Empathy Exercise for Addiction and Substance Abuse Class

 Empathy Exercise

Choose something of significance to quit for the next five weeks.  Keep a journal and write a daily entry which will be included as part of your 5-6 page paper indicating your chosen “sacrifice”, why you have decided to give this up and a summary of your daily experiences.  Discuss how this may relate to “addictive behavior” and the experience that one may have in quitting a habitual behavior or substance addiction.  Did you “cheat”, rationalize, struggle?  What was your self-talk like through this process?  How did you accomplish abstinence, or how did you struggle in doing so? 

Keep the journal with daily entries and summarize the journal into a 5 - 6 page paper addressing the above mentioned questions, thoughts, etc.