3: Freedom-to-Change: Conceptual Differentiation

Freedom-to-Change and Self-Efficacy

Bandura (1977) defined Self-Efficacy as a person’s belief in (or confidence in) his or her ability to successfully carry out a specific task.  Freedom-to-Change is a belief that one is fundamentally free to change, i.e. that one is free to perform or “can” perform a given task.  

The “can-do-ism” of Self-Efficacy and the “can-do-ism” of Choice Awareness Training, as similar as they may seem, are fundamentally different issues.  The “can-do-ism” of Self-Efficacy, with self-efficacy being defined as confidence in one’s ability to succeed, is a probability of success issue, whereas the “can-do-ism” of the Freedom-to-Change is a capability issue.  The Freedom-to-Change construct is designed to reflect the species-wide range of human capability (is a given endeavor within my human capacity?);  whereas the construct of Self-Efficacy is a person-specific estimation of the probability-of-success (will I succeed at this endeavor if I were to attempt it?).  With these distinctions in mind, the thrust of Choice Awareness Training is not to nurture the client’s belief that he or she will successfully carry out a specific task, but to nurture the client’s realization that he or she can carry out the task in question.  With this distinction in mind, it could be said that the “can-do-ism” of Self-Efficacy is really a “will-do-ism.”

This conceptual differentiation might seem like clinically insignificant hair-splitting.  But it isn’t:  the difference between Freedom-to-Change (which delineates one’s capability) and Self-Efficacy (which predicts the probability that a given action will be taken) is no less significant than the difference between capability and motivation.  If treatment fails to differentiate between the constant of “capability” (can-do) and the variable of motivation-contingent “probability” (will-do), the individual, faced with a lapse or a relapse, is certain to attribute his or her failure to lacking “capability,” i.e. to being globally unable and incapable to meet and maintain the recovery goals.  This catastrophized “I can’t do this!” conclusion will, unfortunately, take the place of an otherwise more self-accepting conclusion of “I know I can do this, but I have not yet succeeded in doing so.”

From Freedom-to-Change to Readiness-to-Change

The transition through the initial stages of readiness-to-change (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1986) might be arrested by a client’s sense of inefficacy.  Miller and Rollnick (1991) recognized the need to enhance the client’s self-efficacy (i.e. client’s belief in his or her ability to successfully carry out the tasks of recovery) as part of motivational enhancement.

Given the above-delineated distinction between self-efficacy and one’s sense of being fundamentally free to choose, and, thus, to change, it would appear that the ambivalence of the Precontemplation stage might be just as much about whether one can change as it is about whether one will be able to change.  The “I want to, but I am not sure if I can” ambivalence appears to be phenomenologically precede the “I can, but I am not sure if I want to”  ambivalence.  And, indeed, in order to motivationally vacillate as to whether one wants to change or not, one would have to first presuppose that the very change in question is even possible. 

Furthermore, a client who appears to be motivationally ambivalent, i.e. seemingly unsure if he or she wants to proceed with the tasks of recovery, might be merely questioning whether he or she can, in fact, change.  With these considerations in mind, it is recommended here that Choice Awareness Training (as a means to developing one’s sense of Freedom-to-Change) should ideally precede the cultivation of the Reasons to Change or, at the very least, proceed in parallel with motivational enhancement.  

Freedom-to-Change through Lonergan’s Lens

Lonergan’s Operational Range of Freedom

Lonergan (Tengan, 1999) draws a distinction between Essential freedom and Effective freedom that somewhat parallels this author’s distinction between Strategic and Tactical  Awareness of Freedom to Change (or strategic and tactical freedom). Tengan clarifies Lonergan’s dichotomy as follows: whereas “essential freedom is concerned with possible courses of action, effective freedom is concerned with the actual courses of action” with the effective freedom being, in essence, an “operational range at a person’s disposal” (p. 94).

Limitations to the Operational Range of Freedom

Lonergan posits the following 4 barriers to this operational range of freedom. 

1)      External Circumstance:  one’s effective freedom can be restricted by an External Circumstance.  For example, if you are five feet tall your chances of being drafted into NBA are inherently limited by the fact that one’s height is an important prerequisite for professional-level basketball.

2)      Psychoneural State or Subject’s Sensitivity:  Lonergan posits that one’s “capacity for deliberation and choice” can be hampered by such neurotic phenomena as anxiety or obsessions.  For example, an otherwise perfectly able youth of adequate height and basketball skill might be hesitant to pursue a career in basketball out of the perfectionistic dread of failure. 

3)      Subject’s Intelligence:  Lonergan explains that one’s operational range of freedom is, to an extent, a matter of one’s intellectual development.  Consequently, one’s fund of knowledge, education, analytical capacity all play a factor in one’s “capacity for deliberation and choice.”  In other words, the more one knows and the better one processes information, the freer one is.

4)      Universal Willingness: Lonergan recognizes habit as an impediment to an essential free choice and advocates the development of universal willingness in accordance with which a person is “antecedently willing to learn all there is to learn about willing and learning and about the enlargement of one’s freedom from external circumstance and psychoneural interferences.”  In other words, Lonergan proposes that to expand one’s effective freedom, a person has to maintain an overall appreciation of how habits create response inclinations (or response orientations that manifest as a willingness to respond in a specific manner) and to cultivate a kind of universal willingness to act freely rather than out of a habitual response inclination.

Lonergan’s Universal Willingness

Lonergan’s Universal Willingness, if defined as a willingness to act freely (willingly), rather than out of habitual inclinations (automatically), comes satisfyingly close to this author’s conception of Strategic Awareness of the Freedom to Change.  The notion of Universal Willingness, however, appears insufficient to enable an awareness of the freedom to change at any given moment in the person’s life.   In much the same fashion as the Strategic Awareness of the Freedom to Change, Universal Willingness exists as a dormant realization, as a stored philosophy, a guiding principle that may or may not be incorporated into one’s thought content at any given time-point.  And as such, for all intents and purposes, Universal Willingness or Strategic Awareness of the Freedom to Change is only useful as a philosophical and motivational impetus to developing a capacity for Tactical Awareness of the Freedom to Change.   Consequently, it could be said that Lonergan’s four impediments to the effective range of freedom need to be complimented by the fifth impediment, i.e. lack of baseline (moment-by-moment) choice awareness.  And, indeed, a person who is otherwise non-restricted by circumstance, who is psychoneurally regulated or stable, who is both intellectually adequate, and who, otherwise, knows and appreciates the need to be unimpaired by the response momentum of the habits, might be factually mindless, very much in the process of enacting a given habit, entirely oblivious to the options or possibilities available at any given time.  What appears to be required, therefore, is not a philosophical willingness to act freely but an experiential baseline of awareness or tactical awareness of the fact that one can act freely or willingly at any given moment.  As demonstrated above, both Bandura’s and Lonergan’s conceptual equivalents of a sense of freedom-to-change (self-efficacy and universal willingness, respectively) suffer from one and the same fundamental problem of application.  While both are essentially conceptual reformulations of one’s capacity for freedom and self-control, neither approach provides a method for developing an experiential baseline of awareness or tactical awareness of one’s freedom to change.

Glasser’s Responsibility Training versus Choice Awareness Training

William Glasser, M.D., the founder of Reality Therapy, was one of the few 20^th century North American psychotherapy designers who appeared to appreciate, at least implicitly, the need for choice awareness training.  Responsibility, the second of Glasser’s “3 Rs” is defined as “ability to fulfill one’s needs, and to do so in a way that does not deprive others of their ability to fulfill their needs” (Glasser, 1965).  Glasser further notes in the same text that “teaching of responsibility is the most important task of all higher animals, man most certainly included.” 

Glasser’s Moralism versus Humanism of Choice Awareness

Glasser’s italics (“a way that does not deprive others of their ability to fulfill their needs”) and the third of his “3 Rs,” Right-and-Wrong, show an alliterative hint of the faintly mo-RRR-alistic g-RRR-owl of his clinical orientation, which, in my opinion, served to be the unfortunate demise of an otherwise perfectly sound idea of choice awareness training.  Glasser, in my opinion, in focusing on the Responsibility side of the coin of Freedom, got it backwards.  He was basing his therapeutic sales pitch on the Cost, rather than the Benefit, on Responsibility rather than Freedom, on Consequence rather than Choice.   With that in mind, his otherwise empowering and humanistic affirmation of “one’s ability to fulfill one’s needs” (choice, freedom) was drowned in the moralistic emphasis on responsibility.   It is of note that in its dismissal of the concept of mental illness, and holding clients responsible for their symptoms, Glasser’s take does parallel this author’s dismissal of the notion of addiction as a disease.  Similar to Glasser, the position offered in this approach prompts a substance user to take responsibility for their using behavior by highlighting the fundamental capacity for choice that one possesses at any given time, if he or she is sufficiently  choice-aware or awake. 

Unlike the undisguised moralism of Glasser’s Reality Therapy, the Change Equation approach humanistically normalizes our predisposition for automaticity and mindlessness, with a resultant sense of being out of control and without a choice, and encourages the individual to regain self-control without the suggestion of any particular value-based treatment goals.

Choice Awareness Training vs. Willpower

The act of will, application of willpower, and making of a choice are synonymous.  The term willpower, however, has an unfortunate connotation of varying strength, as if to convey that some people have a more powerful will than others.  It should be noted that the term “willpower” is not an inherently incorrect term.  When used in the sense of “power of will (or volition),” the term heightens, if not extols, the human capacity to make a choice.  The phrase “power of will” is free from any kind of interpersonal comparison, it is merely an acknowledgement that as humans we possess a power (a freedom) of self-determination through choice.  The term “willpower” becomes problematic, however, when the semantic focus shifts from “power of will” to “how powerful one’s will is.” The Concise American Heritage Dictionary (1987) reflects this distinction by defining “will power” as a) the ability to carry out one’s decisions, wishes, or plans, and b) the strength of mind.  While the first meaning of willpower does exist, the second is nothing but a linguistic connotation of the word “power” that does not have a phenomenological reality.  Comparative perception of will or capacity for choice as being stronger or weaker is erroneous and psychologically damaging.  An act of will or a choice is a binary event: one either acts or does not act in a certain fashion.  Consequently, all people are equally strong choosers, with an equal power for will, i.e. of the same willpower.  While equal in willpower, i.e. in the capacity for choice, people differ in:

a)      how they apply their will/choice, and in

b)      the degree of their conscious awareness of their capacity for choice. 

Pertaining to a), it is easy to see how judging of others’ actions leads to a conclusion that so and so has weak will.  It is the belief of this author that the process of moral comparison is the historical context for the emergence of the term willpower.  Say a person is faced with an opportunity to steal something of value.  He/she is tempted and, then, he acts upon that temptation.  To an outsider, this might seem like a battle between wanting to steal and not wanting to steal that has been resolved in the favor of the presumed temptation: the person could not withstand the promise of easy money, the allure of a financial short-cut.  Implicit in such interpretation is that one is weak since he surrendered, gave in to the temptation.  A verdict of weak willpower or not having enough willpower is the next logical step in such a chain of interpretation.

An alternative view of the situation is that one did not surrender or give in to the temptation.  One merely chose to act upon his desire to steal – for a variety of personal reasons.  According to such interpretation there is no weakness of will, there is only socially unacceptable misapplication of one’s will.  Consequently, the notion of strong or weak power appears to be a result of moralistic judgment in which there is an automatic semi-religious implication that when faced with socially unsanctioned opportunities (drugs, sex, crime) people are taunted, tempted, lured by whatever is the cultural equivalent of the devil or the dark side and the weakest give in. With this in mind, the notion of willpower has become a kind of implicit morality yard-stick that in the context of substance use treatment represents a circular double-bind, a kind of logical dead-end, a questionable asset in the change process.  In reality, people merely make choices that we may or may not agree with – and our disagreement has nothing to do with the measurement of a given person’s capacity for choice.  Just because one person insightfully chooses to “numb out” in order not to “go ballistic,” it does not mean that he or she has weak will – all it means is that at this moment this person had concluded (rightly or incorrectly) that drinking or drugging was a strategy of choice, a calculated act of emotional self-regulation.

Pertaining to b) (above), mindless, reflexive, knee-jerk decisions seem “weak” since they are void of the power of conscious choosing.  Such unconscious decisions seem “weak” because in their unconsciousness they fail to represent the best interests of the chooser.  This is exactly the case when a person in recovery yields to a craving, to an impulse to use.  To an outsider, such an easy surrender to a craving appears like an act of weak will.  In reality, the weakness of the act stems from its conditioned unconsciousness (or habitual automaticity) rather than from the actor’s actual capacity to resist a craving impulse.  An unconscious choice is like a sleeping beauty whose charms are not in play while she is dormant.  The “Gun Point Test” is evidence enough that any seemingly weak-willed person would be capable of resisting a craving, given an opportunity to do so in a fully “awakened” state.

The therapeutic importance of deconstructing the myth of willpower cannot be overemphasized.  When one buys into the notion of willpower and uses lack of it as an excuse to use, he or she is beyond criticism.  In such a case, willpower adopts the rationalizing benefit of the doubt that ensures the belief in addiction as a medical disease. To ask a weak person to do something they do not have the strength for is akin to Baron Munchausen’s pulling himself out of the swamp by his own pony-tail.  In other words, change based on willpower is similar to asking one to be strong when one is weak. 

People in recovery who have uncritically bought into the notion of will-power are well familiar with this double bind:  they are asked to use willpower to stay away from drugs and alcohol, to stay in control; but if they had the willpower to stay away from the drugs and alcohol in the first place they probably would have not been out of control to begin with.  With these considerations in mind, it is important to dissect the myth of willpower as a volitional muscle that varies in size from one person to another, and to substitute this hazardous term with a notion that everyone has the exact same capacity for choice.  Therefore, when one says “I can’t” they are really saying “I won’t.”

It should be pointed out that traditional substance use treatment models make the error of omission in not directly debunking the myth of will-power.  Contrary to this, the present approach incorporates the discussion of the interplay between the notions of will-power and choice into the session curriculum.

Comment on the Strength of Willpower Research

Baumeister et al. (1994) present the findings of research (Wegner et al. (1990), Pennebaker & Chew (1985), Notarius et al (1982), Waide and Orne (1982)) that suggests that self-regulation, empirically defined as self-stopping, involves not only mental but physical exertion as well as evidenced by increased psychophysiological arousal.  In interpreting the results of various research teams, Baumeister et al (1994) conclude that chronically weak willpower may be one of the three possible impediments to self-regulation.  In particular, they write that “it is almost certainly true that some people have more self-discipline than others, are better able to control their actions and feelings, are more capable of resisting temptation” (p. 19).  They further proceed to metaphorically liken self-regulatory capacity (and, by implication, willpower) to a muscle whose strength can be both weakened and strengthened over time by precedents of self-regulation or failures thereof.  While the research on the physical exertion aspect of self-stopping/self-regulatory processes appears to be beyond methodological doubt, Baumeister’s conclusion that some people are “better able to control their actions and feelings” and are “more capable of resisting temptation” (Baumeister et al., 1994, p. 19) appears to be an unwarranted leap of logic.  The self-stopping research cited by Baumeister et al. made no inter-group comparisons. 

Consequently, while Baumeister et al. speculate that differences in will-power would account for the presumed differences in degree of control over actions and feelings, and resistance to temptations, this author believes that whatever interpersonal differences exist in terms of these parameters, they are strictly a function of differences in motivation and skill-power, not in will-power.  In equating “capacity for self-regulation” with will-power, Baumeister et al. (1994, p. 19) appear to mistake a decision to self-regulate with the effectiveness of the execution of such a decision which is predicated on the motivation to self-regulate, self-regulation skill-level, and, at risk of being methodologically pedantic, on such additional impediments to effective freedom as psychoneuronal state and subject’s intellectual development (Lonergan).

With this in mind, to justify the conclusion by Baumeister et al. that some people have more will-power than others (not just better self-regulation skill than others), there would need to be a study protocol that finds interpersonal differences in self-stopping after partialing out or controlling for any differences in motivation to self-regulate, self-regulatory skill-level, intellectual development, and subjects’ psychoneuronal reactivity.  To this author’s knowledge, no such research has been published to date.

Overview: Goals of Choice Awareness Training

Choice Awareness Training pursues the following three goals:

1)   Development of a Strategic Awareness of Freedom to Change as evidenced by an appreciation of choice as a manifestation of fundamental, inevitable freedom that potentiates the change process.

Clients are expected to internalize the fact that they “cannot not choose,” that at any given time they have a choice and, consequently, hold the freedom to act as they choose, in accordance with their goals, and the responsibility for any subsequent benefits and costs of their choice.

2)  Reformulation of the Perceived Chronicity of Addiction and Loss of Control as being a function of normal human functioning/habit formation/coping automatization.

Clients discard such self-deprecatory conceptions about their prior inability to change as “lacking will-power” or “being hooked,” and are helped to understand that while they “cannot not choose,” their freedom to change or to make choices can be limited by perfectly human proneness to mindless, stimulus-response bound, conditioned, auto-piloted and schematic functioning.  Clients further appreciate that they can both proactively prevent and retroactively terminate auto-piloted, schematic functioning through the practice of choice awareness (overall message of this section is that “you cannot not choose unless you are on a mindless, thoughtless, conditioned, self-unaware autopilot”)

3)  Development of a Tactical Awareness of Freedom to Change through:  a) the facilitated, in-session, behaviorally-experiential practice of choice awareness, and  b) a formulation of and implementation of a choice-awareness regimen (the overall message of this section is that the “daily choice awareness practice is key to executing a target change”).

Choice Awareness Training and Controlled Use

Choice Awareness Training can help save the lives of those who have an unshakable commitment to alcohol and/or drug use, be it for the reasons of their particular world-view, or anti-social personality orientation, or, more commonly, because of convincing personal data that evidenced their capacity for controlled use.  Let’s face it: the current establishment of the substance use treatment industry in the United States (with the exception of such isolated controlled use advocates as Marlatt) has little, if anything, to offer to a substance user, who, even after a non-judgmental motivational enhancement, decides in favor of using.  When it comes down to a client with a controlled use agenda, it should be appreciated that Choice Awareness training is a control-training system, and as such Choice Awareness Training can help translate the client’s intention for controlled use into a more attainable reality.

Arguments of Spiritual Determinism in the Context of Choice Awareness Training

The content of Choice Awareness Training is non-faith-based.  Any religious or fatalistic remarks about pre-determined destiny, fate, or God’s will are to be respectfully re-directed.  When such comments cannot be disregarded and require attention, clinicians are encouraged not to disagree but to reframe the notion of choice at a micro (moment-by-moment, day-to-day) level, not at a macro (cosmic/spiritual) level.