It’s the next morning.  Whether you went out and ate or you didn’t, take some time to read what you wrote the night before.  Take some time with 20/20 hindsight to evaluate what you wrote and decide if it was helpful.  This last part involves just a little more writing, but it’s important.  It’s an investment of your time that will pay dividends later.

In the previous writing exercises, you gave your projections on what would happen looking forward.  Take some time right now to assess how accurate your thoughts from last night really were.

Firstly, what are you feeling about yourself and the actions you took last night?  It doesn’t matter which side of the fork in the road you took, although if the actions from last night involved eating, this is hugely important to document.

If you didn’t eat, how do you feel about your decision last night?  How do you feel about yourself in the light of the next day?  Write about the positive feelings about what happened.  It was probably not as easy as choosing the other path, so it’s important that you don’t gloss over how positive a choice that was.

If you did end up eating, it’s important to write as well.  However, self-recrimination is totally unhelpful.  Remember what the AA Big Book says in the 9^th Step Promises: “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”

What happened was an experience we went through and can learn from.  To grab another piece of those Promises: “No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.”  Or in this case, how it can benefit ourselves.  Hopefully there will be others who will benefit when you recount your experiences and the inevitable positive outcome of long-term abstinence.

These actions I just laid out in this section come under the category of “pausing to examine,” but the actions here are meant to work hand-in-hand with defusion.  For many of us, the urge and the action were fused together.  The key is taking some time to examine the thoughts and realize that not all thoughts are truths – especially when they involve addiction and the user.

This was a project – whether it led to continued abstinence or to relapse.  In many businesses, when a team works on a project, after it is completed, a “lessons learned” document is formulated.  This is a document that’s meant to help make such a project easier in the future.  And this is the last part of the “should I?” or “shouldn’t I?” event. 

What questions do you ask in this “post-mortem”?  First, read the section of what you wrote in predicting how your actions would unfold.  Were the thoughts you observed last night giving you the reason to eat valid now, in the light of the next day? Did the obtaining process go as you predicted?  How about the food?  How did it taste?  How were you feeling while you were eating it?  What was the effect in the moment?  Did that effect last, or did it change?  How congruent are the thoughts you are laying down now with what you had predicted last night?  Was it fanciful thinking or was it spot on?

Now pretend you are reading last night’s writing as if it were written by someone else.  Write down your thoughts in assessing what was written.  If you could get in a time machine and go back to that point in time, what would you tell that person?  What could that person have done differently to guarantee a different outcome?  Can you generate some compassion towards this person and realize that this is a person suffering with a disease that he or she neither wanted nor asked for?

Hopefully, as the document is called, there will be “lessons learned.”  No matter which path you took at that fork in the road, those lessons contain important information for you to use in the future.  If things went well, it’s important to look at those lessons to reinforce you for the next time it happens (remember, we accept that these thoughts will happen again).  If things did not go well, perhaps you’ll be able to tell two different people about the lessons you learned.  Those two people are the you of last night and the you of the future.  It’s important to remember that you are the only beneficiary or victim of whatever happened last night.  Choosing abstinence has to be your choice, not one imposed on you by others.

The final thought on this is that no matter what happens, hold on to what you wrote.  Perhaps if you find yourself in the same dilemma in the future, you can start by re-reading how you handled the situation the last time.