If your car is spinning out of control, there are driving techniques to help you avoid a crash. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent the skid from happening in the first place?
A good way to protect against accidents is to ensure your vehicle is inspected, repaired, and maintained ahead of time. A car that’s in good shape has less that can go wrong on the road.
Sometimes life spins out of control as well. And if addiction is in the picture, a loss of control is virtually a certainty. But if you maintain the vehicle—manage your emotional well-being—ahead of time, you can avoid the skid altogether and prevent addiction from happening.
Prevent Addiction by Maintaining the Right Behaviors
The vehicle you navigate through life has components that are emotional, spiritual, and personal in nature. Without proper maintenance, those systems can stop functioning the way they should.
Your life can get into bad shape in a number of ways:
- You may become more and more self-absorbed and lose your focus on God and others.
- There can be a descent into depression or anxiety, or an increase in your anger or control.
- If you lose self-awareness, you will repeat mistakes, and your wrong doings can multiply.
Regular self-inspection can increase your awareness and help you better deal with these issues.
As preventative maintenance, you can learn and practice healthy lifestyle behaviors. This will help you develop the resilience to withstand the trials and issues we all face. The good news is that there are such behaviors, and they form the most successful life improvement program in history—the Twelve Steps—which inspired the book STEPS: A Daily Journey to a Better Life.
You can learn how to prevent addiction. For many people, a great place to start is with the easy-to-understand and flexible lifestyle guidelines found in the STEPS.
You can maintain your emotional and spiritual well-being by learning new life improvement steps. That may involve re-learning how to live in a way that brings better results than the self-destructive behaviors you have adopted.
Prevent Addiction by Repairing Your Biggest Problems
If your car had been in a wreck and still had damage, you would repair it before driving on the highway, right? Then why do you travel through life with emotional problems you need to fix?
There are many people who are living with emotional damage caused by things such as:
- Heredity, because compulsive issues often pass from one generation to the next.
- Medical or psychological conditions that lead to anxiety, depression, or addiction.
- An upbringing involving abuse or neglect, or trials they face such as illness or divorce.
If there is such a problem in your life, it needs to be repaired. That may call for working with a pastor, therapist, or psychiatrist or going into recovery or a treatment program.
Substance abuse is a difficult disease, but there is a vaccine for addiction. Do it for your family and those you care about. Do it for yourself. Because, there is hope, and you do have a positive future.
In this series of articles, we discussed 3 scenarios to learn how to prevent addiction. First was dealing with a sudden skid, and next was learning to handle a more gradually-occurring accident.
But the best option is to avoid the crash altogether by keeping your vehicle—you—in the best condition possible. The tools are there if you’re willing to do the work, and you will be glad you did.
Question: Someone you know is suffering from addiction, but do you know who it is?
Action: Re-read this blog series starting with “How to Prevent Addiction” (a Driver’s Manual).”
Photo by Elsie esq. 
Photo by mtneer_man Photo by el cajon yacht club
