The immediate goal of all abuse is to reduce the amount of options the person who is being abuse has, to make it more likely that he will chose something in the favor of the abuser, even if it is unfair for the victim to do so.
Somehow in this process the victim gets confused about his free-will, about the choices that are available in any moment, because there are always some choices, in the worst case scenario, the worst abuse you can have is to reduce the amount of choices to two, do what the abuser want's or die. But you still have a choice, it is impossible to eliminate free-will.
And because of this confusion the victim will suffer greatly even after the abuse is over. Because there is no capacity to consciously chose your actions you will keep taking bad or catastrophic decisions for a long time even after the abuse has stopped.
Your actions can be motivated by three inner forces, first of all you have conscious actions that requires your constant focus, over which you have full control. You can change stop and start whenever and whatever you want.
As an energy saving device we developed to have habits, which are composed out of three components. 1. A cue, an environmental stimulus that will trigger 2. a routine that supposed to lead you towards 3. a reward.
Before you respond to the cue you are conscious and can fully chose your behavior, however after you start the routine is where your brain disengages in order to save energy. If you attempt to stop the routine you will become impulsive because you are anticipating the reward.
And an impulse is the third force that shapes your behavior, impulses are short lasting but intense releases of energy, they can be negative like: freeze, flight, fight or positive like excitement, happiness and euphoria. Impulses are like the autopilot system of the body in critical situations to make sure you are not going to make any critical mistakes. For example if you touch a hot object you pull your hand back very fast before you can even think what you are doing.
You have no control over them, this is why control doesn't work as a form of therapy because it means to control something that it is literally impossible to get under your control. Which will prevent you from doing what is effective rehabilitation and allow symptoms to worsen over time.
Whit conscious action you obviously have full choice over it, with habits you have the choice to avoid your cues which will increase the amount of options you have. However the internal cue of all your bad habits is a negative impulse, like felling anger, sadness, lonely, bored etc.
If stopping alcoholism would be as easy as avoiding bars, or people with who you used to drink, then the cure for alcoholism would be easy.
Because you can't directly stop an impulse, this makes quitting your bad habits a lot harder. It is a lot more rare cases for an impulse to directly ruin your life, like if you drive down the high way and you get scared for some reason and you steer the car in too ongoing traffic. That is a case under which the impulse was directly responsible of the negative effect, however if you suffer from addiction or any other chronic problem it is not a problem caused by impulsivity.
The impulse plays an indirect contribution, for example if you are a cocaine addict, the initial decision to take cocaine it is impulsive, but the the act of sticking a needle in too your veins and pressing the plunger it is not impulsive. Let's say that you decide to do cocaine because you feel lonely, immediately after that you are going to search for some familiar felling of comfort.
If in the past that felling come from doing cocaine you are very likely going to pursue that. But between the moment you feel lonely and the moment you actually act on your impulse there are other steps to take to prepare your actions.
In the case of a drug addict is to procure or prepare the drugs, every step between your initial impulse and acting on your impulse it is a chance to change your mind and stop. By that time it is very likely that the impulse is gone anyway, they generally last for only a few seconds to minutes.
This is why all the bad habits people have are choice they make every day, but not a conscious choice, it is a choice that results because the confusion about choice and responsibility as a result of abuse.
