Video: Do You Need To Hit Bottom To Change?

Transcript: (For video near the end of this series of clips.) The way one “hits bottom,” or what “bottom” looks like for person A versus person B, might be very, very different. “Bottom” is nothing more than a place, an activity, a time, where someone comes to the realization that “this is as much pain and suffering as I want to go through, and I want to change. I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

For some people, it means getting in a car accident or a DUI, or being diagnosed with liver failure. For others, it’s substantially less. I’m a big believer that, yes, there is a bottom for everyone. I wish that it wasn’t so. Sometimes the bottoms are really low bottoms.

“Low bottoms” are: you lose your wife or family, you lose your career, and you find yourself out on the street. Or worse, your health has deteriorated to the point where there’s no recoverability. Now hopefully no one waits to that point, but often, many people do.

There’s also “high bottom” people, and those are the people that I really want to nurture to get the ball rolling. Where things haven’t come to the black-and-white “If I don’t get help now I’m going to die,” but rather, see the bottom coming, see the motion in that direction, and sort of start reaching out for help or start looking inside themselves, to start course corrections, way before they get to that bottom phase.

VideoJug – What does it mean to “hit bottom” in behavioral addiction?

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