The Gentleman (Series 2) - Rehab

On Tuesday night, me and my girlfriend watched the final episode of the latest series of The Gentleman on Netflix - a comedy TV series about gangsters and much more. Last night, Wednesday night, I'd just finished up on a Beyond Compulsion Academy group call. We had about 10 clients join us to check in, share wins, and support newer guys who have only just started applying our method. It's safe to say the guys on the call were doing well. Most have been in the program a little while now so they speak the Beyond Compulsion language. They are aware of the tactics of the addicted part of the mind (APOTM) and do not fear dealing with their own compulsive desires. I really enjoyed the call and we had a few good laughs on it too. As I was walking home from the call, I saw a few people gathered around a guy with a big beard in the Morrisons local. I recognised him immediately. He had been in the last episode of The Gentleman Series 2. The same show we had literally finished watching about 24 hours ago. Fuck it. I went into Morrisons and told him I'd just finished watching The Gentleman the previous night with my partner and loved it. I asked him for a photo so I could send it to her.

If you haven't seen The Gentleman, this will just look like I've taken a photo with a random guy I've found in a Morrisons local in Manchester. So, let's get into a bit of BCA-related talk shall we (*spoilers below). In the series, the actor above (Pearce Quigley) plays a character (Dixon) who has a big influence over a character called Freddy who is in a rehab center, with the aim of overcoming a drug addiction. Instead of learning how to deal with compulsive desires and make change in his neural pathways, Freddy is taught how to change his life. He is easily influenced and let's just say makes some very poor choices. And that right there is the problem with rehab. A lot of the time, it is focused on someone's big picture life as a whole. Whether they do make good choices in their life or whether they make bad choices in their life, they never learn how to deal with compulsive desires. The idea is that if you change someone's life in a positive way, their desire will go away. But, the reality is that when you have developed addicted neural pathways, you are going to have moments when you want to engage in compulsive / addictive behaviours. Those pathways do not change until you learn how to deal with that desire directly. When I was addicted to porn, I thought that if I spent enough time away from "triggers" and worked on myself in a variety of ways, eventually I'd stop desiring porn. But, as soon as I returned back to a situation where I wanted to watch porn - I was fucked because I had no idea how to deal with that desire. Inevitably, I relapsed. That was the pattern of my life for around a decade. So, if there is something you can take away from this it is that the problem is not what is happening in your life. A lot of the time problems in people's life are actually caused by someone being in an addiction. Most of society has got this the wrong way round. If you want to change your life, start by learning how to deal with your desires directly and from there you will be set up change your life in a positive way from a place of clarity.

If you want to get started on learning to deal with desires directly, so you can be in control at any moment, you can find all of our training inside Beyond Compulsion Academy.