Addiction, Defined 1

So you've been doing XYZ for a while now.
It's safe to call it a compulsive behavior pattern.
Whatever it is.

You COULD call it an addiction, if you wanted to.
But I wouldn't, and don't.

Whatever XYZ is, it lives inside you.
It's a personality or a subpersonality.
An energy field or an uncontrollable genetic situation.

Whatever it is, sometimes it takes you over
completely, sometimes arguing, sometimes skipping over
the rational, questioning phase of things.

Just try stopping a second or three when you want
XYZ.

Our main tactic for eliminating bad, onerous XYZ --
is a replacement with good, positive, life-affirming
ABC...D...E...F...as long as needed.

And A is meditation or awareness.
If you can't stop XYZ today, don't.
If it's not easy, don't.

An elderly woman who fashioned herself a
teacher of men once told me
"think of the cigarette as a turd."

that didn't work for me.
but thinking about her statement
was an equivalent evocation of the Prefrontal.

But you've had a bad day.
Okay, you could go there.
The compulsion knows how to deal with a bad day.

But that's not the only way to go.
And furthermore, there are nuances w/r/t
how one approaches one's compulsions.

In the light, thinking about your addiction,
while indulging, partaking, gorging in and on XYZ --
totally different from hiding it from you and everyone else.

So if quitting's not for you,
your idea of quitting is too stentorian.

Back off, in the sense --
thinking about quitting, really thinking about it,
like JRR Tolkien with his imaginary worlds.

Think about the Silmarillion.*
Make your thinking about XYZ honestly
while indulging XYZ,
as elaborate and involved as Tolkien's obsession with his worlds.

Do you even know half of what there is to know
about XYZ?

Maybe you avoid this question because you know
there is nothing positive to find.

However, it's difficult for me to think of an
instantiation of XYZ that doesn't have some positive element.

Even nicotine is good for memory.

*JRR Tolkien's books The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings series, are popular, long, involved, sometimes boring, but most decidedly epic, and the handiwork of an obsessive-compulsive writer -- a writer who went so far as to invent entire languages, plural, for the entirely invented species, plural many times over, in his book.