The Twelve Tools

by Natti Ronel

  The improving influence of abstinence, despite some apprehension towards it, reminds me of Ben, a young man who came in for consultation because of his addiction to drugs of the kind generally regarded as “soft,” especially the smoking of cannabis and also a little ecstasy. For several years, Ben had been smoking almost every day and sometimes all day. He thought he was coping. He had a steady girlfriend, he was working and studying, his family was close and supportive, and he had many buddies. Everything was wonderful -- or so it seemed. The relationship with his girlfriend meant nothing to him -- he paid more attention to getting stoned than to her. His work was unsatisfying, he wasn’t really earning a living, and with his studies, he was keeping up, no more. As for the supportive family, various problems emerged from under the surface, and his buddies -- most of them were just dope-smoking buddies. Without drugs -- they had nothing to talk about and nothing to do together. In fact, if smoking was taken out of the equation -- what was left? That’s what Ben was afraid of. I asked him if he could smoke less, reducing the dosage. It was so nice to see his sincerity. He said that what hadn’t happened until now wasn’t likely to happen in the future. I asked him if, in his opinion, he could smoke “only sometimes?” We both knew the answer. The only change that was possible for Ben was through absolute abstinence. Admittedly, it would not be simple; on the other hand, the price of staying in the current situation was too high. When he’d been clean for a little over a week, he said to me, hesitantly, “I can’t believe that I’m saying this aloud, but suddenly everything looks different, sharper, clearer, wiser. I’m doing better at work, and there’s even been an improvement in my relationships.” The enthusiasm of change, and only a week had passed. Admittedly, later on there were relapses, failure and retreat, alongside the success and the progress, but Ben learned from life something that isn’t easily learned from books: abstinence works, and not only does it work, the situation improves with its help. What he was most afraid of, being lucid, without drugs, turned into a great gift. Certainly, the temptation remained, and he fell into it again, but he also came to recognize a viable alternative.

  Full abstinence creates relief. Sometimes, relief is immediate. Of course, there is still a challenging struggle ahead, but added to the struggle is a new voice that we didn’t know about before we started the abstinence, and this is the voice of change and positive experience. Our great fear -- how can we do without the thing that gives us identity, pleasure, meaning, power, direction, time-filling, friends and more? -- turns out to be a fear irrelevant to reality, like many other fears. Usually this is a relief. There is no other way to learn about it aside from experiencing it, attaining full abstinence, and seeing that there is another life, and it’s an even better one.

  Specific abstinence

  On another side of abstinence, there are behaviors from which it’s impossible to abstain. Eating, for example. It is possible to abstain from food on a temporary basis, but that’s a question of fasting and not of abstinence. Fasting isn’t a way of life or a deep and wide-ranging change; rather, it is a temporary process that’s circumscribed from the start, so it isn’t considered abstinence. Eating behaviors aren’t the only ones we can look at. Let’s imagine, for example, a young man who tends to “dive” into surfing the internet; the surfing goes on for many hours during which he isn’t functioning as well as he would like and he definitely isn’t working. But how can he abstain if his work demands use of the internet? For example, a tax consultant who’s connected via the internet to a government site, obtaining financial information on behalf of his clients, can’t carry on working without constant access. What’s to be done?

  In such cases, we look for something within the behavior from which he could abstained, and identify behaviors from which he can’t abstained. Let’s return to the example of food, the most widespread example, that speaks to most of us. There are two things from which we can refrain: certain types of food and certain styles of eating. There was a woman, for example, who told me that she had compulsive binges of eating at night. It turned out she was eating cookies, whole packets of them, but only at night. During the day, she ate very little, which seemed to her reasonable and appropriate. From a late hour of the evening, when all the routines of the day were winding down, then her self-control evaporated with the cookies, one after another. When she tried eating “only a few” cookies, the experiment didn’t succeed, and the few became many. Eating a little less at night wasn’t possible either, because eating “aroused” her appetite, which was insatiable. The abstinence required here was clear and twofold -- full abstinence from eating cookies and abstinence from eating at night.

  With people who suffer from compulsive over-eating, the often-repeated advice is to abstain from eating sweet things, sometimes also pastry products. These are well-known for their role in stimulating binge-eating. It is easier to abstain altogether from touching them than to try to control the eating of them. Similarly, to abstain entirely from eating between meals, liberates us from feeling uncontrollable hunger. For example, a woman described herself as chewing all day and thinking constantly about what more could be going into her mouth. Admittedly, the food in question was low-calorie , but her pre-occupation with this was compulsive, and disruptive to her life. I suggested to her that she should restrict the chewing to mealtimes, extending this rule to cover the chewing of sugar-free gum. Abstinence of this kind she hadn’t tried before, and it created in her a perceptible sense of relief. Similarly, the man I mentioned previously, the tax consultant, took it on himself to abstain from surfing websites that weren’t connected with his work. He instructed his internet server to block his access to all sites except those that he needed professionally, thus removing all temptation.

  It’s possible to see how the principle of total abstinence is maintained even in cases where complete abstinence is impossible, and then it’s total abstinence from one component of the behavior, or from a number of components, and not from the behavior itself. A certain effort is required to detect the component or the components of behavior to which we shall apply total abstinence, and generally, it is worthwhile asking for the help of someone else in the task of detection.

  Temporary abstinence

  Between the two situations that I have described there is a temporary and transient stage -- behaviors that could possibly be stopped completely, but this isn’t the way we want to live our lives. In a group-training session that I led, Dana, a participant in her thirties, told us openly, while laughing at herself, that she was a “compulsive bride.” Even as a teenager, she had started looking for a marital partner, but they all ran away from her. She admitted that she “leapt” on suitable candidates; a man only had to show interest in her, and she was already imagining the wedding invitations, and of course, he joined the ranks of those who ran away from her. It was only natural that I would advise her to refrain from going out with men for a period of three months. To abstain completely, total abstinence. The suggestion came as a shock, and it wasn’t easy for her to take it in. It’s possible that at that very moment the man meant for her was planning to ask her out. What then -- should she refuse? Waste her chances of marriage? After all, she’s no longer young, and time isn’t on her side. There aren’t that many candidates anyway, the supply is “drying-up,” and how could she abstain if someone turned up during that three months? My answer was unchanged -- abstain.

  Life, as usual, was playing games with us. The moment she took this abstinence on herself, men began to appear in her life again, interested in getting to know her, wanting to take her out. Serious men, looking for serious relationships. When she asked us what to do the answer was the same -- abstain: “You can say you’re not free at the moment.” For the first time in many years, she found herself telling a man she wasn’t free. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she put herself in a situation where she was relatively liberated from dependence on a man approaching her; she wasn’t constructing scenarios
of their conjugal life, she didn’t turn herself into a push-over for him and wasn’t in a hurry to gratify him. The previous pattern had been turned upside-down -- she wasn’t available. Following this new discovery, she positively bloomed. It was wonderful to see the effect of the behavioral change on her self-perception, the way she experienced herself and her being in the world. To be sure, there were struggles and moments of crisis; temptation sometimes knocked on the door, presenting itself in the likeness of a suitable man, who looked like the consummate bridegroom. But she stood firm in her abstinence, and she felt the same relief as that experienced by any reformed alcoholic or drug-addict. This case has a happy ending -- after three months, the period of abstinence came to an end and Dana went back to being available to men. As in the fairy-tales, eventually, the right man turned up, but this time she met him from a different place; there was nothing clingy about her and she wasn’t a push-over for him. She came from a place where she felt confident in herself, and the change worked.

  Temporary abstinence adds something more to the other two situations: as with them, precise detection is needed -- from what to exercise total abstinence, but abstinence only on a temporary basis. On the one hand, it can be more comprehensive than in cases of specific abstinence, and there’s no need to look for a particular component from which to abstain. On the other hand, it is circumscribed in the time available for meaningful change. If Dana, from the example mentioned above, hadn’t found a stable relationship, we would have suggested that she should maintain specific abstinence while continuing in her attempts to become acquainted with men. What kind of specific abstinence? Its definition depends on a changing situation and demands identification according to what is revealed in the course of experimentation.

  Implementing abstinence

  From what I have described up to now, it is possible to identify common behaviors from which it is worthwhile abstaining, and to fit them into one of these three categories. Take bulimia for example, a situation in which a woman eats in binge-style and then induces vomiting. We shall use the female gender here because bulimia seems to be more prevalent among women than among men. Bulimia includes compulsive eating to excess, mental response, intentional vomiting (or using other means like purgatives), and more mental response. Induced vomiting belongs to the first category of full abstinences. It is possible and very desirable to abstain completely from willful, intentional vomiting, which is part of bulimia. Compulsive eating in binge-style belongs to the second category of specific abstinence -- one can abstain from certain components of eating. To this division, we could also add orders of preference. First and foremost, to abstain from vomiting. The vomiting that follows binge-eating makes this possible, because people eat what they want and stay thin and everything is apparently OK. Bulimia is like an astonishing alchemy, preserving thinness in spite of over-eating -- and it is possible to abstain from this self-delusion completely, with total abstinence from induced vomiting. To this we may add specific abstinence linked to the compulsive eating, for example, abstinence from eating sweet things or pastry products. What about the mental response that accompanies binge-eating and vomiting? Regarding this, abstinence will be temporary, because at the initial stage abstinence will be from the obsession with it. Subsequently, as the change progresses, it will receive an appropriate answer, as suggested by the tools that are yet to be described.

  Naomi was a cheerful young woman who suffered from compulsive eating and vomiting disorders. It took her some months until she succeeded in maintaining abstinence from vomiting, as well as from binges of compulsive eating. A fine recovery. She ate “by the book,” didn’t vomit, felt she was making progress, and then… she was staying with a relative, an aunt who adopted her as a regular companion. The aunt cooked a fine meal for the pair of them and everything seemed good. The aunt also served dessert, chocolate cake which smelled and looked great, but Naomi refused it. She was too embarrassed to say why, but finally admitted she feared over-eating. The hot-tempered aunt didn’t accept the excuse. “You’re not one of those people, you have will-power. I’m sure you can eat one slice, that’s all. We’ll both eat some,” and the two of them ate the tasty cake, a slice apiece. So far, so good. But the next day, Naomi felt an incessant urge to eat, followed by vomiting, eating, self-hatred, vomiting, more self-hatred; the binge-eating urge was stronger than ever. It took her months to return to total abstinence and regain some stability. It was sad to see how the cycle of vomiting and binge-eating was compounded by a mental state of self-hate and self-blame, the feeling of living inside a bubble, as if she was stoned. On the other hand, the return to abstinence cleansed her and once she had settled into it, everything looked different.

  Another example is that of Suzanna - who told me she had a far from light addiction to “light” alcohol, and her problems were exacerbated by a succession of casual sexual encounters, which were indiscriminate and unwanted as far as she was concerned, with men whom she found herself incapable of refusing, and there was also a smoking habit that she wanted to stop. We came to an arrangement. Alcohol -- the abstinence applied here should be total and seemingly permanent. Definitely total. Men -- here too, total abstinence was required, but on a temporary basis, until she had undergone a change that would enable her to adopt a different style in handling relationships. Cigarettes -- I advised her not to be in too much of a hurry when it came to giving up smoking. Why add extra pressure? It’s true that smoking cigarettes isn’t healthy, but Suzanna had already been smoking for years and a few more months wouldn’t do her too much damage. Drinking alcohol and indiscriminate relationships with men went together for her, and these two behaviors did her more harm than smoking cigarettes would. It can be seen from the example of Suzanna that it is possible to create gradations between various abstinences and decide on the order that is right for us, an order that takes account of harm and injury, and of our ability to cope with a number of challenges, and also considers other relevant things that happen to us in our lives. Success in abstinence usually strengthens us, and then it’s possible to advance further and deal with more issues.

  Abstinence from thought and feeling

  Is it possible to abstain from thoughts and feelings? In principle, the answer is affirmative. In practical terms, the answer is negative. Although every person can apparently abstain from certain thoughts and even certain feelings, or from every thought and feeling, abstinence from them requires a level of self-control that is rare, and only a few get there after years of practice, if at all. But there is a difference between the thought that appears in us, presenting itself to consciousness in serene innocence, and the inner speech that takes control in a manner that is far from innocent.

  How is it possible to exercise the tool “Abstinence” with regard to feelings or thoughts? For example, how can we abstain from fear and from the thoughts that characterize fear? The answer includes several stages of action. First, it is always worth looking for a characteristic accompanying behavior. It is easier to define abstinence from behavior than from thoughts or feelings. For example, someone who, out of fear of flying, never flies to another country. Or someone else who, out of some obscure anxiety which is lurking in the background all the time, hardly ever goes out of his house. In both cases, fear prevents them from doing something which is entirely reasonable. So, for them, abstinence means doing the thing that they’re afraid of doing. Of course, implementation will be gradual, and very sensitive, with support and help at the moment of truth, but -- it can be done. In the same way, it is possible to identify the characteristic behavior that goes with every compulsive thought or feeling and to aspire to abstain from this kind of behavior, in spite of feelings or thoughts. The second stage in dealing with compulsive thoughts and feelings is to activate other tools that we shall discuss at a later stage, which make it possible to attain the mental or emotional change that abstinence alone is incapable of producing.

  Additionally, it is also possible to c
reate full abstinence from inappropriate internal speech. For example, someone who tends to judge and criticize himself and present himself in a negative light. He says negative things about himself, not only to others but also and especially to himself. Then the negative critical speech is stronger still; a process of prolonged mental self-harm, which expresses a negative image of the self, to the point of disappointment with the self and a sense of lost opportunity, but this isn’t high self-awareness or a clear conscience. The trap is that with all the negative criticism directed towards the self, the person no longer has the strength to do something positive and change, and the negative speech just intensifies. The negative speech in him presents negative ideas with high energy, most of them interpretations that pervert reality, and hides whatever is positive about him. It is possible to stop internal negative speech, at first with total abstinence and then with the help of other tools which will be brought into the process. It is possible to analyze internal speech as it is reflected in external speech and to look for the starting point. When we know how to recognize it, we can activate total abstinence at this point and stop the negative thought that is presenting itself to consciousness. The first negative thought that tempts us, usually we won’t succeed in stopping, but it is definitely possible to stop the internal speech that follows it, first of all by abstinence, and with the help of other tools that we shell describe in due course.