a large share of alcoholics quit drinking without treatment

As Vaillant (1995) has shown, a large share of alcoholics quit drinking without treatment and without any assistance from self-help groups or radical environmental change. Although these types of personal changes are commonly referred to as “natural recovery processes,” such successes are better explained in terms of mechanisms of self-regulation than natural occurrence. They testify to the human capacity for self-regulation. Granfield and Cloud (1996) put it well when they characterized the conspicuous inattention to successful self-regulators as “the elephant that no one sees.” The massive elephant in our midst can tell us a lot about the mechanisms of successful self-management and how to enable people to overcome substance abuse.

Full understanding of self-regulatory mechanisms requires examination of successful self-regulators as well as the intractable cases. Naturalistic studies of self-managed change show that successful selfregulators are highly skilled in enlisting the component subfunctions of self-regulation (Perri, 1985). They track their behavior and the cognitive and situational conditions under which they engage in it, they set proximal goals for exercising control over their behavior in the here and now, they draw from an array of coping strategies rather than relying on a single technique, they create motivating incentives to sustain their efforts, and they apply multifaceted self-influence more consistently and persistently than do ineffectual self-regulators. Successes achieved through perseverent effort strengthen belief in one’s selfregulatory efficacy, which enables one to stick it out through tough times (Bandura, 1997).

References

Bandura, A. 1999. “A Sociocognitive Analysis of Substance Abuse: An Agentic Perspective.” Psychological Science 10 (3): 214–17. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00138.