Glendale DUI Lessons: Recognizing Your Patterns

Getting stopped, arrested and prosecuted for driving under the influence in Glendale is no picnic. Even if you emerge successfully from the experience – you manage to get the charges dropped or manage to get a favorable plea bargain – you likely you will have to spend significant time, money, effort and worry to right your ship. It’s easy to think of the experience as an ordeal – as a horrible thing you have to go through. And it may be. But you could also look at the challenges before you in a different light – think of them as opportunities to learn more about yourself, to grow, and to surface and eliminate negative beliefs and bad habits that have been holding you back from living a satisfying, fulfilling, productive life.

As any Los Angeles DUI attorney will tell you, the consequences of failing to surface and rectify these fundamental bad habits or misplaced beliefs can be pretty dire. If you’re arrested and convicted multiple times for Glendale DUI, for instance, your fines, fees, jail time, alcohol school penalties, probation terms, and et cetera can escalate wildly. If you’re convicted of a misdemeanor like DUI three times or more within ten years, prosecutors may be able to leverage California law to transmute what an ordinarily might be a misdemeanor into a felony. The difference between a felony and a misdemeanor is huge – it could mean a massively longer jail sentence, for instance.

Given all that, it certainly makes sense to try to fix your bad habits or proclivities before they cause you future problems. This is a challenge that’s aside and apart from the specific challenges that your Glendale DUI criminal defense attorney will help you work out. So how do you surface the fundamental causes of your troubles? And once you do surface them, what can you do to eliminate them or get beyond them somehow?

These are tough questions, and obviously there is no one size fits all answer here. But here’s one interesting exercise you can try. Get out a piece of paper and write down one behavior or act that you’ve committed in the past two weeks that you regret — that you believe might have caused you significant trouble. You can pick your Glendale DUI arrest, if you want. And then ask yourself a simple question: Why did you do it? What was the reason you drove DUI or got arrested or did whatever it was that you did that you now regret?

You might contrive an answer to the effect of: “I don’t know. I just wasn’t thinking and I was tired and I wanted to get home.” The next step is to ask yourself why you did that. Why did you “stop thinking” when you got so tired? Your answer will hopefully get you closer to the root cause. You might say something to the effect of “I don’t know. When I party, my judgment goes out the window a little bit.” So you would ask yourself “why” to that – drilling down deeper and deeper to get at your root proclivity. You might eventually get down to something to the effect of “I have a difficult time controlling my impulses.”

By drilling down like this – asking why and why and why over and over again – we’re often able to surface the root of a behavior that we would like to change. Once you know that you have impulse control problems, for instance, you can seek help for those problems, using therapy, hypnosis, meditation, or whatever, to change your fundamental beliefs and come more in line with how you want to be.

Of course, this “drilling down” exercise aside, you probably want immediate and actual advice about what to do regarding your Glendale DUI. Los Angeles DUI attorney Michael Kraut of Glendale’s Kraut Criminal & DUI Lawyers (121 W Lexington Dr, Glendale, CA 91203 Phone: (818) 507-9123) is here to take your call, provide a free consultation, and to help you build a compelling, aggressive, systematic strategy to get results.

If you have been arrested for a DUI in Glendale or you are under investigation for driving under the influence in Southern California, please contact Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Michael Kraut for 24/7 assistance by phone at (323) 464-6453 or toll free at (888) 334-6344 or online.