Amber Hollingsworth argues that beating addiction means changing your identity, not just avoiding the behavior. She uses a tree metaphor: you need deep roots of emotional strength and must uproot faulty beliefs like "I must be perfect" or "Life will suck without it."
If you want something more, you have to become something more. Breaking free from addiction for good is a little bit more complex than just avoiding some sort of addictive behavior. You really do have to change who you are on the inside. You have to become a person that doesn't want to engage in that behavior, that doesn't need to engage in that behavior. A person who likes their life the way it is. You have to be able to find fulfillment, meaning, and purpose so that all of those addictive things just aren't. Aren't nearly as tempting. It might be helpful to think of it like a tree. You know, a tree starts out as a tiny little seed, and the first step to growing a big, magnificent, fabulous tree is for that seed to break open. It's got to break and change to become something before you'll see any evidence above the ground. Now, after the seed breaks open, the next thing that happens is you're going to see roots that start to sort of develop and grow deep down in the dirt. And even though you don't really see that from the surface, you know that those roots are what's necessary to make that tree strong so it can withstand the elements and everything nature's got to throw at it. Well, recovery is the same way. We have to start by developing a very strong foundation that can carry you through the difficulties that could come in the future. I want you to think of it like emotional strength training. Just like you would go to the gym and you would work out your muscles, in order to make your muscles grow, you have to sort of tear them first. Right. And when they heal back, they heal back thicker and tougher and stronger. Well, emotional strength training is similar. Yes. The going to be a part of it that's not very fun, but we've got to get that part done before you can grow into your new self, so that you're ready to go out there and live your best life, A life where you are free to make the choices that you want to make, to be your best self, to go after the things that you want to go after, to live the life that you want to live. For these healthy roots to take hold, we need to make sure the ground is fertile and ready. And one of the things that you have to do to make the ground fertile and ready is you have to get rid of all the weeds and all the rocks and all the other stuff that could get in the way. So let's start by identifying the stuff that we need to clear out so we have a good fertile ground to grow in. Now, we're not going to cover it all in this video, but I do want to get started on it. The first thing I want to take a look at is what I'm going to call influence. Negative influence. And negative influence can come in a number of ways. But today we're going to go way back and start from like the original negative influence. Somewhere in the growing up process we all at some points grab onto some beliefs, irrational thoughts, negative thinking patterns that can really take hold inside of us and cause tons of problems. So we need to identify what they are. And just like a weed, we don't want to just pull it out from the surface, we want to pull that thing out from the roots to make sure it doesn't come back. A lot of these examples that I'm about to give you are so well entrenched in your thinking that you're probably not even aware of. But when you start hearing these examples, I think it might start to ring a little bell for you. Now, the clinical, fancy like counselory thing that we call them, these are faulty narratives or problematic storylines that could be entrenched in our psyche. Now the last thing before we take a look at some of these examples is I want to say I'm not necessarily saying that someone did something bad to you or that this is your parents fault because these narratives don't necessarily come from what happens to us, but more from how we interpret what happens to us. And there's a lot of things that factor into how we interpret things like how old we are, what our understanding of the world is. You got to bring in all those contextual things to really get the big picture. A lot of these are sort of deeply entrenched self beliefs. Here are some examples. I must be perfect to be of worth or I must be selfless for other people to like me or I'm fragile or weak or lazy. Or maybe you have a storyline where you tell yourself that you have to be strong all the time. Maybe you were always told that you were sort of rebellious or you were the troublemaker and you've taken that on as your identity. Maybe you have a subconscious belief that you can only rely on yourself or that you can't trust people. Is there a belief in there that you're not lovable? Now these next few are related specifically to addictive behaviors and substances. Do you have an entrenched belief that life will suck without it? Fill in the blank with whatever your addictive substance or behavior is. Do you have some sort of belief that other people will reject you if you stop engaging in the behavior. Like for example, if you stop drinking, do you feel like other people are going to think negatively of you or think you're weird or want to stay away from you? Are you telling yourself that everyone does it, it's not big a deal? Or are you sort of subconsciously reinforcing in your mind, hey, I deserve it, I work hard, I do all these great things. Why can't I just have this one little vice? Maybe you're telling yourself, hey, there's nothing wrong with it. Not only are these last few like irrational thoughts, but they're just plain not true. I think if you will look a little bit closer at all of these beliefs that we've named, you're going to find that the evidence doesn't necessarily support them. Somewhere along the way you accepted these things and you haven't stopped really to reassess it in a long time. In fact, not only have you not reassessed it and looked at these things rationally, but you may have spent a good considerable amount of time even defending these things. Causing them to be more entrenched and hardwired in these thought processes and beliefs really can help addiction root into your life. If we want to pull it out, we got to take all this out with it. Otherwise addiction will just keep regrowing. These are the conditions that grow addiction. Not happiness, fulfillment, great relationships, best life. So let's start by getting rid of these. Your assignment for the day is to think about do you have any of these ingrained, entrenched self beliefs about yourself or about the world that you really need to address and look at critically?
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