Breaking down your goals

One in three adults over fifty lives alone. An English study showed one adult in eight had no close friends, a rise from one in ten in 2015. Those without close friends were 2. When the problem is loneliness and lack of relationships, the goal is to find new relationships that can provide sustenance and emotional support. This is no easy task. Loneliness tends to reinforce itself through the avoidance of opportunities to meet others. As avoiding relationships gets further ingrained, it becomes the default mode for relating (or not relating) to others. True, less enjoyable or less immediately enjoyable activities may eventually be necessary to further positive change. We just don't recommend starting with tutoring--or job hunting, or back-tax filing--as you identify alternative behaviors to reinforce. Starting with less enjoyable behaviors, no matter how good they are for your loved one, won't directly compete with the immediate gratifications of substance use. Ultimately, the environment that you create will contain a balance of shorter- and longer-term rewards, but all in due time. Believe it or not, the self-confidence and coping skills required for a successful job hunt may start with guitar lessons. Does the alternative behavior compete with the substance-using behavior in time and function? Again, the goal is to build, bird by bird, a life that competes with substance use. If your loved one typically uses with her best friend on Friday nights, is there another activity you can support that she and her friend would enjoy together at that time? Or something that she would enjoy doing on Saturday mornings to influence her decisions about what happens Friday nights? While it can seem chaotic from the outside looking in, decisions to use substances are usually well-grooved routines. Sometimes good, like when they inherit the position from someone unfit for the job; Opposes: Taurus Suns. You see other people as coming by their gains illicitly.

When Jupiter is opposite your Sun sign, you don't connect to its energy naturally, which means you will always find yourself at a disadvantage until you do. The best way to tap into your good fortune is to do a better job of safeguarding it. You can't blame a credit card company for charging late fees or the IRS for collecting on back taxes. Honor your debts and obligations and you'll never owe anyone a cent. JUPITER IN SAGITTARIUS Somebody upstairs likes you. What else can explain all the close calls and eleventh-hour saves? Reaching out gets riskier and scarier the longer the person is alone. Here again therapy is helpful. In the safety of a human relationship with the therapist, the relational barriers can be explored and worked through. The person can explore the early messages and conditioning around being with others, to feel rather than disown the deep needs for relationship, to reach out, to actively initiate contact with others, to risk rejection and not be immobilized by the fear of being devasted by it, to tolerate greater intimacy and not be so threatened by it that it gets cut short. Interpersonal therapy contends that dealing with present relationship issues is the key element to recovering from depression. The aim is to find nourishing relationships and to assist people in creating healthy boundaries, so they can function on their own when appropriate and merge with others at times of deep intimacy. Learning to more skillfully navigate the interpersonal world steers the person out of depression. Depression as a result of a deficient self The core wounding of most people involves a wound to the very sense of self. This creates a sense of a deficient self and the feeling of shame--the feeling that underneath it all you are bad, not okay, unworthy, or wrong. In your original Behavior Analysis you probably noticed that your loved one's use happens at certain times of day and on certain days (even a daily habit usually has a pattern over the course of the day). A positive behavior competes with this use pattern, then, when she can do it during the time she would have spent using and/or recovering from the effects of use. For even more competitive edge, the new behavior should fulfill a similar function as the substance use.

If drinking is the way she connects with other people, you can create other opportunities to socialize. If it's to cope with stress, you can reward activities that are healthier and reduce stress. Finally, consider whether the behavior is functionally incompatible with using, that is, requires fine motor skills, like a cooking class, or fine mental skills, like reading, or vigor, like exercise or getting up early. Consider settings where substance use is not allowed or readily available, such as gyms, parks, choirs, museums, or meditation groups. Try to involve people who don't use with your loved one and don't encourage use. Would the opportunity to engage in the new behavior occur often enough, or could it occur often enough in the future? A onetime or once-every-ten-years positive behavior is certainly worth having on your bucket list, but you'll want to include mostly behaviors that are regular, routine, or at least repeated with some frequency, so that their continuation will make a difference over the long run. One might think that this kind of bailout would make you foolhardy and profligate--and you probably once were--but over time you've grown deeply reverential. Jupiter is in domicile in Sagittarius. It won't make you lucky, but it does make you fortunate. It's got your back. And this stems from the fact that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. It has the strongest gravitational pull, so asteroids and comets are drawn right to it. Scientists speculate that an asteroid crashes into Jupiter at least once a week, so we have Jupiter to thank for planet Earth still being around. Jupiter in Sagittarius also gives you a big tent philosophy. There's no such thing as one way of doing things or a single belief that outranks them all. The fate of the planet--for better or worse--lies with humanity. Shame is so painful because it's the deep feeling you are unlovable. Various approaches to depth psychology describe this deficient self in different ways. Kohut's psychoanalytic self psychology first articulated this as a narcissistic wound in which shame is the predominant feeling to defend against.

Defensive structures shore up the deficient sense of self but create an as-if or false self that must be worked through for genuine vitality and self-esteem to develop. Only then will the self become more coherent, integrated, cohesive, and stable. Other psychoanalytic writers depict similar features. Existential and gestalt theorists explain how the existential void inside the self must be confronted and gone through in order for the authentic self to emerge. Somatic therapists point to the dissociation from the body and resulting overly mental self that is responsible for this feeling of being unreal, vague, or insufficient. Reconnecting with the body and somatic reality brings the needed sense of being real. Whatever vocabulary or school of psychology one chooses, there are similar features to the modern self that come into view. Think: weekly classes, regular exercise, getting up in the morning or coming home at night, or practicing a skill. Is the new behavior or activity something that you could enjoy too? This could be an opportunity to start enjoying time together again, as the life you are building to compete with substance use includes you! If spending more time together before he stops using would seem to put the cart before the horse, remember the evidence. CRAFT studies have consistently shown a connection between enjoying time together and decreased destructive behavior on your loved one's part as well as an increased sense of well-being on yours in this order. Improvements in the quality of everyone's life can and usually do happen even before substances are fully out of the picture. What's hard about this . If your strategy for reinforcement includes enjoying some activities together, try to resist the urge to talk about anything too serious during these times. The point is to have stress-free, conflict-free time together to improve your relationship in general and reward nonuse. Do not underestimate how challenging this can be. We've got the whole world in our hands. Sagittarius Jupiter . Enriches: Sagittarius Suns by being welcoming.

Misses the boat with: Scorpio and Capricorn Suns when it gives away more than it takes in. Benefits: Libra and Aquarius Suns because it won't stop believing. Squares off against: Virgo and Pisces Suns when it makes promises it can't keep. Blesses: Aries and Leo with fun and laughter. Is anyone's guess with: Taurus and Cancer Suns because it's a big spender. Both signs like to live well, but there's a difference between living well and living beyond your means. Opposes: Gemini Suns. The sense of a deficient self is a common understanding across many different depth approaches. Greenberg's emotion-focused therapy highlights this in depression. This insecure, deficient self is under constant threat of fragmentation. Given the near universality of the core wounding to the self first described by Kohut, it makes sense that this inner deficiency is central in depression. What's not clear is how much poor diet and other physical factors contribute to exposing this vulnerability. Treatment entails first tuning in to this core sense of deficiency at the center of depression. To transform it, it must first be experienced. After entering into a relationship with this state of insufficiency and with the help of an attuned therapist, the person experiences more fully the early experiences that led to this state. The supportive therapeutic presence allows the patient to tolerate what were previously intolerable emotions and be able to symbolize them in words. In deepening the person's inner experience, primary emotions are accessed. Given how much you might be holding in (currently or historically), you may be tempted to fill your loved one in on everything you've been thinking about. You may have to use self-care strategies (eg, distraction, relaxation) to control yourself and trust that you will have opportunities in the future for more serious conversations. For the present, try to simply be together.