5: Part II of Choice Awareness Training: Cultivating Tactical Freedom to Change

This part of Choice Awareness Training discusses the practice of tactical (here-and-now, ongoing) choice awareness and development of a daily Choice Awareness Practice as a way to potentiate change.  The true challenge of Choice Awareness Training is not necessarily the task of helping the client awaken to their fundamental capacity to change but to help the client weave that realization into the very fabric of their life.

Choice Awareness Practice

The first part of Choice Awareness Training (facilitation of the strategic, philosophical, ontological appreciation for one’s fundamental freedom to choose and to change) can be accomplished within four to six semi-didactic, semi-experiential sessions.  The practice part of the Choice Awareness Training was an ongoing treatment modality that an inpatient substance use client availed himself of until the day of the discharge from the program.  As such, facilitated practice of choice awareness (through the attendance of the Choice Awareness Practice group and through corresponding choice-awareness clinical homework) is recommended as an ongoing programmatic element in structured drug and alcohol rehabilitation.  The following is a discussion of how an initially Logotherapeutic intervention designed to facilitate the appreciation of the fundamental freedom-to-change transitions to a form of modified mindfulness practice designed to institute an appreciation of the here-and-now opportunities for choice as well as to facilitate an “installation” of a personal choice awareness practice habit.

Choice Awareness Practice Group Session Format

Choice Awareness Practice (CAP) was originally designed as a group modality (Somov & Somova, 2003), as part of an overall clinical curriculum of group-based modalities, such as motivation-leveraging Logotherapy group, “Meaning of Life” (Somov, 2007), Relapse Prevention Psychodrama (Somov, in press), and others.  While the description of CAP below is customized to group setting, Choice Awareness Practice is just as well-suited for individual applications.  The CAP group, piloted in the correctional drug and alcohol treatment program, consisted of an ongoing discussion of the importance of developing a choice awareness routine interlaced with in-session practice of choice awareness that involve the practice choice awareness enhancing exercises. 

Choice Awareness Practice Group sessions consist of four potential elements: a) ongoing review of the rationale of the choice awareness change variable and of its interplay with other aspects of recovery; b) assisting clients with initiating and fine-tuning their daily choice awareness practice; c) helping clients process the experiential fall-out/insights from their increased choice awareness; and d) providing clients with an in-session structured choice awareness experience both to raise their level of choice awareness and to model ideas for choice awareness applications and practices.

From Strategic Freedom to Change to Tactical Freedom

Having assisted clients with establishing their strategic awareness of their fundamental freedom to choose and change, facilitators begin to qualify the thesis of “you cannot not choose” by discussing various exceptions to this existential axiom.   While the strategic sense of freedom-to-change is undermined by the client’s all-or-nothing view of their self-control attempts, as well as by subscribing to the choice-disempowering Disease Model of addiction and choice-incompatible language, the tactical freedom to change is undermined by lack of choice awareness, i.e. by habitual, schematic, stimulus-response, unconscious, mindless responding to internal and external stimuli. 

The overall goal of this section is to help clients realize that while they may be strategically free, they are not tactically free unless they are actively (or mindfully) aware of the choices imbedded in the here-and-now, particularly at various micro and macro crossroads of life.

Exploring the Barriers to Tactical Freedom

In exploring the barriers to Tactical (actionable, operational) Freedom, clients can be asked to ponder if there, in fact, some exceptions to the previously established existential maxim that “one cannot not choose.”  The following answers typically emerge, with minimal prompting:

We cannot not choose unless we are: a) dead (given particular beliefs about the after-life or absence thereof);  b) comatose, unconscious, or asleep; and c) acting on an impulse, reflexively, automatically, mindlessly, in a scripted, pre-programmed, pre-rehearsed, rote, conditioned manner, out of habit, without the awareness of the choice options available in a given moment.  This type of discussion of the barriers to the tactical, in-the-moment, here-and-now awareness of choices primes clients for the metaphor of conditioned, habitual, mindless behavior as a kind of sleep, and for the metaphor of choice awareness and mindfulness as a kind of awakening.  The metaphor of mindlessness as sleep existentially upgrades the mandate of Choice Awareness Training to a goal of self-awakening from the lull of automaticity.

Tactical Choice Awareness Training & Gurdjieff-Type Mindfulness Training

Long after the days of the Buddha, the utility of here-and-now, tactical mindfulness would be echoed by many of the philosophical and psychological brokers of the East.  Few came as close to a practical choice-awareness training system as Georgy Gurdjieff, a charismatic early 20th century Russian guru, nicknamed the “rascal sage” (Speeth, 1989).  Gurdjieff likened an un-awakened human being to a machine, self (personality) to a collection of habits, and awakening or self-understanding to, at best, a lucid dream, or an awareness of being asleep.  Gurdjieff did not believe that un-awakened human machines phenomenologically experience choice and denied the human machine a power of self-determination: “We have no capacity to do, no ‘free will’ – in fact, no function of will at all” (Speeth, 1989, p. 33).  Gurdjieff posited that “Man is born, lives, dies, builds houses, writes books, not as he wants to, but as it happens. Everything happens. Man does not love, hate, desire – all this happens;”  a person does not choose: “the situation chooses” (p. 33).  But, according to Gurdjieff, the human machine can study itself, and can develop a capacity for true will (Speeth, 1989; Ouspensky, 1949).  Gurdjieff emphasized self-study through self-monitoring of one’s motor-behavioral and cognitive-affective habits.  More specifically, he prescribed such de-automatizing activities as assuming and holding of an uncomfortable sitting or standing position, the use of non-dominant hands to perform various routinized tasks of daily living, and modification of one’s writing.  Thus, Gurdjieff taught freedom from automaticity.  Langer (1989), the author of “Mindfulness,” writing at the end of the twentieth century echoes Gurdjieff’s early twentieth century formulations and recommendations: “the automatic behavior,” she writes, “has much in common with habit” (p. 16) and notes that acknowledges that “proper meditation techniques are said to result in a state that has been called de-automatization” and in a state of freedom from stereotypes and rigid distinctions (p. 78; Langer’s italics). 

But Gurdjieff, of course, wasn’t the only one to write about automaticity.  Wells, as far back as 1927, in her work entitled “The Phenomenology of the Act of Choice,” observes the so-called “habitual” choices: “with repetition the development of the processes entering into volitional consciousness tends quickly to become habitual.” (p. 92).  Wells preferred the term “habitual” choices are really a misnomer since they involve no consciousness per se and are nothing other than cognitive-behavioral defaults, or automaticity. 

Wells, unlike Gurdjieff, apparently did not like the de-humanizing analogy to a machine, and felt that the term “habitual” choice, rather than the term “automatic,” “better expresses the psychological constitution of the process” (p. 92).  Barrett (1911) did not feel he had to be apologetic about the terminology of automaticity as he saw it not only normal but adaptive: “automatism is the natural issue of normal motivation… a manifestation of the protective economizing tendency of volitional functioning” (1911, p. 141). 

Gurdjieff drew a distinction between people who experience events as if they “happen” to them and those who are free.  This semantic distinction between people who “do” and people for whom “everything happens” is tantamount to a distinction between choice-ful-ness and choice-less-ness. 

It should be noted that the practical part of the Choice Awareness Training proposed  by Somov & Somova (2003) was inspired by Gurdjieff’s teachings and can be reasonably construed as a form of modified mindfulness training the purpose of which is to increase a baseline of here-and-now awareness of choices, as an existentially-prophylactic catalyst of habit-modification. 

Choice Awareness as Modified Mindfulness Training vs. Classic Mindfulness

While both Mindfulness and Choice Awareness Training are awareness training technologies, the two are somewhat different in focus.  Mindfulness is awareness, “awareness of simply what is” (Dimidjian & Linehan, 2003).  Choice Awareness is choice awareness, or awareness of the opportunity for a choice and of self as a Chooser behind the choices

Buddhist mindfulness is an awareness of the external object with the purpose of assisting the meditator to eventually lose the sense of being an observer and to unite in the moment, with the moment, in a state of object-less, subject-less non-duality.  Choice Awareness, by definition, is an awareness of choice, a meta-cognitive awareness of the fact that one has a choice (options at any given moment) and a capacity to choose.  Therefore, choice awareness does not aim to blur the boundary between the subject and the object.  On the contrary, it aims to reinforce one’s sense of oneself as a subject, as a self-determining agency.  Therefore while mindfulness meditation represents a period of non-judgmental observation passivity or non-doing, free of discursive, interpretive inner narrative, choice-awareness practice is an active process that infuses an awareness of choice into what was previously automated, characterized with discursive self-narrating of the options that one is tactically aware of and their alignment with one’s strategic goals. Whereas mindfulness is a state of accepting willingness (Dimidian & Linehand, 2003), whereas choice awareness is a state of purposeful, psychologically healthy, and self-efficacious willfulness.  In summary, mindfulness training is training in the awareness of being here-and-now, Choice Awareness Training is training in the here-and-now awareness of being free.

Demonstrating Automaticity, Mindlessness, and “Choice-less-ness”

The following are a few experiential ways to demonstrate automaticity, mindlessness, and “choice-less-ness” that can be used either as part of Choice Awareness Practice group or in the context of individual psychotherapy.

Pointing Out the Here-and-Now Automaticity

“Catch” clients in the middle of head nodding, leg shaking, and in the middle of their gestures.  Point out the seeming mindlessness and automaticity of these motor behaviors.  Help clients appreciate the fact that while they, in theory, had choices (about what leg to shake, how quickly to shake it, etc.), the behaviors “happened” on their own without their having been any conscious processing of the choice options or any conscious choosing.  This type of immediate behavioral feedback is used to facilitate to a greater state of choice-awareness.  As clients begin to become self-conscious, they, by definition, become conscious of their Selves: such moments of meta-cognitive self-awareness and self-observation afford an empowering glimpse of the dormant Chooser that is coming back “on-line.”

Circle of Choice

Give clients four sheets of paper and have them draw a circle.  Then, in rapid succession, have clients draw another one on a separate piece of paper, and another one on the last piece of paper.  Following this, invite clients to comment on the similarities of these three circles (“In what ways are these circles similar?”). 

In most cases, the mindlessly drawn circles will reveal a range of similarities on the following parameters: clock-wise or counter-clock-wise direction of the circle, its diameter (large, small?), its relative position on the page (centered, up or below the center line?), and its starting point (twelve o’clock, three o’clock?).  Ask clients if they consciously intended for these similarities to occur or if these similarities just happened.  Ask clients to ponder what that means. 

Following this discussion of mindlessness and automaticity, have clients draw a fourth circle, this time making conscious choices of where to start the circle, which direction to draw it, consciously choosing its diameter size and consciously choosing where to place it on the piece of paper.  Have clients discuss how the experience of mindfully drawn circle differs from the previous experience of mindless drawing.  Highlight any statements that indicate a sense of presence, a greater sense of control over the drawing.  In discussing the experience of mindful circle-drawing some clients might convey a sense of being somehow alert, awakened, and attentive.  Ask the semi-rhetorical question: “What if you could be this alert, this attentive and thoughtful at a baseline, with matters and events that have much impact on your life?”

The choice of a circle as a figure to highlight mindlessness is not a random one in this case, and the facilitator is encouraged to capitalize on the metaphorical and existential significance of a circle as a metaphor for mindlessness.  After all, what makes a “vicious cycle” vicious is its circularity.  Help clients appreciate that motor-behavioral and cognitive-affective habits are in essence circular stimulus-response patterns of “always doing the same thing without realizing it.”  Most substance use and compulsive spectrum clients readily relate to the phenomenological entrapment of being caught up in a repetitive cycle of doing the same thing over and over again, despite the sincere intent to break out of this behavioral loop. 

Congratulating for Choices Made

As a means of highlighting the fleeting and subtle phenomenology of the actual act of choosing, the facilitator are encouraged to rely on their observation skills and congratulate clients for any apparent novel choices.  Note that the emphasis in this technique is on the fact of a conscious choice rather than on its rationale.  With this mind, clients are helped to transition from the perspective of content-based assessment of choices to a perspective of assessing the choice in terms of whether it was a true, conscious choice or a pseudo-choice, i.e. a stimulus-response reflex.  Thus, the only “bad” choice is the choice that is not made. 

Processing of the Meaning of the Word “Just”

While facilitators refrain from judging client’s choices, they are encouraged to inquire about whether, in the client’s own opinion, a given choice, if in fact consciously made, is in line with his or her treatment goals.  Thus, clients are helped to appreciate the fact that a choice does not exist in a vacuum but is, in fact, indicative of the underlying motivations which maybe current and up-to-date or existentially out-dated. 

Processing the meaning of the word “just” is one way to help clients learn not to confuse mindless actions with choice-based actions.  Clinicians should be careful to make sure that this exercise is not experienced as a form of picking on the seemingly benign behavioral moments.  To preempt the defensiveness, clinicians should introduce this clinical moment in explicit terms as a choice awareness exercise.  For example, by asking a client’s in a choice awareness practice group about the rationale for his or her sitting position in the room, you are likely to hear a defensive “just” of “I just decided to sit here.”  Patiently and non-reactively assist the client with the realization that by saying that he “just” sat there, he is, fact, saying that he sat in a given place for no particular reason and is, thus, in Gurdjieff’s terms, claims that his behavior “just happened,” without any conscious participation from him. Therefore, paraphrasing the word “just” as meaning “for no reason,” the client is helped to appreciate the paradox of the moment: nothing happens without a reason and yet it somehow “just” did.

By inviting clients to unravel the mystery of clients’ seemingly un-caused (“just happened”) behavior, facilitators work to demonstrate how the behavior, even when not consciously chosen in the present, reflects possibly outdated motivation that might be in conflict with current recovery goals.  These “just-s” can be also related to what Marlatt & Gordon (1985) referred to as “seemingly irrelevant decisions” that may lead to a lapse or a relapse.  Consequently, clients are helped to see the potential role of choice awareness in relapse prevention.

The Arbitrary Choice:  Practice of Spontaneity

If you were to be asked “What would you rather have: red or blue, one or one point three, a glass or a cup?” you would probably respond with a degree of annoyed bewilderment: “Red or blue what?  One or one point three of what?!  A glass or a cup of what?!”   While this “offer” appears meaningless it is not without some choice awareness training value.  Such offers represent the opportunity for a pure choice.  If you were to be offered a $20 or $100 bill, “no strings attached,” your choice would be more or less predetermined by the pragmatics of financial common sense.  Presenting a purely arbitrary choice, on the other hand, is challenge to common sense and pragmatics, and, as such, is a valuable opportunity to “wake up” and make a conscious choice. 

In choice awareness practice, facilitators may offer clients meaningless choices that cannot be guided by the previously conceived considerations of pragmatics, commons sense, or value.  Such un-motivated choices, in a way, represent what Tillich (1952) referred to as “freedom beyond freedom,” an ultimate manifestation of spontaneity.  A spontaneous choice is free the logic of the past.  In its freedom from historical pre-determination, such choice has no past to rely on and, thus, can only rely on the here-and-now assessment of one’s motivation, which requires presence and awareness.  Evaluation of two equally meaningless options results in a choice of the purest kind.  The capriciousness, subjectivity, irrationality, moodiness, unpredictability of such a choice highlights our freedom to choose in a manner that does not have to reflect our socio-economic, socio-cultural, and psycho-biological predispositions. 

Who’s Doing It?

The “Who’s Doing it?” choice awareness exercise involves a simple task of repetitious execution of a motor behavior.  For example, the facilitator may ask the client to clench his fist, but only after consciously choosing to do so.  The facilitator tells the client: “clench your fist only after you have made a conscious choice to do so each and every time, and do that for a while.”  As the facilitator observes the client, he or she suggests that the client speed up the pace.  Clients are likely to notice that they are able to increase the pace but they are not necessarily able to match the increased pace of the motor behavior with the pace of conscious choosing.  In a manner of speaking, at a certain speed of behavior, they allow the behavior to begin to “happen” without consciously initiating it.  Facilitators invite clients to process this experience in terms of their experience of choice and automaticity.  Facilitators may also engage the client while the client is continuing with the exercise and ask: “Who’s doing it?  Who’s clenching your fist while we are talking?”  This demonstration of automaticity-on-demand is discussed in terms of our capacity to self-program, and, thus, self-reprogram, and its pro-recovery habit-formation value.

Thought Choice

In this exercise, participants are asked to repeat in their mind the word pronounced by the facilitator or to think the word opposite to the one pronounced by the facilitator.  For example, as the facilitator says “black,” clients will be, if choosing to accept the conditions of the exercise, choosing between “black” (same word) or “white” (opposite word).

With these instructions clarified, the facilitator begins to say the words “black” and “white” in random order, and continues to do so for a period of time (1-2 minutes).  Following this facilitator stops the exercise and asks participants to share their experience.  The theme to watch is the notion of trying to organize an otherwise chaotic stimulation.  Some clients will report that after a few moments of stressful indecision they decided to always think the same word or to always think the word opposite to the one announced by the facilitator.  The facilitator would do well to recognize this as a self-imposed autopilot that represents a trade-off between mindfulness and tension relief.

Following this discussion, the facilitator resumes several more mini-sessions of this kind, each time encouraging clients to choose freely on an ad-hoc basis, encouraging them to track the initial tension associated with ad-hoc choice and the temptation to initiate some kind of chaos-organizing autopilot. 

In one such series the facilitator may choose one word, say, “black,” and repeat it 20 times in a row, and process the participant’s clinging to the arbitrary expectation of fairness and balance.  In particular, some may note that they were waiting for the word “white” to balance out the “black.”  Discussion of how the client’s expectation of somewhat intermittent sequencing of these words from the prior series is, too, an autopilot.  Parallels with general expectations of fairness, balance, symmetry could be also discussed.  Some clients may also report a sense of hopelessness or surrender, an increased temptation to switch to autopilot, be it “same” or “opposite,”  given the sameness of environmental stimulation.  Acceptance of “same” autopilot might be likened to surrender to peer/environmental pressure; while acceptance of “opposite” autopilot might be tentatively likened to oppositionality.

Finally, in the last presentation, the facilitator shall being with same black-white sequencing and then suddenly switch to north-south, right-wrong, left-right semantic dichotomies.  Discussion of this will reveal the fact that clients – while trying to be awake in the sense of whether to “go same” or  to “go opposite,” – fell asleep in terms of potential variability of semantic dichotomies.  Some will report the feeling of the inertia or momentum of the black-white semantic auto-pilot.  The discussion of this semantic resistance, of this clinging to a familiar auto-pilot can be easily generalized to the dynamics of substance use.

Arbitrary Abstinence and Arbitrary Maintenance

Gurdjieff encouraged his students to give up “something valuable” but “not forever” in order to create a constant “friction between a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’’’ (Ouspensky, 2000, p. 45).  This suggestion offers a valuable choice awareness training opportunity as long as it is not misconstrued as an exercise in Stoic ascetism.   Arbitrary Abstinence and Arbitrary Maintenance exercise is an opportunity for clients to practice both making choices (of what to quit and what to start), and serves to also hone their craving control skills for resisting temptations.  In recommending this exercise as a choice awareness practice clients are emphatically encouraged: a) to make only arbitrary choices about what to quit and what to start, b) to commit to a pre-specified, time-limited abstinence or maintenance (timelines should be initially short and plausible, i.e. a week or a month); and c) to feel free to break the commitment any time, if they wish to do so, as long as this is done via a conscious choice.  Clients should be explicitly cautioned against misusing this exercise for dieting or going off medication and any other physiological parameters of their living that may jeopardize their health.

“I” Statement

Ask clients to attempt to mean the pronoun “I” each time they use it in speech.  Engage them in a simple discussion and help them raise their awareness of whether they use the pronoun “I” by choice or mechanically, in mindless, un-free execution of speech autopilots. Suggest that clients may incorporate the “I” Statement technique into their daily speech as a choice awareness routine.  Process the phenomenology of meaning the “I.”

Uncomfortable Chair

This is an exercise that illustrates the choice in delaying gratification, an omnipresent problem for substance abusers.  Participating clients are encouraged to assume a somewhat uncomfortable posture and become mindful of the discomfort and the desire to change posture.  Doing so would create a sense of relief. 

Process the choice in delaying the gratification of relief.  Make parallels with substance use.  Have clients re-engage in the exercise and experiment with the choice of the timing of the relief.

Choice Step By Step: Walking Meditation

Process mindlessness of walking, explore various choices of pace frequency, stride length, pronation, toe-first versus heel-first stepping, etc.  Ask a client to choose each step.  Suggest that actively choosing one step whenever one gets up from a chair or bed during the day might serve as a rather generalizable choice-awareness routine.

Crossing Arms

Ask participating clients to cross arms on their chest.  Then ask them again.  Process the habitual, automatic, mindless crossing (which arm goes over which arm).  Highlight the mindlessness of habit.

Signature

Have clients sign their name, once or twice.  Then have them sign it mindfully.  Process how the mindful signature looks less valid because it is not automated enough.  Discuss the benefits of mindlessness – such as signature authenticity; discuss drawbacks of mindlessness – such as  the ease of signing whenever asked to sign, such as in the beginning of the exercise, and possibly jeopardizing one’s privacy by making publicly accessible one’s stamp of authenticity for possible replication.

The Choice to Let Go

The following choice awareness exercise provides a useful interface with anger management:

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• §  Ask clients to clench the fist again and provide metaphor-enhancing narrative along the lines of “You have a choice right now, you can stay tense or you can let go, if you decide to let go, you have a choice in how you will let go, go ahead a make a choice to either stay tense or to let go, if you decided to let go of tension, make a choice on how you will let go of it, all at once, or gradually, by holding on to your tension for a while…”
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• §  Instruct clients to experiment with the timing of the release of the tension
• §  Instruct clients to allow themselves to use their other hand to open their clenched hand

The apparent value of the Choice to Let Go choice awareness exercise is that, if practiced on a regular basis, this choice awareness ritual:

a)      In the spirit of progressive muscle relaxation, teaches clients to recognize bodily tension which they may use as a turning point at a moment of stress;

b)      conditions the notion of freedom-to-change to psychophysiological relaxation and as such reinforces the idea that awareness of choices, at any given time frees one up, relieves one’s tension about being trapped, or locked into a given internal or external circumstance; and

c)      re-conceptualizes tension, stress, and anger as a choice, a response option that does not have to be a default, as an affective autopilot that can be overridden.

The Choice to Let Go choice awareness exercise also yields to secondary metaphors. For example, asking clients to use their other hand to open the clenched fist may be metaphorically likened to seeking help or support.  “Flipping the (proverbial) bird,” by opening the fist with beginning with the middle finger, can be likened to displacement of anger, a tension-relieving, albeit less constructive, strategy for letting go of tension.  Finally, continuing to clench the fist can be seen as a choice to hold on to the grudge or anger, and not wanting to release it. 

In summary, the clinician may reiterate that tension or relief are but invisible choices if one is asleep.  Consequently, regular practice of this exercise will allow clients to turn tension into a kind of choice awareness alarm clock that will awaken the person to the fact that he or she has a choice to stay tense or to let go.

The Choice Eye

The visual imagery, relaxation, and hypnosis literature make references to the metaphor of a “mind’s eye.”  The present choice awareness practice involves the metaphor of a Choice Eye and, in format, vaguely follows Yapko’s (2003) format for the Mind’s Eye hypnotic induction technique.

More specifically, the client is instructed to close his eyes and imagine that he has a Choice Eye. This Choice Eye is likened to a physical eye, but inside one’s mind.  This Choice Eye sees automaticity, schematic behaviors, habits, and mindlessness.  The client is instructed to let the eye roam, around and inside himself, in search of any behavioral autopilots or schemas, or habits, or mindlessly executed behaviors.  Each time the Choice Eye sees an autopilot, a mindlessly running behavioral or affective routine, it makes a choice.  The Choice Eye chooses to continue to run the routine or to discontinue its operation for the moment.  For example, the Choice Eye may see that the subject is tapping his or her foot.  The Choice Eye then chooses to continue to tap the foot or to stop tapping it.  And so and so forth. The person is instructed to perform this exercise for a few minutes, letting the Choice Eye take a panoramic view of the person’s current moment.

A Different Way to Get 4

Write on a piece of paper the following and give it to the client: “___ + ___ = 4.”  Instruct the client to fill in the blanks.  A typical response is, of course, “ 2 + 2 = 4.”  Discuss that the “two plus two equals four” is an autopilot.  Challenge the client to “get 4 a different way,” and allow them to work on that problem for a couple of trials.  The client may, for example, arrive at the following equations: “7 – 3 = 4,” “569.5 – 565.5 = 4,” “8 x 0.5 = 4,” etc.  State that if the client chose to, as of this moment, he could come up with a different way to obtain 4, each time, for the rest of his life, if this is all he did.  Allow the client to ponder the infinity built into this simple algorithm. 

Offer to the client to each day “find a new way to get four,’ and make parallels with recovery.  State that there’s more than one way to get to Rome (more than one way to get 4).  “Choosing another way to get what you want” and/or “appreciating that another way is possible makes for a good choice awareness practice. 

Pattern Interruption

Facilitators may use a variety of pattern interruption elements to create opportunities for choice. For example, moving one’s podium or easel in the group room to a new location allows clients to make a choice to adjust and to make a choice to regulate or not regulate any discomfort or inconvenience that a given pattern interruption might have created.  Similarly, silence can be used to highlight clients’ automatic preferences, such as a desire to break the tension of silence on group’s behalf, to wait it out, hoping for someone else to do it on their behalf, etc.  Clients may be asked to process the choices they had in the moment, and how they guided themselves through those choices.  Similarly, Zeigarnik effect can be an effective method of pattern interruption to increase client’s choice awareness.  An example of a simple implementation of such pattern interruption strategy would be to start but not finish an utterance at any point of the choice awareness practice group.

Another variation on pattern interruption is starting a previously automated routine from an arbitrary point of entry.  De Bono (1970) suggests that changing a choice of entry point may lead to insight.  And indeed, if the choice of entry point is kept constant, the determinism of the behavioral algorithm leads to one and the same result. Einstein’s definition of insanity (as doing one and the same thing but expecting a different result) illustrates the futility of mindlessness and automaticity quite well. 

In working with substance use clients who have developed a habit of using the Serenity prayer, I have frequently recognized the philosophical/spiritual value of it, but also suggested a simple modification to turn this already recovery-oriented routine into a freedom-to-change potentiating choice awareness routine. In particular, I would instruct clients to each day make a conscious choice to start the Serenity prayer from a different point of entry.  For example, a client could choose to start the prayer from word # 7.  To accomplish this, he or she would have to first mindfully and mentally “walk through” the prayer structure to identify word # 7.  Following this, the client would begin the Serenity prayer from an unusual point of entry.  Quite often clients reported both enhanced choice awareness and state of wakefulness and a new appreciation of the actual text of the prayer.  On occasion clients would discover new meaning possibilities.  And almost always, clients would report a Zeigarnik like effect of needing closure after this pattern interruption.  Knowing the lingering tension of the Zeigarnik effect, I would typically recommend that the clients choose not to redo the prayer but leave it as imperfect as it is, with the idea that this lack of closure from the pattern interruption would provide the lingering of an otherwise therapeutic meme.  Several clients have confessed that they did, after all, “order” the sequence after some time of resisting to do so.  My sense is that most, or at least the majority, of individuals in the state of lack of closure would at some point bring the pattern to completion.  The therapeutic value here is obvious: in addition to choice awareness, the client is “tormented” with a benign and clinically meaningful obsession.

Get to Know Your Robot

One of the best correlates to Gurdjieff’s method of de-automatizing that I have found in the self-help literature is the chapter “Get to Know Your Robot” in the book The Psychological  War on Fat by Cordell and Giebler (1977).  These authors provide a well-popularized discussion of automaticity and offer the readers to essentially catalogue their programs or habits.  I have used a similar cataloguing technique in guiding my clients’ choice awareness practice, by offering them to think of automaticity in terms of simple “if A, then B” algorithms that can be reprogrammed to read anything from “if A, then A” (viewing reality as is, through separation of Self into Subject and Object) to “if A, then (fill out the blank with a more adaptive alternative response).”  It should be noted that the difference between Cordell and Giebler’s use of the knowledge of one’s robot is that they reprogram the robot through behavioral reinforcement, whereas the Change Equation reprograms the robot through choice or agency.

Pressing Flesh

In group setting, have two clients shake hands. Help them deconstruct the experience.  Discuss the unintended, un-chosen communication imbedded in a street-style high-five handshake/hug.  Explore the handshake as a link in the potentially long and treacherous chain of small-talk if in the presence of stimulus-laden people, places, and things.  Have clients press flesh in a de-automatized, choice-aware fashion.

Demonstrating the Emotionally Pragmatic Appeal of Mindlessness and Automaticity

As part of Choice Awareness Training, the following “Word Choice” exercise can be used as both an opportunity to demonstrate the emotional pragmatism of choosing not to choose and as a choice-training exercise.  Participants are instructed to repeat in their mind the word pronounced by the facilitator or to think the word opposite to the one pronounced by the facilitator.  For example, as the facilitator says “black,” clients will be saying to themselves the word “black” (same word choice) or “white” (opposite word choice).  With these instructions clarified, the facilitator begins to say the words “black” and “white” in random order, and continues to do so for a period of one or two minutes. 

Following the exercise, the facilitator offers to discuss the experience.  The theme to highlight is clients’ attempts of trying to organize an otherwise chaotic stream of stimulation.  Some clients will report that after a few moments of repeated stressful indecision they decided to always think the same word or to always think the word opposite to the one announced by the facilitator.  The clinician facilitates the discussion of this dynamic, of its existential meaning and its parallels with substance use.  In particular, clients are helped to appreciate the freedom-escaping allure of the self-imposed autopilot that represents a trade-off between the stress of conscious, mindful choosing and tension relief.

Following such discussion, the facilitator encourages clients to “claim” their freedom to choose, to not go on auto-pilot, to choose freely on a moment-to-moment basis, and resumes the exercise.  This “Word Choice” exercise can be used repeatedly as a choice-conditioning, with the term “conditioning” here being akin to muscle conditioning.  Methods for self-administration of this choice-conditioning exercises (such as making a recording with a random presentation of these word stimuli or involving a support person to work with the client) can be discussed as well.

Emotional Deepening: The Costs of Automaticity

Mindless, reactive, habitual, mechanical, schematic, rote, conditioned, fixed, rule-governed, impulsive, stimulus-bound, auto-piloted existence is not unlike being asleep or sleep-walking, at best.  This can be a rather existentially-poignant and, thus, motivationally-enhancing realization: most would be appalled at the notion of sleeping away their life.  To deepen the appreciation for the need to be more awake and aware, clinicians can offer a kind of existential accounting to help clients ballpark how much conscious time they have actually lived (by factoring out actual nighttime sleep and conditioned sleep of mindlessness that pervades our lives).  Pushing the existential button of time loss allows the facilitator to heighten clients’ motivation for the need to wake up and to stay awake, if they are to live as themselves, prudently apportioning time, their only existential resource, to what, indeed, matters. 

Daily Choice Awareness Habit: Setting an Alarm-Clock for the Mind to Awaken the Sleeper

By this point in Choice Awareness Training, clients realize that knowing the value of choice awareness does not make one choice-aware.  An existential sleeper is asleep and is unaware of that fact and, short of outside help, will remain asleep.  While counting on others to rouse oneself from cognitive-behavioral auto-pilots is certainly possible (through therapy and/or self-help meetings that remind one of his or her goals and priorities), learning to wake yourself up to the here-and-now freedom to choose and to change is the ultimate goal of Choice Awareness Training.  Gurdjieff offered an elegant self-help solution for this problem.  He believed that “it is possible to change certain aspects of overt behavior and to use such changes as reminders for flagging attention” (Speeth, 1989, p. 77).  In particular, Gurdjieff suggested that an individual can set up a kind of mental alarm-clock that would awaken the individual continuously throughout life, at various selected time-points (Ouspensky, 1949). 

Gurdjieff’s suggestion, in the context of Choice Awareness Training, takes the form of cultivating a habit of de-constructing and consciously re-constructing various habits of daily living as an opportunity to infuse choice awareness into various routines of daily living. 

On a practical level, the client might begin with de-constructing their evening hygiene, re-sequencing its various steps, and including such “choice awareness twists” and mindfulness-raising alterations as brushing with a non-dominant hand, brushing and washing with one’s eyes closed, making a conscious choice to not use the mirror on occasion, etc.  For weeks, if not months, the client consciously varies his or her evening hygiene routine until he or she either tires of it or the new routine begins to feel old (i.e. too familiar to be of choice-awareness and mindfulness-facilitating value).  At this point, the client makes a conscious choice to target a new daily habit.  Once the client appears to have exhausted all available targets, he/she can recycle the previous targets.  The opportunities for anchoring choice awareness in one’s daily routines are practically limitless.

Helping Clients Select a Target for Daily Choice Awareness Practice

In selecting a choice awareness practice clients are encouraged to consider habits that are high in frequency and are likely to occur on any given day of a client’s life regardless of circumstance and surroundings (such as hygiene routines, for example).  Furthermore, it is recommended that clients try to anchor their choice awareness practice in high-frequency that are also reasonably paced throughout the day (e.g. mindful, choice-aware eating).

Portable Choice Awareness Practice

Conscious drawing of a circle (see more detailed explanation above) is recommended as a portable choice awareness practice that can help clients both internalize the metaphor of the self-reinforcing circularity of habits and provide an easy, on-the-go meditation on choice awareness.