Another helpful DBT skill for addiction is called burning bridges. Burning bridges involves reducing your opportunities to engage in the addictive behaviour. Basically, you’re burning the bridge between you and people, places, or events in your life that encourage or facilitate addiction. This might, for example, involve deleting your drug dealer’s information from your contacts, purposely cutting off your ties to drug (or alcohol or gambling) using friends or associates, staying away from the people, places, and events related to the addictive behaviour. It’s hard enough already to stop an addictive behaviour; it can be so much harder when you’re still hanging around others who engage in that behaviour or who encourage you to do it too, or when you’re in an environment related to your addictive behaviour. For some people, burning bridges literally involves moving to a different neighbourhood. Avoiding people, places, and events related to addiction can make it a lot easier to recover. You will not be exposed to reminders of your addictive behaviour and will have some time in the clear on the other side of the bridge to start building an addiction-free life. Using this skill involves first brainstorming all of the people, places, or events that represent your ties to addiction. Then, you systematically cut those ties. This is not easy to do. Sometimes, the people related to your addictive behaviour are beloved friends or even family members. You may have to accept that you’re losing something in the short-term to gain something even better in the long-term – an addiction-free life and the ability to work toward goals that are important to you. With certain addictions, such as Internet or porn, it can be even harder to burn bridges. Computers, smartphones, and tablets are ubiquitous. It’s very hard to avoid them. In these cases, people might consider setting up blocks for particular types of websites, scheduling large blocks of electronics-free time, getting work done in a way that doesn’t rely quite as heavily on computers or the Internet, or other such strategies. It can also be helpful to devise a coping plan just in case you encounter the people, places or events related to addictive behaviour. Burning bridges is great, but it doesn’t always work; some bridges are exceedingly hard to burn, or they might end up being rebuilt. In those cases, it is wise to have a back-up plan for how you would cope without using alcohol or drugs or engaging in other addictive behaviour. – Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.