The hardest thing
The hardest thing, I think, in making a deep transformation - particularly when any level of addiction is involved - is to see yourself as something, somebody else. When something has been a part of your cultural context for a long time, it becomes inseparable from your memories of your life and your self concept. Thinking about that thing being gone is almost MORE inexplicable than thinking of yourself without a significant other, a parent, a child. It's like thinking of your face without your nose.
This is true even if whatever you are seeking to transform has negative impact on the rest of your life. Even profoundly negative impact.

Image Credit : Jan Willem
You have to strip all of that way. You have to leave behind regret, pain, sorrow, self loathing, worry, fear, the judgments of others, judgments of self, concepts of God, the good and the bad of those moments that made up your SELF WITH the behavior to be transformed.
I have to strip away all of the joy & pain of being a person who drinks often, and plenty. And so on with other behaviors. I have to lay myself bare. I have to be willing to be bored, boring, naked, silent. Still. A lone pine on a windswept mountain with no knowledge of what comes next. When memories, good or bad, come up - they must pass through my mind as things with no more weight than a single atom. A cloud dissolving without substance. The emotional trails they leave in the sky of my mind will dissipate.
And I will still remain.