Stage Two

Stage 2

“We are not helpless dolls…we do not behave as we behave by accident.”

— Ernst G. Beier

Awareness—When You Know You Have a Problem

People in this stage know they have a problem and want to understand their problem, but they don’t know what to do or they feel powerless to change. People in stage 2 are still far from making a commitment to change.

Many people get stuck in this stage. They spend years telling themselves that they are going to change “one day.”

Fear of failure keeps many people stuck in this stage. They hide from the truth by telling themselves that they’re waiting for the “perfect” weight-loss program, the perfect smoking-cessation program, or the perfect time to stop drinking.  

“I’ll change when the time is right,” is one of the phrases you hear most often from people in this stage of the self-change cycle. There will never be a “right time,” of course, but they haven’t been able to break out of their verbal cage.

Some people in this stage are never able to make a serious commitment to change, even though their life depends on it. We are all familiar with the day-to-day experiences and struggles of ordinary people who are stuck in this stage.

My father-in-law recently died after a long struggle with emphysema. Even though he slept with an oxygen tank next to his bed, he never quit smoking. He cut down, but he never quit, even though he knew it was killing him.

A number of years ago, I read about a woman in New Jersey who had a tracheotomy before she died of cancer. After her tracheotomy, she was no longer able to breathe through her mouth, so she placed lighted cigarettes into the hole in her throat and inhaled the smoke that way.

Danger signs

People in stage 2 are still focusing on the problem. They want to talk about themselves and their families; they can be quite open when talking about their problem. What holds people back in this stage is often a fear of change.

Even good change threatens our security. When we’re accustomed to something, the thought of losing it can cause us to panic and freeze where we are, no matter how much we stand to gain by changing.  

Olga is a widow with three children in their teens and early twenties. She met a man named Chuck and fell head over heels in love. Chuck is divorced and recently moved to Olga’s city from another part of the country. He is a construction worker in his late forties who seems to have no trouble finding jobs in spite of a drinking problem.

A few months after I met them, Olga and Chuck left town. When Olga’s children realized that their mother was going out with an alcoholic drifter, they naturally became alarmed and pleaded with their mother to break off the relationship.

When Olga refused to stop seeing Chuck, her children told relatives that they feared their mother was in a dangerous relationship. When the whole family confronted Olga, she did what any experienced counselor could have easily predicted: She left town with her car, her clothes, and her new boyfriend.   

I was taking my walk around the neighborhood one evening when Olga stopped her car and asked if she could talk to me. What followed was a sad but common story of a woman in love with the wrong man.

When Olga and Chuck got back in town, Olga used her contacts to get Chuck a good job. Chuck moved into an apartment that Olga owns. The apartment is adjacent to the house where Olga lives with her children. Olga told me that Chuck pays rent, and he is nice to the children.

But Chuck has become verbally abusive to Olga. He hasn’t abused her physically, but the verbal abuse has become intolerable. Olga is a Hispanic American. She was born in the United States. When Chuck is drinking, he shouts at Olga and tells her to go back to Mexico. Every time Chuck insults her, Olga asks him why he doesn’t go back to wherever he is from.

Olga is a classic example of a person in stage 2. She has become aware of the problem. Olga’s “bad habit” is her low self-esteem, which is the only thing that keeps her from ending such an abusive relationship. Just as every bad habit can be broken, low self-esteem can be changed into a healthy self-image. But it takes time.

Olga realizes that her children’s safety may be at risk. Chuck has never done anything violent so far, but Olga is beginning to understand that she’s playing with fire. As bad as the relationship is, Olga doesn’t want to lose Chuck. “I love him,” she says, “Can’t he see how much he’s hurting me?”

Olga recognizes that her life may be in danger. Chuck has said that he would like to take her to another part of the country. Olga senses that moving to an area of the country where she doesn’t have any support relationships would make her even more vulnerable than she is now. “He might take me there and then decide to kill me,” she said.

Chuck hasn’t threatened Olga or the children, and Olga doesn’t want to ask Chuck to leave. She still can’t take action, which is a common problem for people in stage 2. Instead of telling Chuck to leave, she asks him why he doesn’t leave on his own. That’s as far as she can go at this point.  

Getting unstuck

Olga is afraid to lose the life she has become used to, no matter how unsatisfying or risky it is. She worries about her problem day and night, but so far that is all she has done.

One of the biggest dangers in this stage is to substitute worrying about a problem for working on it. That describes Olga. If you’re in a position to help someone who’s in stage 2 of the cycle, always keep the following points in mind:

·       People in this stage need support, listening, and feedback.

·       Don’t give advice unless you’re asked for it.

·       People in this stage usually need to be jolted into action, but that doesn’t mean you’re the one who should apply the pressure.

Trying to push a person to take action before she is ready to change can be a big mistake. Pressure at this point will only make the person more resistant to change. People who are stuck in stage 2 really do know better, but they have forgotten what they know. Too often, a personal tragedy must happen before a person in this stage is able to move forward.

Olga knows what she must do. Yet she still can’t do it, even though her family’s welfare depends on her ability to act. This is typical of people in stage 2 of the cycle. Olga didn’t come to me for advice. She already knows all the reasons to end the relationship that she needs to know, and she is beginning to understand that as long as she does nothing, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Olga is like a chain smoker who isn’t ready to quit. Many smokers are fully aware of the damage they’re doing to their health. John repeatedly says that he wants to quit, but can’t. The truth is that John doesn’t want to quit smoking.

John knows the health risks that smokers face. But he doesn’t want to give up all the little satisfactions that smoking gives him: the pleasant anticipation he experiences after a meal when he is about to light a cigarette; the satisfaction of feeling the cigarette between his fingers; the nicotine rush that goes straight to his brain every time he takes a puff; the security of knowing he has an extra carton of his favorite brand stashed away in the closet.

The only part of smoking that John wants to give up is the part that threatens to give him lung cancer; he wishes he could somehow eliminate that part, and hang onto all the other little perks that hooked him in the first place. People like John don’t want to quit, no matter how much they say they do.

John isn’t lying when he says he wants to quit. He sincerely thinks he wants to quit. His problem is that he hasn’t come to grips with the real reason he smokes. As soon as he is able to do so, he will be in a position to move forward. When he is able to admit that he likes lots of little things about his habit, he will be in a position to substitute healthy new habits for the old destructive ones.   

As long as he hides from the truth—from the real reasons why he smokes—he can conveniently shift responsibility from himself to a “force” that’s stronger than he is. When a smoker says, “I really want to quit, but I just can’t,” what he really means is that he doesn’t want to be held accountable for his bad choices.

For many people, there is a certain comfort in believing that they can’t avoid the destructive path they’re following, even though they know where it leads in the end. They are locked into a self-defeating mindset that says, “I know I’m doomed, but what can I do about it?” The answer is that they can do a great deal about it, but not until they are able to see through the mind games they play.

Why do we play these games, even when we know our habits are destroying us? I think the answer goes something like this: As soon as we break out of the cage we’ve been hiding in, we will have to admit that we had the power to do it all along.

That can be a scary thing. A person who frees himself from a habit that has dominated his life for years or decades can be terrified of the prospect of having to admit that he wasted a large part of his life by failing to take responsibility for his own behavior.

If you’re in a helping relationship with a person like that, or if you are courageous enough to admit that you are that person, take heart and remember this: Better to have wasted part of your life than to have wasted all of it. It’s never too late to turn your life around. As soon as you do, you’ll discover that none of it was wasted after all—it just took a little longer to reach your goal.  

A woman you know may be drinking herself to death, but subconsciously she tells herself that it would be far worse to be free of her habit. If she were free, she would have to spend the rest of her life wondering what she might have made of her life if she had realized sooner that she was free to make better choices.

This is the danger of focusing on the past. When all you can see is what lies behind, you aren’t able to understand that new opportunities present themselves as soon as you make the decision to walk in a different direction.

A person’s capacity to shift her thoughts from the past to the present is the key to moving from stage 2 to stage 3. You can’t make the decision to change as long as you’re still focused on the past.     

As soon as you decide to change, you’re at the end of stage 2. The next step in the cycle of freeing yourself from a bad habit is the preparation stage. 

Stage One

Stage 1

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Removing the Blinders

At the age of 72, Jim is a chronic complainer. I learned a long time ago that I don’t need to buy a newspaper or watch television to know what’s wrong with the world; there are plenty of people like Jim who will tell me what’s wrong. Complaining, gossiping, criticizing, and negative thinking are some of the deadliest habits.

Little by little, negativity eats away at a person’s health and eliminates the possibility for happiness. If someone close to you is a complainer, a criticizer, or a negative thinker, your own well-being is at risk.  

Complaining about things beyond our direct control is one of the most destructive habits. Yes, I know, it’s also one of the most common things that people do. We complain about the weather; we talk about whoever is the focus of the latest celebrity scandal; we blame the government—any government—for everything that’s wrong.

Complaining about things we can’t control is a very effective way to avoid facing up to things that we can do something about. By spending his life complaining about things that he is powerless to change, Jim avoids having to confront his own negative thinking and bitterness.

Jim wants everyone else to change. He blames everyone else for his problems: his parents, a former business partner, the government, the local economy. In his present state, he can’t begin to understand that his unhappiness has nothing to do with any of these things, and everything to do with his habit of blaming others for what’s wrong in his life.   

Jim doesn’t have a habit that causes a clear health risk. He doesn’t smoke, drink, use drugs, or overeat. But his health is failing, and he is worried about the need for major surgery. Although negative thinking hasn’t been conclusively linked to cancer or heart disease, researchers are beginning to find evidence that resentment, bitterness, and hatred literally kill people.

Jim feels no reason to change his own attitude or behavior. He is a classic example of a person who is unable to recognize the true cause of his unhappiness. Jim is in denial.

Denial is the first stage in the cycle of self-change. The vast majority of people whose health, happiness, or relationships are being threatened by a self-destructive habit spend months, if not years, in a stage where they deny the seriousness of the problem.   

People in this stage share the following characteristics:

·       They refuse to admit that they have a serious problem.

·       They resist change and usually become aggressive if confronted about the need to change.

·       They have a general sense of hopelessness, no matter how busy their lives seem to be on the surface.

Many people who have self-destructive habits also suffer from feelings of distress. Research suggests that up to 50% of drug users have some form of depression. Misery loves company: We tend to form relationships with people who have our bad habit.

By spending time in a bar, people can convince themselves that it’s the normal way to unwind after a stressful day, since there are so many other people in the bar doing the same thing. Research shows that clinically obese people are less likely to lose weight when they live with other clinically obese people.

Self-destructive behavior

Many people are so stubborn in their unconscious need to defend their bad habits that they refuse help even when their lives depend on it.  

In Changing For Good, James Prochaska mentions a startling experiment done by a zoologist named Calhoun. Instead of using domesticated white mice and rats in his research, Calhoun studied wild mice to gain an insight into how they strive to maintain control over their own behavior.

In one experiment, Calhoun gave the mice an electric switch that allowed them to select dim light, bright light, or no light in their cages. When allowed to make their own choice, the mice avoided bright lights and darkness; time after time, they turned on the dim light. But when the dim light was turned on by the experimenter, the mice ran to the switch and turned it off. Then they turned on the bright light or left the cage dark.

In another experiment, the mice were given control of a switch that activated a treadmill, which was their only source of exercise. Caged mice need to run about eight hours a day to stay healthy. Without any prompting, the mice turned on the treadmill and ran at different times of the day.

Whenever the experimenter turned on the treadmill, the mice immediately turned it off, even though the first part of the experiment clearly showed that the mice wanted and needed to exercise.

Prochaska calls this “foolish freedom.” Laboratory mice are too domesticated to exhibit this kind of behavior. Prochaska points out that the wild mice “demanded control over their behavior, even if it meant sacrificing their own health.”

Helping relationships

People in denial have lost control of the problem, which means that they have lost control of their lives. They rarely progress to the next stage without the benefit of a helping relationship.

Professional counselors, therapists, and helpers have learned that confrontation doesn’t help a person move from stage 1 to stage 2. Nagging doesn’t help. Letting him have his way—or “going along with him” to avoid confrontation—merely strengthens his denial of the problem by reinforcing in his own mind that whatever he’s doing is right.

People usually need an unexpected response before they can remove the blinders. This is a fact that hasn’t changed in the last 3,000 years, as the following story illustrates.

King David was one of the heroes of ancient Israel. He was the leader of his nation, a great warrior, an accomplished musician, and one of the greatest poets of antiquity. When he was a young shepherd tending his father’s flock, he killed a bear and a lion with his hands. When he was barely a teenager, he killed Goliath on the battlefield.

One evening, the king got out of bed and went up to the roof of his house. He saw a beautiful woman washing herself not far away. Immediately he sent his men to find out who she was. Her name was Bathsheba. She was the wife of a soldier named Uriah, who was one of Israel’s bravest and most loyal soldiers.

Uriah was away from home, serving his nation in a war against one of Israel’s many enemies. David sent for Bathsheba and slept with her. She became pregnant.

The king wanted Uriah out of the way. The Israeli army was besieging an enemy city at the time. David sent a letter to the commander of his army, Joab, in which he laid out instructions for getting rid of Uriah. He told Joab to send Uriah to the front of the battle, then retreat with the rest of his soldiers, leaving Uriah alone.

Joab carried out the king’s orders and Uriah was killed in battle. David made Bathsheba his wife, and she gave him a son.

There are a lot of things going on here that are worse than smoking, overspending, negative thinking, and overeating—treachery and murder, to name just two. And it started with David’s voyeurism, a nasty thing in itself. How do you tell a king that he’s developing some dangerous habits?

If you think it’s hard to get somebody in your own family to remove the blinders, imagine what the prophet Nathan was up against. Nathan knew what was going on. As a prophet, it was his job to help the king open his eyes.

Nathan didn’t confront David directly. Instead, he told the king a story about two men who lived in the same city. One man was rich, the other poor. The rich man had many flocks and herds. The only thing the poor man had was one lamb. The poor man loved the lamb as if it were his daughter.

One evening the rich man needed a lamb for a dinner party. Instead of sacrificing a lamb from one of his own flocks, he took the poor man’s lamb. When King David heard this, he was furious—he thought Nathan was telling him a true story about two men in his kingdom.

“The man who did this thing shall surely die,” said the king.

Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man.”

David listened to Nathan’s story, and it opened his eyes. Why can’t we listen better? Why can’t we see the faults in ourselves that others see so clearly in us? It is so easy to know when others are in denial, and virtually impossible to admit that we are in this stage.  

In the language of modern therapy, the prophet Nathan was in a helping relationship with King David. He confronted David, but not through an act of direct verbal aggression. He created uncertainty in David by responding in a way that David least expected. That is what allowed David to open his eyes.

Uncertainty is what causes us to look for new options. Nathan knew that it’s impossible to change another person, but you can motivate him to want to change himself. Your role as a helper is to support another person during the process of self-change, not to attack him or reject him.

We can’t all be as wise as Nathan. But there is always a way to help someone open his eyes without entering into an aggressive confrontation, which often causes irreparable damage to everyone involved.

If someone close to you is in denial, you are already equipped to be a better helper by having read this. Don’t go along with him, don’t cave in to him, and by all means, don’t confront him openly.

The best thing you can do is give him this report. When he reads the story of Nathan and King David, he may be ready to say, “I am the man.”

If you’ve become aware of the need to free yourself from a bad habit, you’re already in stage 2. 

Happy 2014!

With the start of a new year, I wanted to publish this article about breaking bad habits. I will break it down in six stages, but tonight I will start with an introduction. Every time I read this, I find something new!

Introduction

Alice:                           Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat:       That depends a good deal on where you want to go.

Can People Really Change?

David Lucero knows where he wants to go: He wants to go to El Paso, Texas.

David is about sixty years old, I think. For the last three months, he has been living on a sidewalk across the street from a Greyhound bus station.

I don’t know how long David has been homeless. He is one of America’s walking wounded—mentally ill, unable to take care of himself, unable to cope with the business of life. He is always happy to talk, although you have to repeat yourself a few times before he can understand you: David is losing his hearing.     

One day I tried to take him to a shelter for the homeless. All he had to do was get in the pickup truck. He had to make a decision: Get in or stay on the street. The right decision could have started the cycle of healing and change, but it was more than David was capable of doing that morning. He decided to stay on the street, waiting for his imaginary ride to El Paso.

When I meet people like David, I tell myself that Lewis Carroll didn’t make anything up when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. I have met many people who are flesh and blood Cheshire Cats, Mad Hatters, and Queens of Hearts.

I come into contact every day with people whose lives and families have been torn apart by bad habits: people addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, and illegal drugs; over-spenders, overeaters, and chronic worriers; negative thinkers, procrastinators, and people who won’t forgive themselves for something that happened long ago.

I have seen firsthand how bad habits keep ordinary people from living happier and healthier lives. Everywhere you look, people want to know why they are unhappy. And they want to know what they can do about it.

The talk shows offer a constant menu of miracle cures for every type of bad habit imaginable—everything from quick weight-loss programs to 20-minute lessons in positive thinking that promise to cure depression. We are constantly bombarded by programs that promise effortless and immediate results: Lose weight fast, while eating as much as you want! Guaranteed to work! Sure.  

We are overwhelmed with solutions today. And the more solutions there are, the harder it is to find one that works. Many people have failed so many times that they’ve almost given up the battle. Others gave up a long time ago.

Establishing new priorities

Is it possible to free yourself from bad habits? Can people really change in any meaningful and lost-lasting way? Can I change myself? The answer to each of these questions is “yes.” But you can’t change in 24 hours, as some programs and self-help books promise.

My research, as well as my experience and common sense, tell me that anyone can change, but at the same time, I know that people need a compelling reason to change.

What does it mean to change? To change means to establish new priorities—to choose a behavior that’s different from the one we’re using now. David Lucero is stuck on the street, waiting for a solution that doesn’t exist. When a real solution is right in front of his nose, he can’t see it.

I don’t know when his hearing started to deteriorate. And even though he can see, I have a feeling that he has been blind for many years. I don’t know the story of his life, but I suspect it is a story of bad habits and bad decisions.

I’m sure it’s a story filled with bad people and bad situations, too. But at some point we have to discard the factors, the people, and the situations that shaped us. Focusing on the past won’t help us solve today. At some point we have to take responsibility for our own lives.

I suspect that bad habits and bad choices are what brought David to this point—day after day and year after year—until he hit rock bottom. That’s always the way it is.     

Learning how to free yourself from bad habits starts with the realization that we cause our own feelings. I am the major cause of my own problems. The moment I grasp that simple fact, I’m ready to step into the process of self-change that will lead to freedom from the habits that keep me from living a more satisfying life. And when I’m free from my bad habits, the people around me will be free from the person I used to be.

All people can bring about superficial changes in themselves. But freeing yourself from a self-destructive habit like smoking or overeating requires a deep, long-lasting change. A bad habit is like an iceberg. You can’t beat the habit if you approach it as if it were only as large as what you can see on the surface.

Franz Kafka said, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Any book or program that aims to help people break bad habits must reveal the whole iceberg that lies below the surface.

You can’t eliminate the whole thing in one day, but if you take a step-by-step approach, you can eliminate the bad habit sooner than you thought possible. It is going to take effort on your part.

You can’t eat whatever you want and loose weight, no matter how many times you hear it on the talk shows. But you can loose weight, and you can learn to enjoy healthy foods more than the unhealthy foods you’re eating now.  

David has constructed a verbal cage for himself. His definition of the problem seems to give him no choice; he avoids having to take responsibility for himself. To receive the benefits that come with daily meals, hot showers, clean clothes, a bed, medical attention, companionship, and as much help as a social worker can give him— bus fare to El Paso, if that is indeed where he should go—he must break out of the cage.

But David is convinced that he cannot go to the shelter, for doing so would mean that he might miss his ride to El Paso. That is how people get trapped in verbal cages of their own making.  

I talk about some extreme cases in this report, because I see them every day. But I also think that these extreme cases make it easier to see the real issues and challenges faced by people who are not in such obviously life-threatening situations.

David isn’t conscious of the elaborate mechanisms he has constructed to hide the truth from himself, but he is hiding it all the same. To free ourselves from bad habits, we must stop hiding the truth from ourselves.

Overeaters, smokers, and chronic procrastinators have more in common with people like David than meets the eye. We all go to great lengths to hide the truth from ourselves about the destructive nature of our bad habits; too often, lives and families are destroyed before we become aware of the verbal cages that keep us trapped in self-destructive behavior.    

Does professional therapy work? Can it help people break bad habits before the habit destroys their lives? The dropout rate is astonishing: 45% of clients who seek a professional therapist drop out of therapy after two or three sessions.

Do programs help? Millions of smokers have quit forever without following a treatment program. On the other hand, many people who try a smoking-cessation program are not able to quit, no matter how many different programs they try.

Some research suggests that for every person who quits smoking by following a treatment program, there are almost twenty persons who quit on their own.

What conclusion should we draw from all of this? It’s pretty clear, I think. You have a better chance of freeing yourself from a bad habit by becoming your own coach, by taking responsibility for your own program.

The goal of this report is to give you the information and strategy that will empower you to free yourself from bad habits. Millions of people have succeeded in breaking a bad habit, and so can you.

The six stages in the process of self-change

Change is not an event, but a process. Change happens through a series of stages, and most successful self-changers fail at least once before they succeed. Willpower alone won’t do it.

You need to understand the cycle of change, or you risk substituting one bad habit for another, as so often happens when ex-smokers satisfy their craving for “something” by overeating. Success depends on having the right information and knowing how to use it.

Researchers have identified six clear stages in the process of successful self-change:

1.      Denial

2.      Awareness

3.      Preparation

4.      Action

5.      Maintenance

6.      Termination

For most people, the process of breaking a bad habit is not a straight path that takes them from one stage to the next. Successful self-changers usually follow a path that’s more like a spiral: They move forward, go back to a previous stage, and move on to the next level of commitment one or more times before breaking the habit for good.

Quitting a habit cold turkey usually doesn’t work. If a person isn’t ready to move ahead, pushing her into the action stage will cause her to feel like a failure the first time she slips up. She may end up more addicted to her habit than she was before she tried to quit. If she feels guilty and blames herself for failing to break the habit, she will find it even harder to make a commitment to quit the next time.

We have all seen cases close to home. Many of us have experienced the frustration of trying to break a bad habit. As Mark Twain said, “Quitting smoking is easy. Personally, I’ve quit many times.” If that sounds familiar, this report is for you.

Whatever your bad habit is, you may have tried to break it many times, too. This time will be different, because you’ll understand that breaking your habit is a process, not an event. You will have the knowledge and the confidence to succeed this time.   

 

Can you really change? Can you really free yourself from bad habits? Millions of people around the world are living proof that you can. This guide will show you how. But like Alice, to reach your goal you need to know where you want to go. For many people, that is the hardest part. Like David, they’re stuck. 

Freeing yourself from a bad habit starts by removing the blinders.