I’ll be honest with you, I wanted success and I wanted it now, not later. I wanted to make a great effort in the beginning then glide through life with ease. This attitude and expectation only prolonged my recovery. It wasn’t until I realized that the freedom I wanted would come gradually and over time that I had real success. On that note I will say that even with this corrected attitude I still needed the correct methods of overcoming addiction which came from the porn addiction recovery program that I have written a review on.

So when you start working with the correct methods you must pace yourself and not expect perfection. What you can expect, so long as you persevere and pick yourself up quickly every time you fall, is to get stronger and stronger. Trying to be perfect or perfectly handle every temptation will only bring failure. It is almost a guarantee that you will stumble and make mistakes as you set out to gain control of your life. Don’t let these setbacks discourage because you are most likely closer to success than you think.

The analogy I started using is playing sports. If you start out playing football you’re probably not going to be very good. But if you keep going to the games and keep practicing you will get better and better. You will make errors and mistakes, its expected. However, you don’t give up and throw the game just because you made a mistake. No, you get back in the game and try to do better. This applies to life and it applies to overcoming porn addiction. When you make a mistake just get back in the game of working to overcome and do better than before without expecting perfection. You will progress in amazing ways with this attitude and approach.

If you do not work out your emotions and thoughts then you will return to your vices. I will focus on thoughts for a moment here since everything stems from them, including emotions. I was reading an interesting article today written by Jonathan Leger titled “Think low and you will stay low”. This article highlighted the importance of overcoming mental barriers before you can overcome physical one. If you were to do this in the opposite order you would just return to what you have not worked out in your heart and mind and the cycle would repeat itself.

So you want to know how to stop porn addiction or any addiction. Start believing in yourself first because there is nothing that you cannot overcome if you believe and persevere. This is the first step and is very necessary. Stop all the negative self talk and start building yourself up with positive thoughts that cause you to believe in yourself no matter how many mistakes you have made.

Yes the world can be stressful and often the news makes it more stressful than it really is.  Yet many of us choose to use the news as a true reference to how how life really is. Why am I talking about this on a sexual addiction  site? Well, addicts in general are usually looking for escape from reality as they know it. How you reference reality is up to you. Life is not as bad as the people trying to make money make it seem. Actually life is great and full of opportunities to experience joy and happiness. Yes there are upsets but the positives far outweigh those upsets. Remember, the news doesn’t make money by focusing on the positive. They make money focusing on the shocking negative things that captivate us. How in the world does this apply to porn addiction?

Which would you rather watch, a high speed police chase ending in a crash or a mayor talking about improvements in elderly care. You see its effortless to be attracted to the most stimulating and exciting thing that catches our attention. It takes work to  appreciate the finer things in life. So will you let he idle part of you win or will you expend some effort and focus on the positive.

When it comes to dealing with the stresses of life in a healthy way you really must exercise you freedom to choose. Meaning you choose what to let into you life and what not to allow to effect you. When you realize this control you have and actually use it to only focus on and allow positive things in your life influence you it is quite empowering. This does not mean nothing negative will happen. It does mean you will notice a “positive” difference in your life. Believe or not you are in control. Sometime, like all of us, you choose not to maintain control but instead  let the  world control you. There comes a time when you have to wake up and come to the realization that you are, in fact, in control.

When you relearn this personal control you are in a position to properly deal with the stresses of life instead of turning to addictive activities. The proper way is to be in control of your thoughts and attitude and let the negative things roll off your back like water off a duck, so to speak. With a good attitude, which you decide to have, you don’t sweat the small stuff. However, don’t let anyone, especially the media, steal you good attitude, because they will do anything and say anything to make money without care for your  personal well being.

I speak from experience on this one. Some days will seem easy. You’ll be able to easily resist temptation in a relaxed manner. These are the days you’ve desired to have for a long time, so when they come you feel relieved and happy. But you must remember that this will only be true on some days. Most days, all your life, will require work. They will require you to exert your physical and mental energies to stay clean. We must not be lured into thinking that we no longer have to work as hard as we did before. As long as you are on this earth there will be temptations.

I do no say these things to discourage but to prepare. You will get stronger with time and it will be easier to resist temptation. All I’m trying to say here is that there will rarely be a day that will not require you to work at staying clean. It takes constant and every day effort to maintain a clean happy life. Happiness will always require more work than the misery associated with bad choices.

So every day you have to wake up and decide you are willing to exert your personal powers to make the right choices all day. This will become a great habit and prepare you for the really difficult days ahead. I say this because some days will seem like “The Perfect Storm” in which every thing seems combined against you. For example, you wake up with little sleep, you’re irritated at work, your boss won’t leave you alone, the bills are stacking up, you get into an accident on the way home, you argue with your wife,you’re having a hard time controlling your thoughts, and finally you see an inappropriately dressed girl on TV. Well, in those circumstances it just seems like you can’t take it anymore and you are so tempted to give into temptation and go on a pornography binge. Believe it or not, even in these circumstances, it is still your choice to do the work to resist temptation and maintain a positive attitude.

How much you are willing to work is directly tied to how much you believe in the process of change, in a better life, and your personal powers to change. If you stop working and give into temptation or fall short of your goal it is simply because you did not have enough faith and motivation. How do you get that faith and motivation? You choose to have it. Nobody can give it to you or make you have it. There are people and sources that can help you to have it but it is ultimately your choice to have enough faith and motivation to keep working no matter what the circumstances are.

Masturbation and pornography can make you feel powerless. It is true to these things bind you and restrict your freedom to choose. However,though it may feel like it, these things do not have complete control over you. You still have enough power to fight back and reclaim the lost ground in the internal battle you’ve been engaged in. It will not be instant but gradual and eventual. In fact, with perseverance success is inevitable. However, this requires work. Sometimes it will require you to exert all the energies of your soul to resist temptation, but you are not alone. Heavenly Father promises to bless you with the extra strength you need, after you have done all you can do. You will know when you’ve done all you can do because that is the time when his power kicks in and you will be victorious. He loves you enough to not do all the work for you but help you when you’ve done all you can do. Even if you are not religious, just do all you can do and you will be rewarded with success. You will feel an extra boost of power from a source beyond yourself.

Just keep working!

Ask yourself these questions with “10″ representing the most:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10 how much do I really want to overcome porn addiction or any kind of addiction?

2. On a scale of 1 to 10 how much do I believe in my power to overcome addiction?

3. On a scale of 1 to 10 how much am I willing to work every single day to overcome addiction?

Answer these questions honestly. If you are lacking in one or more of these areas then work to improve the numbers and you will have more success.

Success will not come by accident or luck. It will come because you worked for it and earned it.

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Negative Association

How to apply this to porn addiction. If you’ve been addicted to pornography or masturbation then you have been living in a fantasy world within your own mind. The addiction or prison you’ve found difficult to escape has been largely within the walls of your mind. Your mind and body try to run as effeciently as possible. Many times this means automating processes to save energy. Because you have used pornography and masturbation to feel temporary pleasure you have been associating fantasy-like thoughts with natural sexual urges of the body until the appetite of the body grows out of control. So every time your body feels a sexual urge it immediately and almost automatically associates these urges with thoughts and images of the fantasy world you have created in your mind. Of course you can get this back under control, it just takes work and time.

You need to change the way you see temptations to look at filth or masturbate. You need to start associating these actions with the real consequences and misery they bring. The moment you are tempted you must cling to reality and not let yourself be swept away into the unrealistic fantasies that have brought you into addiction. The reality is you only feel pleasure in the moment then soon after feel very low and miserable. Your imagination has very powerful effects that can be both good and bad. Use your imagination to create a negative image of the true results of looking at pornography or masturbating. Then when the temptation comes have this image ready to go to associate with the temptation. The more you do this the more your mind will remember these negative images and the power of the temptation will be decreased. Use whatever negative associations work for you. Everyone is different. Also, be patient, it will take more than a few times of doing this before it becomes habit. Just keep doing it.

Positive Association

You’ll need more than negative associations to break free of addiction. You have to learn to love your new life more than your old one. This is going to take some persistent positive associations. Here is a good example from workout guru, Pete Sisco, speaking of positive association when working out:

“Finally, take another 10 minutes at a slow pace on the treadmill to gradually cool your body down. Use this time to feel the warm afterglow and sense of well-being that intense exercise provides. Those endorphins are magic! Take a moment to associate that positive, relaxed yet invigorated feeling with going to the gym and doing your workout. For many of us this can shift our psychological focus from dreading a workout and doing it reluctantly to positively looking forward to it and to the sense of well-being it delivers.”

This couldn’t be more true. I’ve put this to the test myself and love going to the gym. So how do we apply this to addiction? Well, when I was struggling, I was using this technique and didn’t even know it. Here’s how. Every time I would have success, a day or two without slipping up, I would sort of meditate and ponder how great it felt to be free and have success. In my mind I would purposely associate these great feelings with abstaining from pornography or masturbation. This only increased my desire to have success. This increased desire helped me to work harder, and get up more quickly if I slipped up. I would think to myself, “I love the way I feel when I abstain from weakness, I don’t want to stay down, I will get up and try again and feel those feelings again.” You see, your mind and body want to do what feels good. You have to decide what feels good. You do this by changing the way you see things.

Go ahead and experiment with this great technique. Don’t expect perfection. Just expect a progressive change of desires. It takes time for desires and feelings to change. This is the work required to do so.

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The answers I sought and you currently seek are different for everyone. They depend on your ability to persevere through difficulties and mistakes, your faith in yourself, your faith in the process, and how much work you’re willing to put into the process. So, that being said, it could be a matter of weeks, months, or years. It all depends on you. It’s definitely not a matter of just a week or two. That’s unrealistic. Though I must admit I was guilty of expecting change in a week or two, to my detriment.

Making Mistakes

In order to keep going in the process of change you will have to accept that you will not be perfect. It is very dangerous to expect you will make no mistakes. I’m not saying use this as an excuse to make mistakes. I’m saying have realistic expectations. One realistic expectation is to expect that the mistakes will become fewer in proportion to the amount of effort you put into the process of change. If you have a problem with porn addiction and you look at it every day then you can expect that it will not be every day as you make the necessary choices to adjust your environment and follow the steps to become stronger.

Remember, the body is too stubborn to change in just a week. You cannot expect to stop liking or desiring porn in a week or two. You have to have consistent success over a long period of time for your desires to change significantly. Also, you can’t expect to like new habits at the start. If you just started exercising then it will probably take some time before you enjoy doing it. I felt this way about running. I hated it but over time learned to love it. So you see it takes a lot of work initially to change since you and your body will not like the changes at first. I will tell you that change will become a lot easier after being completely clean for about a month. After that, it gets easier and easier.

Believe in the Process

It can be a tough thing to convince yourself to keep going when you’re not seeing results. I know I would get so frustrated after only a week or two of staying clean because I would still feel really strong urges to go look at pornography or to misuse my body. I would angry at how I didn’t see my desires change much in that short time. I would get so frustrated when I would see a beautiful woman and my body would get so aroused. Instead of being patient and allowing more time for my body to balance itself out, I would obsess about the lack of change until those thoughts had control of me and I would make a mistakes again.

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

So believing in the process is a must. Going for a week or two and getting frustrated until you quit is not defined as believing. Believing means you keep going every single day knowing that you will change in due time. It may be one month, two months, a year. Whatever it is you just continue to believe change is coming because it is. Most people give up not knowing how close they were to complete change.

Believing in Yourself

We have all had doubts in ourselves at times on our lives. Thats ok as long as you know how to move on from those doubts. Its when doubts become a habit that failure becomes a habit. We not only have to believe that the process of change works so long as we put in the effort and time, but we must also believe that we can absolutely do whatever is required in the process of change. You have to have faith in yourself otherwise you’re right, you can’t escape addiction and can’t do anything for that matter. Addiction can cause us to stop believing we can do things. Its like being a prisoner of war, eventually you start to believe you cannot escape and stop trying to escape. That’s when the enemy called addiction has you right where it wants you, feeling helpless. You have to stand up and believe in yourself. Believe you have the power to make decisions that will ultimately bring freedom in your life.

There is no one who can make you have faith in yourself or the process of change. That is a decision you must make. People can encourage you but they cannot give it to you. On a religious note I will say that developing faith in God helped me to develop faith in myself. I still had to make the decision but my religion certainly made that easier.

Post Acute Withdrawal Symptoms (PAWS)

Anybody who gets addicted to anything has to go through a withdrawal stage. There is no way around it, you have to go through it. It can last anywhere from a month to 18 months depending on many things. This is called Post Acute Withdrawal Symptoms or PAWS. In other words, you will fell lethargic, bored with life, irritable, unable to concentrate or remember things. However, the amount of time these things last and the intensity can be lessened with proper diet, exercise, therapy to deal with underlying issues, and even supplements to help your chemical imbalance get back in balance.

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Like I said, there is the temptation to doubt your success is real. This is exactly the time when you need to let go of the doubts that will hold you back from complete freedom. You have become very familiar and comfortable with these doubts after repeated failures. So they have become your security blanket because they are what you know. However, you must convince yourself that it is ok to let go of these doubts and venture into the unknown new life you are not yet familiar with. In due time, say a month or so, you will start to become quite comfortable and confident in this new way of living.

So how do you start this process of becoming more happy with your new life. First of all you need to decide you hate your old life. That will probably be easy since it has brought you pain. What won’t be easy is consistently hating it and deciding it is not an acceptable way to live when relatively boring times come. You see, you’ve been in the habit of comparing a simple, happy life with no stimulates to an addicting life full of temporary excitement and stimulation. It can be difficult to convince your mind and body that the new life is better when you will feel far less stimulation at first. I call this the “Getting over the wave” stage and compare it to Tom Hanks in the movie “Cast Away”, in which he worked so hard to escape a deserted island. The problem he faced was that the waves were too big and kept washing him back to the island. He even got hurt trying this and just wanted to die. However, he decided to keep trying and come up with a new plan and eventually got over the waves and out to the open sea. You need to get past those huge waves of temptation that will wash you back into your old way of living. You’ve trained your mind and body to misuse the body to have temporary excitement. They will fiercely resist this change at first but then they will learn to enjoy a normal life as you retrain them.

The next thing you need to do to enjoy your new life is to stop looking for some future rose happiness and start finding the happiness of every day living.

“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.” – Dale Carnegie

“We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.” -Voltaire

Those are some great quotes which sum up nicely what I had to work very hard to learn myself. Its difficult to believe this, especially when your life has been ruled by addiction, but life can be absolutely great every single day. What’s the secret? Well, its no secret at all. You possess it right now and it is called free agency, or choice. You can decide to be happy and productive right now. In fact it is better that you decide right now rather than later. You can decide to replace addiction with healthy, happy, and wholesome things. You can decide by simply waking up every morning and deciding you are the one who controls your life and your attitude. Addiction has convinced you that you do not have this control but that is a lie.

Life is full of ups and downs and plenty of challenges. You must learn to have a positive attitude and see this as an opportunity to learn to be happy in all circumstances in life. External circumstances do not determine happiness. Internal thoughts and emotions do. The sooner you realize that your happiness is your choice the better. If you have a habit of thinking negative towards yourself and others then your efforts to overcome addicton are being sabotaged.

“If we think happy thoughts, we will be happy. If we think miserable thoughts, we will be miserable.” – Dale Carnegie

When you begin to set goals to overcome masturbation or pornography just decide to be stubbornly positive in your thinking. Decide to take joy in the simple new life. This does not mean do nothing. Of course you must get out there and replace addiction with new activities. When you start to have some success and are tempted to worry or doubt, just relax, take a deep breath and decide to stubbornly believe in yourself. Your addiction will at first be stubborn but will eventually succumb to your new way of thinking and living. So look at it as sort of a fight between you and your addiction. Who will be more stubborn? Of course you will because you want your life back. Besides, the joy that comes from a simple, happy and productive life will far outlive the temporary excitement of your old life and the huge difference is YOU will be in control and not the addiciton. In fact, do not associate yourself with your old life anymore. Say, “That’s my old life, that’s not me anymore” and truly believe this.

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The Importance of a Good Diet

You are what you eat, though that doesn’t mean you will turn into a vegetable if that’s all you eat. However, eating a balanced and nutritional diet based off of the food pyramid will greatly enhance your mental and physical health. When you eat healthy you feel healthy. When you feel healthy and vibrant you can more easily focus and have the mental and physical energy to make important decisions in your daily life.

Here’s an example. On a day when I eat a a lot of meat or a high fat meal I start to feel low and slow. I’m really just not in the best mood I could be in. Physically I feel I’ve lost my energy and my edge to perform at my best. Mentally my confidence declines and my brain is not sharp and focused. In this state I become more vulnerable to temptation than I was before the meal. Perhaps I will not be able to control my thoughts as well as before. Certainly with an overall decrease in confidence I will not take full advantage of the personal power I possess to make the right decisions when things get tough.

Another thing concerning diet that people don’t consider is how the hormone levels in the body are effected. Certain foods can increase and decrease hormone levels in the body. For example, red meats increase testosterone levels in males. This could be a problem for someone trying to overcome porn addiction or masturbation addiction. The higher these levels are the stronger the sexual tension in the body. There are a number of high protein foods such as cottage cheese, yogurt, eggs, and nuts which break down into amino acids and in-turn increase dopamine levels. While normal levels of dopamine are good and healthy, increased levels could be bad. Part of the reason people look at pornography is because they are addicted to the high levels of dopamine released when they look at stimulating pictures or videos. Dopamine makes us sexually excited. The person’s body who has become trained to associate high levels of dopamine with pornography on a regular basis may find it difficult to think otherwise until retrained to think differently. Caffeine is also known to increase dopamine. Sorry coffee drinkers. Too much caffeine can make it tough to have balanced hormone levels and make it more difficult to control your sexual urges. Even when it wears off you are cranky and feeling low and not in the best mood you can be in to control yourself.

There are many foods than can effect your physical and mental health. To make it simple, just stick to the food pyramid and stay away from bad things such as coffee, alcohol, tobacco, or anything you know is not helping.

The Importance of Exercising

Have you ever gone for a run, hated it the whole time you were doing it, then felt great and proud of yourself that you did it afterwards? I know I have. Running is a great exercise but it is only one of many. I have found anything involving cardio to be very beneficial for me physically and mentally. Anytime I have woke up and felt depressed and unconfident I made myself go for a 15 minute run and whala!, I felt much better afterwards. One of the biggest benefits of doing any type of weight training, sport, or cardio workout long enough is the release of endorphins. This bio-chemical acts like a natural pain killer and makes us feel happy. This is just what a person struggling with addiction needs since their mental and physical energy have been sapped by the misuse of the body.

Exercising makes us feel confident and it even helps the body recover more quickly from any form of self-abuse. The body needs time to recover and get everything back into balance when we misuse it but this process can happen quicker if we have a moderate exercise routine. Those who have prevented or overcame illness by exercising certainly know the rejuvinating powers of exercise.

If you combine a healthy diet and regular exercise you dramatically increase your power to overcome addiction. Don’t take this to the extreme and try to work out several hours a day or have the perfect diet. Remember, moderation in all things.

Addiction steals everything good in our lives including these healthy habits. If you think about it then it makes sense. Addiction wants you to stay in addiction and it can more effectively do that by causing you to become unhealthy. And so it tightens its grips on you one area in your life at a time. So make a decision now to get out there and start your new life and new habits and break free of addiction

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It may be tempting to delay changing. Some say, “I’ll start next week” or “I will wait and make a new years resolution”. These are dangerous ideas. I will admit I fooled myself with these same ideas at one time. I thought, “oh I’ll just do this for now until I’m ready to stop.” That only made it more difficult to stop. You see you lose power to start changing when you delay. Your resolve and motivation declines with every minute you delay the decision to change.

Applying this to porn addiction was even more dangerous. I would decide to look at filth until I was tired of looking at it and then would think, “Ok I’ll start being good now.” The problem with that idea is just because I was tired of looking at filth didn’t mean I was more powerful to change. Really I just became so desensitized and physically spent that my body needed a break. Then when I would start to be good and start to recover, I was over-sensitive to anything and everything because my body was still in rapid sexual recovery mode from the recent over-stimulations I put it through. So though I would have a few days of success it was short lived because I foolishly delayed stopping the last time. So the cycle would repeat itself over and over.

The longer you wait the more difficult it is for the body to unlearn the what you are teaching it to do. Unless its been months or years then you are probably going to return to the same level of viewing you ended at the last time. The problem is each time you repeat the cycle you progress, whether slowly or quickly, in the level of pornography you view. So its always getting worse in some, perhaps subtle, way. The further along you progress the more difficult it will be to change.

Also, the further along you are in addiciton the more you lose your edge on everything in life, whether it be business, school, work, hobbies,health, talents, or relationships. Most people don’t believe they’ll lose everything from this addiction until it actually happens. Avoid that unnecessary pain and start working today to overcome this destructive habit. Stand up and have courage to change. Don’t let your pride make you think you are the exception and that somehow you won’t experience the same consequences because you will.

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There is no doubt that porn addiction or any addiction for that matter, makes us feel even more alone than we felt before. The guilt, shame, and pain make us feel hopeless and unliked by others. Of course this is all a lie and the only reason we start to think like this is because we are blinded by the darkness brought about by addiction. It’s really tough to see the truth when your life is full of lies. That’s the captivity that comes with addiction. We are held captive in part by lies that we find difficult to escape. In fact this is very much a personal war.

One day I came across some training for prisoners of war (POW’s) that really helped me understand how to better fight this war on lonliness and captivity. I found it interesting that coping with an enemy to your country was very similar to coping with the enemy of your soul. So here are the coping methods I came across:

Titled “Pyschological Aspects of Captivity – Coping Methods”

Conviction of Purpose
The most important coping method is to develop conviction of purpose:

How do I fit into the “big picture” from national goals to Service objectives to the unit mission?

What personal standards am I committed to? Develop confidence in your training and professional preparation by focusing particularly on the hurdles and obstacles you have overcome to get to this point in your career.

Faith Keeping – Establish and “keep the faith” with yourself, family, Service, fellow captives, nation, and God.

Reject False Logic – It is false logic to think that survival is contingent upon compliance with captors

Recognize and resolve Conflicting Pressures – Recognize and resolve conflicting pressures from captor and self

Attitude

Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) – Keep a positive mental attitude by being stubbornly optomistic. Resist destructive thought processes. Take heart in any small victory won over captors. Overcome aversions by learning to tolerate discomfort versus demanding the circumstances change. Reduce anxiety by placing captors into patterns of predictability.

Use Directed Imagery –(Structured Daydreaming). Think about the future and positive things. Create mental exercises by inventing objects, making up stories, learning new skills, keeping a mental diary, planning escape, or anything that will keep your mind occupied in a positive manner. Do not focus on mistakes made in the past or let guilt or regrets come into play – your captors want this.

Actions

Be Engaged – An “engaged” captive is not a “passive recipient.” Being a passive recipent leads to hoplessness, helplessness, compliance, or despair (i.e., won’t try to resolve problems or improve the situation. Engaged captives will make some mistakes but they will be able to learn and bouce back.

Take Control – Focus on things within your control (daily schedule, will to resist and communication).

Internal Actions – Order your thoughts, appraise the situation, study and predict the environment(remember, your Situational Awareness is an ongoing, continual process)

External Actions – Be assertive, insist on rights under the Geneva Conventions. Commuicate health and welfare issues to captors. Be persistent.

Health and Hygiene – Improve on sanitary conditions. Get into a physical fitness routine. Develop consistent habits concerning personal health and hygiene.

Recognize Small Victories – Usually by maintaining a sense of humor and turning it against captors. This can greatly improve morale and captivity survival.

Interact with Others

Communication – Directing your focus outward towards other fellow captives helps minimize self-absorbtion, despair and linliness.

Communications brings pespective to the situation and accountability for individual captive and group actions.

Without communication, no organization can exist.

Be consistent, convincing, and persistent in your communication with captors.

Use Humor – Humor can add a positive spin to difficult situations and can raise the morale of the individual captives and the group.

Group Affiliation and Accountability – A sense of belonging to a group engenders commitment to a cause. Being held accountable is an important aspect of keeping discipline within a group. Keeping discipline is the essence of organizing individuals and groups. In addition, discipline usually leads to routine, and routine can be extremely comforting in captivity.

Organize/Strategize

Organize Routine(self and group) – Maintain a schedule(whenever possible)

A personal routine or schedule can be important as a means of gaining control over the captive’s life and the situation in captivity.

Staying occupied mentally at increments or intervals helps to break up a routine that is being forced on the captive.

Exercising regularly is essential to maintaining physical and psychological health.

Captive’s should utilize any regimen or routine they can adapt to their personal situation.

Plan and communicate regularly with fellow captives.

Strategize – For upcoming demands, prepare and rehearse in order to develop confidence. The better the group’s sense of preparedness is, the more the group’s efficiency will increase. The individual of the group can improve their sense of preparedness by setting realistic goals such as:

-Establish goals relative to the captivity envoronment and the developing situation (fatigue, sleep deprivation, etc.)
-Establish realistic expectations for yourself and others
-Focus on internal resolve and conviction of purpose

Adapt

Discomfort – Learn to tolerate discomfort. Remain focused on tasks at hand.

Overcome Aversions – To food, enviromental conditions, poor standards for health and hygiene, etc.

Flexibility – Any inflexibility by the captive will be exploited. Adapt to food language, culture, and fellow captives. Try to understand the motives without openly sympathizing or aiding in their cause.

Stay Stay Alive – Focus on your physical needs, such as food, hydration, sleep, etc.

Bounce Back – A captive should move on from mistakes made by themselves of fellow captives. Don’t dwell on mistakes.

Things to avoid

Worrying About Family – Reaffirm roles, convictions, faith, and confidence in pre-captivity preparations. Thinking about family is a source of strength for some captives. Worrying about them induces emotions and sets the captive up for failure. Remembering the good times and thinking about making them proud by returning with honor can be a great source of strength for increased will to resist.

Thinking Negatively of Self – Captives should not beat themselves down. Captives should learn from their mistakes and plan for the future.

Suicidal Thoughts – Avoid depressing thoughts of thinking about negative things that are beyond any captive’s control. Reaffirm the will to live and think about positive things to return home to.

Other Vulnerabilities – Used by captors to exploit captives. Most captives will experience symptoms of these conditions during captivity.

Captivity Dependency. Defined as the captor’s attempts to make the captive feel safer under their control and reduce the captive’s motivation to escape. The longer captives are in captivity, the more they will be conditioned and become accustomed to the captivity situation. The longer captives are in captivity, the less likely they will look for resistence and escape opportunities, unless they pursue these activities as a matter of routine.

Stockholm Syndrome. An irrational affinity with certain captors based, in part, on concessions of care or more humanizing treatment from captors.

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