Positive Proof of why Traditional Recovery Methods Fail

A double negative is not nearly as effective as a positive. I’m an eternal optimist, so as someone who is perpetually fixated on the positives, I should know the difference. Less (negative) of a bad thing (negative) is not nearly as awesome as a good thing. And this, my friends, is why our traditional addiction recovery system doesn’t work. I should probably do some explaining.

Let’s start with some tangible examples. Which of these food consumption opportunities would more effectively turn your crank?

In scenario one, you see a rotating hotdog cooker in a convenience store with a processed meat tube that’s been spinning for so long it looks like dehydrated leather. In this scenario, I tell you that you don’t have to eat it. It looks bad (negative), and you don’t (negative) have to put it in your pie hole.

In scenario two, you are invited to dine at the finest steak restaurant in town, and you get to pick your favorite cut grilled to your desired level of doneness and perfection.

Which scenario gets you excited? Are you more incentivized to not eat the shoe leather, or to eat the mouth-watering steak? The steak gets your juices flowing and your taste buds tingling, right? If you are a vegetarian, substitute a perfectly ripe mango for the steak, and dehydrated seaweed for…