02 - Addiction and the Hot Cross Bun Model
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[00:00:00] My name is David Cornwell. I am a therapist working at one of the world's leading rehabs, specializing in addiction and burnout. My role there is to work with mindfulness based interventions and somatic psychotherapy. And in these videos I want to present some of the things that I have learned and understood from working with addiction, and I want to present it from my own specialization
which is the study and practice of mindfulness. I started practicing mindfulness when I was first year of university. I developed a meditation practice in a local Buddhist center, and that became a main part of my life for the following, 26 years, as well as studying, the treatment of depression through meditation at Oxford University.
Training as a therapist specializing in [00:01:00] trauma therapy and really helping people with addiction and similar disorders, to be able to understand the relationship between what is happening in their mind, their behaviors, their emotions, their impulses. So what I'm gonna present today is a very simple model, which I often use when I'm explaining
people's processes to them, helping them to understand what's going on. This is a model from the cognitive scientists, Padesky and Greenberger. And I like this model because it is so simple. You know, there's lots of models out there, but this one is one that I think really helps people to understand what is happening within their process.
And I also, I like the simplicity. [00:02:00] Because I think that a good model, once we've seen it or understood it, we will say, ah, I already knew that. Somehow I understand that. And it, it really, it resonates with a person's experience. Okay. So this is sometimes referred to as the hot cross bun model. Because each of the parts connects with all of the other parts.
So we have these four major parts. We have moods, thoughts, behaviors, physical reactions, slash sensations. Okay. So it's what this model is demonstrating is that there are four parts to a person's experience. And these are interrelated and each part will trigger or activate the other part. So if our mood is low or it's high, that's going [00:03:00] to trigger certain behaviors.
It's going to activate certain cognitive thought processes, and it's going to create sensory experiences within the body. For example, you might feel when your mood is low, you feel tension in your stomach and your breathing and then your thoughts are difficult and then your behaviors are sort of impulsive to go and eat something, for example, or to find cocaine
or to find alcohol. And we, any one of these can be a starting point. If our, if our thought processes are difficult, that can trigger a decrease in the mood, which then again, decre, uh, triggers certain sensory processes and that then activates certain behaviors again, to maybe addictive behaviors. [00:04:00] So this model, it, the, what it can show also is that we can work with our experience through any of these four lenses.
So if we work at transforming our mood to improve our mood, that's going to impact our thoughts, going to impact sensory processes and it's going to impact behaviors. If we focus completely on a behavioral component that will likewise. So we do things, go to the gym, exercise, uh, attend, you know, AA meetings, CA meetings.
Those behaviors are going to have corresponding improvement in our mood, thought and physical sensations. Sensations really are, they have a location in the body, like what is happening in the body. We could also, for mood we could also use emotions. What emotions are present. So the also, what is, what this is [00:05:00] showing, this image is that
our human experience is more like an emergent phenomena. It's something that is emerging new in every moment. So we, we're, we're not the same person we were a moment ago. We're not the same person today as we're going to be tomorrow. And if we can work at the underlying substrate of our experience, our moods, uh, uh, sensory processes, thought process, and behaviors,
if we work on those, if we work on transforming those, then a new me emerges in each moment, and that new me, that new version of myself doesn't need to be sort of impulsively moving towards old addictive patterns and behaviors. So there's, there's some things that I have really learned in rehab, working with clients.
And [00:06:00] that is if we don't really shift our underlying experience, the sort of substrate of our experience, then we will not be able to change our behaviors. We will not be able to heal or transform that behavior that drives our addiction. That makes us in a moment, go and buy drugs, or drink alcohol, or binge eat, or whatever it might be, that we have to be working in a disciplined way at transforming the underlying substrate to transforming the mood, the thought, the behavior, the physical reaction.
And this requires some discipline. And it could be as simple as going to the gym. Um, it may require us to change some of our friendships. It may require us to go to therapy, to meditate. I find that mindfulness practice and meditation is [00:07:00] extremely important because that really does help to change the underlying mood.
It helps us to work with to metabolize difficult emotional and cognitive processes. It helps to really change our mood. There's evidence that shows that practicing meditation, it helps to heal the damage done from insecure attachments, and that doesn't just exist in our mind that exists in our body, in our emotional body.
So this model is very simple. It's really saying to us that we, our experience is this emergent phenomena. It's becoming new every moment. And if we can change the underlying thoughts, emotions, behaviors, sensory processes, then we become a new person. Something new emerges. [00:08:00] And working with addiction, we really have to do that.
We have to find that inner resources, that discipline, to transform our experience. I'm not saying it's easy, it's very difficult. Addiction, cocaine addiction, alcohol addiction, it makes very compulsive behaviors and very, very quickly a person has gone from sort of being stable, actively involved, maybe with their family, and five seconds later they're calling a drug dealer to purchase drugs.
But if they were able in that moment to pause and to take a moment what they might see is that something in their body has changed, their sensory process has changed, their mood has changed, their cognitive, their thought process has changed, and that has driven this compulsive behavior to go out and buy cocaine.
And that is where we need to bring [00:09:00] awareness. We need to bring awareness to these interrelated processes, which are driving the machine. These very strong currents within us. That are driving our behaviors. And if we can start to pay attention to that, it can be deeply transformative. This is why I'm teaching meditation at the beginning of all of my sessions with, uh, patients who suffer from addiction.
Because if we sit for 5 or 10 minutes and turn inwards and watch our internal processes, we can begin to see the interrelated, these connections between these different aspects of our experience, and then we can start to work with them. We maybe have the, um, develop that top down regulation to interrupt
a pattern as it's starting to emerge. So if we can see it, we can change it, but also we can work with the [00:10:00] underlying mood and emotional processes, maybe caused by trauma in our childhood that are, um, fueling and driving our addictive behaviors. Okay? So we need to see this. This is where meditation becomes very important.
We can look, we can see our meditation or sort of the patterns that are, uh, emerging within our experience. This is an, the human being arguably is this emerging phenomena. In every moment, a new version of myself emerges, but it emerges from this underlying substrate. And if we can bring awareness to that sub substrate, if we can change it, then we have a chance we really can begin to transform our addiction.
We don't have to be, um, holding onto that pattern of addiction. Okay? It is a pattern. It's just a pattern. And patterns do not want to be held [00:11:00] onto. They want to be let go of, okay? But it's a pattern that could be very deep coming from trauma, coming from our childhood experiences. But what we need to do
is bring awareness, pay attention, and begin to metabolize and transform that pattern. So there is a new default mood in our body. There is a new pattern of sensory, sensory experience. There is a new patterns of cognition and consequently there are new patterns of behavior and those do not have to include addictive behaviors.
Okay. This is the key point, and that's why it can be very hopeful. And one last thing I will say is that the healing process becomes grist for the mill. It's the sand in the oyster. And from all of this difficulty, a new wisdom emerges. A new beauty emerges as a person heals and [00:12:00] transforms. Thank you.
