@woundedmind, Your comments about reframing thoughts were helpful and made me think,...
Its helpful for me for looking at thoughts of powerlessness, which are just thoughts not always reality. I make choices often in a split second, without looking at the process of decision. Even when all the choices are bad, I still make choices - often the proverbial lesser of two or more evils. It does provide me a sense of at least not extreme strength and power, at least I don't feel weak in an abosolute sense, less of just being a wind-tossed leaf in respect to others, never mind that I feel that if there are gods interested in our doings, that as has been said that the gods laugh at our plans and not to learn to fight the currents of life directly but to to go with the current to the point we're not fighting it, like going perpendicular to it, we may not make the beach or the bank exactly where want, but we'll make it.
It also helps in addiction behavior. Instead of saying to myself all the time, I can't stop, the reality is that I don't choose to stop something at this time because I feel the bad things don't outweigh what I'm getting out of it. When the pain of doing that harmful thing outweighs what I get out of it, that's when I choose to do something about it. When I'm going through the discomfort of withdrawal, I choose tolerate that discomfort because I know that there's something even worse down the road. Those are certainly things that are part of DBT - being able to discern your thought processes between the behavior and what causes the behavior, recognizing when you have choices and what they are and learning to tolerate discomfort gradually, using specific techniques and consciously weighing the pros and cons of possible decisions rather than just making all decisions in a seemingly willy-nilly manner if you're not used to doing so and if you do it unconsciously, to learn to do it consciously and deliberately to observe that you have choices, even if you make bad ones, that you choose to make them and why - it recognizes that you do have will and you can will to stop behavior as well as engage in it or vice versa depending on what you are trying to do, but also to identify that if you want to stop something, to show how to fill that void that's left with positive actions.
I'll get off the soap box. I can only imagine what the idea of being addicted to stimulation rather than trying to deal with overstimulation which is one of my issues and something I'll be dealing with for the rest of my life or that is the expectation. To understand the understimulation issue I can only go by what I've heard from others, not from direct experience except through a stretch of my own experiences.
