One of the best examples of this was a man I treated several years ago whom I’ll call “Jim.” Jim, who was a sixty-something physician, arrived in residential addiction treatment for alcoholism as a result of pressure from his two adult children and his grandchildren. Jim was not the sort of person who bowed to pressure from anyone, but when his granddaughter read him a letter describing the impact his drinking had on their relationship, he knew he needed help. Although Jim was initially reluctant to get help, once he arrived in treatment he described the choice to get treatment as one he had been thinking about for a long time and that he just needed the right excuse to find the time. It was so important to his brain to experience a sense of control that his recollection became distorted and created the story that entering treatment was his idea all along. This is very common and is an example of the hindsight bias we discussed in chapter 3.After some time getting familiar with his peers, his counselor, and me, he started to develop some trust in us and revealed that, in fact, he had made numerous efforts to decrease or stop his drinking.
