Addiction
Having heard Dr. Phil say this any number of times, I would like to commentthat oftentimes he’s also referring to what we might consider a “bad habit”.Yes, he’s used the comment when it’s a cigarette addiction, for example, but Idon’t think he would suggest that if you were addicted to heroin, you couldjust substitute celery sticks and you’d be home free. He’s not suggesting thatyou simply replace one addiction with another — replacing something “bad” withsomething “good” is a tool to solving the issue of why you’re doing the “bad”thing in the first place.
And there is a difference between addiction and bad habit, even if the linebetween them might be thin sometimes. Speaking for myself, my habit of eatingchocolate at every opportunity was certainly a very “bad habit”, and I wouldcertainly not compare it to an addiction to alcohol or nicotine.
The point Dr. Phil often makes when he says this (Julie’s quote above) isthat if you have a “bad habit” (such as chewing on pencils), then in order tostop doing the “bad” activity, you need to find something else that’sconstructive that will give you the same “feeling” that chewing the pencil does.And thenhe has you work on the feeling…. and that’s something that needs to bechanged from the inside out. We just don’t see that part on the show.
Dr. Phil does use a lot of “catch phrases”, but the really positive thingwith them is that we can hear them (sometimes over and over) and then it canresonate somehow with us on a personal level.
As I’ve stated before, it was a comment that I heard on Dr. Phil thatcombined with my reading of Dr. Atkins that was the motivation for me to changemy”bad habits”. It’s possible that reading Dr. Atkins alone could have done thetrick, but I know that watching Dr. Phil alone didn’t motivate me!
Quotes and sayings from any source can click with us at any time — Icertainly don’t give Dr. Phil any special applause in that dept. — it alldepends on”where your head is at” when you hear or read something.