever is in that category, then whether I feel ticked off or not, I'm behaving and thinking that way. And so it really just helped me realize that I was in these different stages. If it was easy enough to recognize that, then we wouldn't go from restoration to relapse, you know, without recognizing it. And so that's what I love. It's just very objective. You can go through each step that Nick explained and just look at it and simply say, am I doing or thinking any of these things? And then make a plan from there, which we'll talk about more.

Yeah, it's just a grid. And I love that that someone else did all this hard work to create a grid for me that I can filter how I'm feeling or how I'm doing through that. Instead of having to, like, remind myself to ask myself every day, how am I doing today? Because that could just be different on any. On any day, any hour, any moment where this is just a grid that I can come to filter through the grid how I feel. And then it gives me a better idea of where I'm at.

Yeah, I know that when I had first started a pure Desire group. One of the huge fears I had that I was going to keep relapsing because I felt like in my life it just happened. And I'd used that line so much in confessing like to my wife and others and to myself that I really believed it. I thought I would just go along, things were going well, and then whoop, there was a relapse and I don't know where it came from, it just happened. And then life would be good and I'd be making good choices and then all of a sudden, whoop, it happened. And. And so I was terrified that one of those oops kind of moments was going to happen again. And so for me, the faster scale was so liberating actually to see that there were a number of choices I was making that where I used to just justify and say, I don't know what happened. You know, I was on my computer and this, this thing triggered me and the next thing I know I was looking at stuff I shouldn't and, and to me, what I thought was an oops moment, what I was blind to is, oh, well, first off, I was on my computer alone and I was isolating. But there was stuff from work that day that I hadn't been dealing with appropriately. I wasn't in good relationship. So there's all these other factors that actually were the kind of things really I could do a lot of healthy, good work on. But until we see them, until we start to recognize what they are, we are going to end up back in that old predictable place. So it's really just eye opening to what's going on underneath the surface long before we go back to that old familiar place.