Addictive Traps & Their Detector

Addictive traps are so tricky that most people who fall in never make it out. Each individual has a different biology, personal history, and current social circumstances, and so each of us have a different puzzle to solve. For you to finally escape your addictive trap, you will have to complete a passage that no one can take for you nor spare you.

Listed below are the six kinds of addictive traps that are responsible for most relapses and failures of will. Doing what you have to do is difficult, more so if you do not appreciate how the trap works. However, if you can develop an understanding of your particular challenge, you will be able to focus your energies and cognitive resources in ways that enable you to become free and to prevent relapse. The Trap Detector is a brief evaluative tool that will help you identify your particular addictive trap. There is no charge or signup to use this tool, and all data entry and scoring occurs on your computer only. To take the The Trap Detector please click here.

Interpreting Your Results

After Completing the The Trap Detector, your scores will be shown on your screen. We are interested in discovering which trap has the highest score, the one you should focus on first. By clicking on the trap name [below], you will access a detailed description of that trap as well as tools and methods that will enable you to escape it.

1. The Pig -The Problem of Immediate Gratification):Motivation is more sensitive to the immediacy than to the magnitude of the payoff. The Problem of Immediate Gratification is a cute name for a primary cause of Incentive Use Disorders. The relationship between the immediacy of the payoff and its influence on how you act is hyperbolic. When the incentive is nearby it has a much greater influence on your perception, motivation and response tendencies than you would predict when it is far away. Please click here for a more detailed discussion of the PIG . If you are vulnerable to the PIG it is important to prepare and strengthen your coping responses in advance, because you will not be able to do so once the PIG shows up. The story of how Odysseus responded to temptation provides a metaphor that can help you cope successfully with the PIG when you encounter this beast.
2. Counter-Regulatory Motivation: Perverse motivation may come in different flavors. One example is Reactance, which refers to the motivation to rebel against a restriction of a freedom, especially when the restriction does not apply to other people.
3. The Karma of Behaving Badly: Don’t worry about paying for your sins in the after-life; you will pay for them during this life. The true curse of the sinner is that the sinful behavior becomes stronger with exercise. With enough practice, the sequence of events that leads to incentive use becomes habitual, and hence requires conscious effort to interrupt. The path of least resistance you create by exercising some habits, rather than others, is your Karma.  For example, it is more difficult to learn to stop at a green light after you have already learned to stop at a red light.Please click here for a more detailed review of this problem. Changing your Karma involves modifying your path of least resistance. Helping you to transform your path of greatest advantage into your default path is the objective of this kit. Please visit Strategies to explore ways of approaching this task and Tactics for help with developing specific methods to cope with crises of stress and temptation.
4. Recursive Traps: Negative emotional states including depression, anxiety, and anger often produce outcomes that confirm the pathogenic beliefs that gave rise to them. There is often a reciprocal relationship between incentive use and emotional distress in that each amplifies the other. Please click here to learn more about positive feedback and addictive traps. As you might suspect, escaping a recursive trap can be tricky. Please click here for trance formative methods and exercises to help you escape recursive traps.
5. Attachment to Outcomes: Some people fail because they don’t care enough to perform well, and others fail because they care too much about outcomes to perform well. Individuals who believe they are failures are particularly desperate for validation by good outcome and so are particularly vulnerable to emotional reactions when they don’t get what they want, and when they do. Please click here for more on this topic. Attachment to outcomes increases emotionality, and thereby disrupts performance. Ancient wisdom in modern language: If you let your happiness or unhappiness depend on something you don’t control, you’re screwed. Our goal is for you to achieve good long-term outcome, which requires good performance on your part. The Enlightened Path describes the recommended perspective to a long-term challenge that may not always go your way.
6. Dependence: Whatever has the power to give you happiness or take it away will be your master. You will remain its slave as long as you wait for an external agent to free you. Genuine freedom is the byproduct of developing the procedural skills required to exercise your will. This kit contains information and tools that will help you complete your developmental passage from dependence to self-determination.No one can tell you the truth about what you really want and what you are willing to do to get it; you have to discover the answers for yourself. To supplement the general contemplation exercises, Ask Alice and The Dickensian Exercise will give you an opportunity to explore your truths and core motivations. Are you ready to change? Please click here to research readiness for change in general and yours in particular.