by William Dubin

Consider a time when you were driving your automotive vehicle along a familiar route, and you were so absorbed in your thoughts—planning some future activity or ruminating on a current concern—that you didn't notice passing a certain landmark along the way, or the music from the vehicle's sound system, or the feel of the steering wheel in your hands. Even though your conscious mind was so completely preoccupied that you didn't notice all these things, a part of you was driving the vehicle and operating it perfectly safely.

Since your conscious mind was preoccupied with its thoughts, who was operating the vehicle? It must be a part of you of which you are not conscious. This unconscious, experiential processing system is capable of guiding complex performance while making little demand on your finite conscious resources. Indeed, most of the time you are not consciously operating the bio-psycho-social vehicle you inhabit, because your attention is focused elsewhere, or not at all.

By contrast, "mindful driving" means being fully present in each moment, consciously aware of sights, sounds, thoughts, and bodily sensations as they arise, so you can respond intentionally rather than follow the path of least resistance. When mindful, you can act in accord with your interests and principles despite the influence of local stressors and temptations that would promote relapse.

The Karma of repeatedly exercising the behavioral sequence that leads to incentive use is that it gets progressively stronger until it becomes autonomous. Once that happens it requires willful effort to interrupt the sequence of events leading to relapse.

The Path of Least Resistance

The path of least resistance describes the predictable, cause-and-effect sequence of events that a biological creature would follow if it did not have an operator aware of its core motivation, or if the operator was asleep at the wheel. Getting this creature to follow an intended path in the face of local conditions that would promote incentive use requires an operator capable of exerting will to override these local forces.

Real life demands substantial cognitive resources. Investing these dear resources to intentionally guide behavior at each moment is not a realistic strategy. Will has its greatest impact when exercised during the critical moments of a crisis. From my perspective as the therapist rooting for good outcome, I want an operator who appreciates the client's core motivation in the driver's seat at these critical moments. If only I could follow my clients around and alert them—in a kindly, non-judgmental way—when they are in a high-risk situation, so they could wake up and operate the creature mindfully. Of course, this is impossible and there will be no external voice to tip the client off.

A major part of the passage to good long-term outcome is developing the capability to shift from the perspective of the biological creature that must obey cause-and-effect principles (such as the PIG - the Problem of Immediate Gratification), to the perspective of the operator (who has a particular goal in mind).

Getting a mortal creature—driven by desires and fears—to act as intended requires the power to override these primitive motivations. Exercising will, like exercising muscle power through resistance training, is a discipline that demands some dedication and patience.

Our web site: alcohol-drug.com contains thought experiments and downloadable MP3 files that provide opportunities to develop the faculties and skills to override the influence of local conditions and behave as intended. These exercises share the commonality of inviting you to experience a particular phenomenon by getting you to focus your attention on a particular stimulus. Your ability to manipulate subjective phenomena intentionally depends upon your faculties of concentration and imagination. Like muscles, these faculties grow stronger with exercise and atrophy with disuse.

The Mentality of Childhood

To get a child to trade something of genuine value for a trivial incentive is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in some cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to state-dependent phenomena as they were when they were children, and for them provoking a relapse is as easy as taking candy from a baby.

A predisposing cause of relapse is the mentality of childhood. Children assume that their state-dependent perceptions and beliefs are accurate reflections of objective reality. They label their appraisals in ways that crystallize these experiential phenomena into "things" that have an independent reality. For example: "Mommy is bad," carries with it the tacit premise that "she really is bad and it's not just that I'm cranky." The dispassionate observer understands that the child's cranky state influences his current appraisals, and mommy won't always seem bad. Later, when the child is in a different emotional state, his appraisal will be influenced by a different state-dependent filter. Naturally, the child is always unaware of the Soul Illusion and in each situation believes that he sees things as they really are.

When a child experiences fear—say in the doctor's office just before the inoculation—her emotional arousal comes with the tacit premise that the fear is based on a real threat and its intensity is related to the awfulness of the situation. Some children experience such strong emotional states that they must be restrained by adults, even though they are told, "It will just sting for a moment." Likewise, children often believe that the intensity of their desire for a certain incentive correlates with the degree of pleasure they will actually receive from it.

Many grown-ups continue to think that their perceptions, expectancies, and appraisals are undistorted reflections of a permanent objective reality. An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective experience—including cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings—is merely a temporary, state-dependent phenomenon, which exists only in the mind of the beholder. The objective world is populated with events; it is only within your subjective reality that beliefs, emotional reactions, and the story that gives it all meaning exist. The technical term for this realization is, Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

Operating the creature you inhabit so that it follows the path of greatest advantage rather than yielding in the direction of least resistance requires the ability to shift from the perspective of the creature, whose actions are determined by cause-and-effect principles such as the PIG to the perspective of the operator, who appreciates what is truly important.