The Stay with It Longer Method: Using Titration to Change Habits

The body and consciousness are amazing powerhouses of processing.

There’s the saying ‘time heals all wounds’, but I don’t think that gives enough credit to the active processes that are happening to return a wounded system to health.

Just like a physical cut requires clotting, scabbing, and immune response to heal the skin, psychological wounds take our internal processing power to repair.

The Flip-side

Unlike with physical wounds however, psychological wounds seem to need our conscious attention and witnessing to heal.

This is rather unfortunate, because it functionally makes the healing optional!

Enter here: addictions. The devastating ones, the banal ones, the socially sanctioned ones.

When the human system encounters emotions that are too big and too much to deal with, the endless cornucopia of numbing and distracting strategies takes over.

Anything from reading the news obsessively, over-eating, over-exercising, drinking, sudoku, vintage-shopping, what have you, can be the action that postpones feeling what’s uncomfortable.

So How does Healing Happen?

It’s not that numbing activities have no place in healing!

Think of the classic break-up montage: a person vegging out to TV, drinking wine, eating or not eating and generally rotting into the couch between intense jags of crying.

 It’s the crying jags, however, that are what’s helpful and forward moving, not the numbing out.

The numbing actions are the body’s unconscious intelligence spacing out the pain in tolerable intervals.

This is titration.

Bringing in Titration

Titration is a term from chemistry that’s been borrowed by the trauma repair field to mean doing just a little bit of something that if you did all at once would be overwhelming.

In the break-up trope example the body is naturally titrating the pain. Crying, tv, wine, crying, cookies, sleep, crying.

With a lot of our developmental, early, big, existential pain, the body just goes right for the numbing out and doesn’t process the underlying issue.

Titration needs to be reintroduced.

 Staying with it a little longer

We’re not trying to deprive the system of its coping strategies.

The fear of losing what brings regulation (the addiction) sets off huge alarm bells. A lot of people’s systems freak out at the thought of stopping the addictive thing.

Don’t try and wrestle with your coping mechanism when you need your coping mechanism.

What I’m suggesting is those moments we reach for comfort food, tv, social media, etc. can be opportunities to work with our stuff, but just a little bit.

What to Try

So maybe! When you’re all set to partake in your escape of choice, take 15 seconds and feel/sense what are you postponing feeling. See if you can take a breath into it.

The first step might even be: thinking about even thinking about what’s under there.

You can set parameters like: I’m going to feel 2%, 10%, or .5 % of what’s under here.

It’s not an intellectual exercise though. The sticky thing: tune into it. See if you can feel it and bring some love, compassion, curiosity, breath, and care there.

And then……let your system do what it was going to do!!

If you were going to have a cookie, have the cookie. Watch the show. Intensely workout.

Tell yourself, ‘there there, you did a good job looking at reason you do xyz, enjoy your xyz.’

This brings titration to those big stuck old emotions.

Why does this help?

Numbing strategies are sheets we put over piles of clothes we don’t have space to deal with.

Titration is saying: peak under the sheet. Maybe fold one of the shirts that is under there. Then set the sheet back down and avoid the remaining pile like you were going to.

The thought is that if you do this enough, a future point will come where there won’t be anything under the sheet to cover up, so you can fold the sheet up too.

This is the long game. These complex strategies formed over time and it’s an overwhelming mistake to think we have to fix it at once!

 But, if we can stay with it a little longer, the natural intelligence of the system can come in and do its work.

All we need to do is bring conscious attention to the issue.