If we can ride out and surf the crest of the temptation without being plunged beneath its crushing wave, we will keep ourselves safe from it.
“We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The urge comes over me in a huge wave, and I lose myself!”
These were the words Ray, a young client, uttered despairingly to describe his gambling addiction. His impulsive machine gaming was depriving his child of resources, threatening to end his new marriage, and stripping his self-respect.
Urges can drag us all off course sometimes.
So what can we do about them? First off, let’s look at the true root of the problem.
Urging us on to destruction
Catastrophic impulsivity can lay waste to whole lives. And yet if we can just wait a little, the seemingly overwhelming urge to blow out on drink, drugs, or food; buy uncontrollably; or blow up in a fiery ball of rage will, like dew on a summer morning, evaporate fast.
Prefer to watch instead?
If we can ride out and surf the crest of the temptation without being plunged beneath its crushing wave, we will keep ourselves safe from it.
Urge surfing means just that. Rather than sinking, we surf the wave of the impulse until the wave has lost its force. The urge passes, and we find we didn’t drown after all.
But how can we help our clients to do this? Well, firstly we can reassure them of something.
Surfing is not fighting
Swimming against the tide is never easy and, as any beach lifeguard will tell you, the tide usually wins.
Importantly, urge surfing isn’t about fighting the urge, any more than you fight the clouds when you observe them float by.
Letting the urge be there rather than trying to suppress it is key to the technique of urge surfing. We use urge surfing to help clients manage their own unwanted behaviours by not giving into destructive urges but rather riding them out, like a surfer riding a wave.
What’s more, the more able a client becomes to urge-surf destructive impulses and compulsions – not deny them, but not give into them either – the healthier and happier their life becomes as a whole.
So how might we develop the skill of urge surfing in our clients?
Tip one: Externalize the pattern
Imagine a parasite that nests within someone then insidiously convinces them somehow that it is who the person essentially is. The more a client identifies with their urge, the harder it may be to detach from it and let it pass.
For example, when people say things like ‘I am a smoker’ or ‘I am a depressive’ or ‘I have an addictive personality’, they have enmeshed their very identity with the distinctive pattern.
We want our clients to externalize the destructive pattern so they can begin to detach from it and leave it behind.
How do we do this? We can begin to frame the problem as external to the person through the way we describe it, such as with questions like:
- How does that bulimia try to con you into believing it is somehow going to help you?
- How will you stand up to that smoking when it tries to con you back again? What kind of lies will it try to use on you?
- How do those depressive bias thinking styles make you buy into them?
What we need the client to understand is that the problem is not who you essentially are. We don’t have to say that as a platitude, but rather demonstrate it to them in the way we ask about and discuss the problem.
By externalizing the pattern, we also reframe it. When the client begins to talk about the pattern as external to them, they are already starting to transcend it, and it becomes easier for them to feel separate from it.
A useful technique in this regard is mindfulness. Mindfulness entails a sense of being outside of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. So by practising mindfulness, your client can develop their observing self, which will further enhance the sense of distance between themselves and their problem.
Finding this sense of distance can also guide our clients towards a greater sense of self-compassion, which is likely to boost motivation and resilience. Indeed, recent research suggests that self-compassion following dieting setbacks may help maintain motivation and promote healthier responses.1
Next, we need to develop a plan and strategy for our clients to surf that urge in the moment – to be, so to speak, above the water rather than in it.
Discover How to Stop Anyone Smoking
Read more about Mark's approach to smoking cessation.
Tip two: Help your client stay in touch with wider values
Urges are hypnotic. By that I mean they narrow our focus of attention and often arise in association with other ‘post-hypnotic’ triggers which cause the urge to arise within us.
Strong urges snap metaphorical fingers, mesmerize us into forgetting all but what the urge nudges – nay, bullies – us into doing. We forget in the moment that the urge (if it is destructive, and of course not all urges are) will come at a great price as we betray what we truly value.
But what if we can remember, not just intellectually but experientially, our true best interest when the urge tries to push us around?
We can help our clients urge-surf by encouraging them to identify their core values and goals, and explore how their urges may be interfering with these values. Then, when the urge tries to manipulate them into casting aside their best interests, they will be prepared to consciously stay in touch with their values and true wider wishes.
Equipped with this sense of purpose and meaning, clients can find the motivation to tolerate discomfort and resist impulsive actions. In fact, research has shown that staging or affirming aloud core values when tempted to follow the dictates of an urge can enhance our ability to surf the urge, rather than being pushed into going against our true interests.2
So you might elicit from your client some of their core values, such as honesty, health, self-improvement, sobriety, self-control, or whatever. Then have them rehearse stating these core values out loud. When we feel weak, just stating our core values can be a quick and easy self-control booster.
Ray, the young slot-machine gambler, said he believed his responsibilities were important. So I had him close his eyes and approximate the urge, then open his eyes and state aloud, ‘My responsibilities are important to me!’
While enhancing motivation and self-control is an important facet of urge surfing, for some clients it isn’t enough on its own. This next strategy powerfully interferes with the mechanics of the urge itself.
Tip three: Scramble the urge pattern
When helping our clients develop urge surfing, it’s vital to help them spot when the urge is first building so that we can find a way to naturally transcend it, even derail it, before it drags them along. The urge needs to dance to our client’s tune, not the other way around.
Okay, I’ll attempt to stop mixing my metaphors now and actually explain scrambling to you!
Problems run in mechanical ways. That may sound strange, but it’s true. An urge or compulsion will have a predictable beginning, middle, and end. The scrambling technique relies on identifying the ‘steps’ of the urge, like so:
Step one: Identify a time when the urge would naturally be at its weakest, or even non-existent.
First, ask your client what is the state of mind furthest away from the urge state. It might be when they are relaxed in nature, or some other relaxing or resourceful experience. Or it might be after they’ve indulged in the urge for some time and it has played out to the point where they no longer want to engage in it – they feel fed up (literally!) with bingeing, or disgusted with themselves after gambling, and so on.
Step two: Identify the steps of the urge problem.
Now ask them what triggers the urge to kick in, in those very first moments. Maybe they feel the urge because they are aware it’s a certain time of day (‘wine o’clock’), maybe it’s when they are in a particular place where gambling machines are located, or any other trigger. Get them to close their eyes and access the feelings associated with that initial step.
Then ask: What happens next? Maybe it’s fighting the urge but then giving into it, or justifying why it’s okay in their mind. This is the second step. Again, have them close their eyes and hypnotically access that step.
Then move on to the third and fourth steps, or however many different phases of the compulsion there are. Have the client close their eyes and access an approximation of each step in turn until finally they reach the end of the urge feelings – the point where the urge is finally exhausted.
This is a powerfully important point when we examine any compulsive activity: How do they know when to stop? Why don’t they just binge forever, or smoke 24/7? How or why does the rage end? This is the last step of the pattern.
Once all the steps have been identified, have them go through the pattern in order of how it happens, opening and closing their eyes in between each step.
Next comes the scrambling part.
Step three: Scramble the pattern.
Have them access step one, the very initial stirrings of the urge, then immediately go to the sense of it ending. Go back to the very first step again, then interpolate the polar-opposite state of mind they previously identified. Go back and forth between the steps in a completely random order, until the steps are so ‘scrambled’ that it’s near impossible to get the old urge pattern back anymore.
I did this with Ray, the compulsive slot-machine gambler, to the point where he couldn’t even approximate an urge feeling at all anymore; or if he did, the urge immediately died because we’d scrambled it so much. He lost the urge to gamble. It just went. We still had therapy to do, but the emergency – haemorrhaging money – had been stemmed.
Of course, not every client will respond quite so dramatically to this technique. If they still need a bit more support handling their urges, this next tip can be very helpful.
Tip four: Teach your client how to relax with those urges
Guide your clients through a mindful body scan, which they can then use when they experience intense urges. Encourage them to bring their attention to different parts of their body, noticing any tension, discomfort, or sensations associated with the urge. By observing these bodily sensations without judgement, clients can learn to tolerate the urge without feeling overwhelmed by it.
We can also teach our clients to anchor themselves in the present moment by focusing on their breath when urges arise. Invite them to notice the sensation of the breath entering and leaving their body, without trying to change or control it. Just as the air we breathe isn’t us – is not who we are but rather passes through us – so too an urge isn’t us, and we can simply watch it pass through.
We can also use visualization techniques with our urge-stricken clients.
Tip five: Help them ride the wave through visualization
Guiding your clients through metaphorical visualization exercises can help them develop a sense of mastery over their urges and build resilience in the face of temptation. The better hypnotically trained you are, the more powerful this will be.
I might help a client visualize themselves surfing a wave, with the wave representing the urge. I encourage them to visualize riding the wave with skill and confidence, staying balanced and focused despite its intensity.
We can also take a more direct approach with our visualization, having our clients hypnotically rehearse experiencing the old trigger times but finding that the urges, like voices that have become barely audible, no longer bother them.
These are by no means the only tools to use when helping our clients overcome their urges and compulsions, but they are powerful ones.
Ray told me that, when it came to the urge to throw his family’s money into a metal box, what had once been a storm was now ‘barely a ripple’.
Help Your Clients Use Their Imagination Constructively
So often, we use our imaginations to scare, depress or anger ourselves. But something so powerful can be the cure to greatly improved mental habits and stable psychological health. That’s why Mark uses hypnosis with almost every client. Hypnosis is essentially the structured use of the imagination to achieve therapeutic goals, and you can fold it into your practice with his online course Uncommon Hypnotherapy.
Discover How to Stop Anyone Smoking
Read more about Mark's approach to smoking cessation.
About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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Notes:
- Hagerman, C. J., Ehmann, M. M., Taylor, L. C., & Forman, E. M. (2023). The role of self-compassion and its individual components in adaptive responses to dietary lapses. Appetite, 190:107009.
- Schmeichel, B. J., & Vohs, K. (2009). Self-affirmation and self-control: Affirming core values counteracts ego depletion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(4), 770-782.
