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"Recovery Review."

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STEP 3   - How We Change

What is going to drive your change?

You have a purpose. You have desire. You want to take the first step.

Do you want to fully experience and expand happiness in your life? Do you believe you are capable of finding the right path for you? If so, right now, you need just enough desire to take the first step.

When you take the first step to join Positive Recovery, we help you take the next step towards lifetime change by giving you the tools to get what you really want.

Willpower can't overcome identity.

All the will power you can muster will not change your behavior beyond your values and identity.

If you believe that you are an addict who will struggle with your addiction for the rest of your life... you will.

If you believe you are powerless, this will belief will limit your capabilities.

Will power is short term energy applied to an identity problem. If the foundation of your problem is in who you believe you are, your willpower will fizzle, your rational arguments about what you should do will become illusive.

What do you believe? Who are you? What are your values?

Our clients are often surprised by how easily our hypnosis sessions and discovery tools dig down and separate the beliefs they have absorbed from their dysfunctional families and emotional traumas from who they really are and want to be.

Reprograming Habits and Triggers

Once we have uncovered our beliefs about our identity, we still have a lot of habits and traps that will survive our identity change.

These habits are a neurological reality. Repeated use of certain behaviors and thoughts create a "groove" in how our impulses travel through our brain. Combinations of behaviors create automated responses to triggers. These triggers make it feel like our behaviors "just happen."

An important part of any change is to recognize the habits and triggers and reprogram them based on our natural identity. Our hypnosis, interactive exercises and relationship training all support creating new reactions to old habits.

Self Sabotage

As we grew up, we often felt threatened and needed to protect ourselves. Sometimes the threats were one time traumatic events. Sometimes the threats were ongoing. Depending on our age, we often didn't have a lot of choices on how to best take care of ourselves. So we picked the best defense we had available at the time.

Now that we are adults, the defense we chose in the past to protect ourselves now become a prison, preventing us from reaching our potential. Each of these parts that protected us needs to be recognized, honored and given a role that supports our new identity.

Positive Recovery uses hypnosis and interactive exercises to experience and recognize each part of ourselves,and to integrate these previously limiting parts into who we are becoming.

New Behaviors that express our real identity

Do you recall learning to drive a car with a standard transmission? Do you remember how hard you had to concentrate before it became so easy that you could drive, shift and talk all at the same time?

Why does creating new behaviors feel so hard at first? It is because we have to create new neural pathways. This requires conscious effort. The more we use these neural pathways in our brain, the more automatic the behavior becomes, the less we have to work at it.

When we develop new and healthy behaviors that get us what we want in life, we have to concentrate initially to make them feel natural. Often we stop before they get easy because we don't understand the process of building new neurological activity. We were willing to put in the effort to build new neural pathways when we learned to ride a bicycle because we saw older children riding and we wanted to be like them. We knew it was possible. We knew we could do it and we knew that once we learned, it would be easy for the rest of our lives.

New behaviors built on our natural and positive reclaimed identity rapidly become rewarding and pleasant. Positive Recovery gives this experience from day one.

What's the point? It's all about relationships.

At Positive Recovery, you will learn that no matter how badly you have been hurt or how badly you have hurt others in the past, you are capable of a new set of behaviors that will change how you relate to others forever.

It doesn`t make sense to concentrate on the addiction if the most critical aspect of our lives, our relationships, doesn`t also improve.

Positive Recovery has created a series of interpersonal exercises that will allow you to develop a new way of relating to others in a safe way.

Our post seminar groups use these exercises so you can continue to build relationships both inside and outside of the recovery family. Our goal is to give you new a relationship `muscle` to use in developing and rebuilding relationships in your own community with people you admire and want to model.

STEP 4

If using the Positive Recovery "identity power" recovery process makes sense, call Richard Friesen at (415) 259-0652 to see how your identity can work for you.

If you would like to read a personal letter from, Wendi Friesen, take step four on your discovery tour of Positive Recovery.