Counselor, Author, and Reflective Eclectic
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All this reading about substance abuse and recovery may have given you the wrong impression. You may think that it’s hard to stop using drugs. Maybe it is, but nearly everyone who has experienced both addiction and recovery say the same thing: recovery is far easier than addiction.
You’re accustomed to all the work it takes to keep up an addiction, so you might not notice it anymore. You’re not accustomed to the work it takes to recover. It seems hard to decline your first impulse, to be honest with yourself, to go to meetings, and to open yourself up to healthy influences; but, in almost every case, you will wonder why you put it off so long. It’s not hard, it’s just different.
Let’s look at all the work involved in keeping up an addiction. You’ve got to get the drug. It’s rarely cheap and often involves going to a bad neighborhood and dealing with unsavory characters. You often get ripped off, run legal risks, and have to act secretly.
Then, you’ve got to use the drug. It sometimes involves the fuss of cooking and the pain of needles. It tastes bad, makes you cough, or gets you dizzy. You’ve got to stand out in the weather or hide yourself in the bathroom. You sometimes have to use it, even when you don’t crave it; like when you pull out your cigarettes before going into a movie theater because you won’t be able to smoke till the end.
Finally, you have to recover from it. There’s the hangovers, of course, the withdrawal, the delirium tremors. You’ve got to deal with the fallout from your spouse, the disappointment from your children, the criticism from your parents. There are lies and excuses you have to think up, and then remember what you said to whom. There are health issues. You’ve got piss tests at work and teachers looking closely at your eyes at school. Judges and probation officers don’t take kindly to chemical use and neither do old friends who know how you used to be.
Oh, there’s also the phenomena of increased tolerance. The more you use the drug, the less effective it’s going to be. You chase that first high and never experience that delight and wonder again. It gets to be that you can’t even get high anymore, but you use only to feel normal again.
People in the beginning and middle of addiction seldom think of all the costs involved. All those kids, smoking in front of the school are not saying to one another, Look at me, I’m starting a habit that going to cost me thousands of dollars a year, will make me stink, cause me to be socially ostracized, discriminated when I apply for insurance, give me cancer and heart disease, and bring me to an early grave. You think that’s what they’re saying to one another? No, they’re talking about how cool they look, how grown up they feel, and how no one else understands.
Let’s take a look at the decisions involved when you make the choice whether to use drugs or not. You probably use in response to a distress of some kind. It may only be the distress of the craving, itself; or you may use drugs as a way of coping with some anxiety or depression. Either way, you experience distress and assume you’re going to continue to experience distress unless you do something about it. The situation is depicted in this graph.
The vertical axis represents the level of distress, the horizontal axis, the passage of time. Your distress grows over time, until it gets to the point where you are now. You imagine that it’ll just get worse. You feel you have to do something fast.
What do you do? If you’re an addict, you use your drug.
Your distress level plummets pretty fast. You think, it’s a good idea you drank, shot up, or smoked, then.
But, there’s one problem, you don’t know what would have happened if you didn’t use your substance.
I’ll tell you what would have happened. What would have happened is what always happens. Things regress to the mean, people get used to anything, thoughts end, feelings go away, you get distracted. If you don’t do anything, it looks like this:
If you knew this, you’d feel like a fool, using drugs. All that cost, all that risk, all those consequences, all to get exactly where you would have gotten if you did nothing.
Well, if you feel like a fool looking at that graph, then look at what happens when more time goes by and all the costs, risks, and consequences of using drugs play out.
How do you like them apples?
This same graph works just as well with almost all kinds of distress and other things we do to intervene: shopping, getting in a fight, avoiding issues, hurting yourself, or killing yourself. We rarely know what the consequence of doing nothing is because there seems to be an imperative to always do something to relieve distress.
I used to advise people to learn to sit with feelings. If you feel angry, sad, nervous, or scared, see what happens if you do nothing. Study the feeling, contemplate it, and experience it before you act on it. You’ll find that, whatever feeling you had just went away and didn’t stick around long enough for you to study anything. So, I don’t say sit with your feelings because your feelings don’t sit. They travel. Watch them go by.
It’s easier than you might believe.
A recovering alcoholic goes to a party in which there’s alcohol being poured. He’s determined to stay sober, but he doesn’t want to stop going to parties. All his friends are going to be there. They’ll be watching the big game on the big screen. It’s bound to be a great time.
He does all the things to ensure that he’ll stay sober at that party. He has good reasons to stay sober. They’re all written down on a laminated index card he keeps in his pocket. He brings someone who will support his sobriety. He has an alternative beverage. He has some lines worked out in his head to say if someone offers him a drink and some more lines if they persist. He parks his car so he can make a quick getaway if he has to.
Chances are, that person is going be successful at staying sober at that party. But, chances are, two days later, he’ll relapse when the pressure is off and he has no reason whatsoever to drink. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times.
What is going on?
Drinking alcohol got in his head. Not the alcohol, itself, but the idea of it. A lot of times, that’s all you need.
A recovering drug addict drives to meet a prospective customer on the far side of the city. On the way, he passes by the abandoned building where he used to score dope. He’s not going there to get dope, he’s just driving by. He has no interest in getting high. He’s been there before and doesn’t want it again. Things have gotten much better for him since he began his recovery. He has this job, for one. He’s back with his old lady. His kids are talking to him. Using drugs again would be just crazy.
But then, as he drives by the old drug house, he gets this funny feeling. Something tightens up in his chest. His stomach goes queasy. You know what? He gets a little high. He hasn’t done anything more than drive by the old drug house, but that’s all he needs to do. He doesn’t get as high as in the old days. It’s not like that; but the excitement is still there.
You know what he does? He goes on to his meeting. If he tells anyone about his drive past the old drug house, he tells them about how he was able to pass by, without relapsing. His old lady congratulates him on his success. He’s feeling pretty good about himself.
A week later, he drives by again. This time, it’s not really on his way. The same thing happens. He gets a little high; and, just like before, that’s enough.
A week after that, he drives by again. This time, he pulls over and has that feeling a little longer. You guessed what happens eventually. As they say in the meetings, if you keep going to the barbershop, one of these days you’ll get a haircut.
This is what’s known as a contact high: the high you get when you’re in the vicinity of your drug. The term is sometimes mistakenly used for the high you get when you imbibe second hand smoke or handle a drug with your hands so that it passes through your skin. You can get high by imbibing secondhand smoke and handling drugs with your bare hands, but that’s not properly called a contact high. A contact high occurs psychologically, not physiologically. It’s all in your mind.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this. It’s related to the placebo effect. When scientists are researching a new medication and want to test it, they will give the new medication to a group of people and study the effects. They’ll take a second group of people and give them a pill that looks just like the new medication. They will tell them it is the new medication, but it’s really just a sugar pill. The sugar pill is called a placebo. Then they’ll study the effect of the placebo.
Placebos always are effective to some degree. For instance, when they conducted the trials for Prozac, a popular and important anti-depressant, the placebo was effective in about half the cases. Prozac was effective in about two thirds of the cases. That’s not a huge difference, but I guess it was enough to say that Prozac works. Still, when Prozac works, it’s a pretty good chance that it works because the patient believes it will work, rather than because of some physiological effect.
People who believe that everything comes down to cells and chemicals are mystified by the placebo effect, but the phenomenon has been used and abused by both healers and charlatans, for good and ill, for centuries.
Words are the most powerful drugs used by mankind. Kipling
I once had a client who was very anxious. Nothing seemed to help her and the medicine she was taking for it was actually harming her. Her doctor hatched a scheme. He told her they had discovered a new, very powerful medicine. He would put it on her and discontinue her old medicine. The new medicine was a placebo, but he went through the usual song and dance doctors go through, describing all the side effects. He was making them up, but he needed to make it believable. She took the new medicine.
A couple weeks later, she saw her doctor again. All her symptoms of anxiety had disappeared, just like he said they would, but she was also getting all the side effects. She couldn’t tolerate the side effects, in fact. She refused to take any more of the medicine.
Here’s another story. I once worked nights selling drinks at a teenager’s nightclub. We had no alcohol there, of course; it was all just sodas and juice; but, one week the owner had gotten a couple cases of non-alcoholic beer.
A few of the kids were pretty excited to see the beer. They either didn’t hear or didn’t understand that it was non-alcoholic. It looked like beer. It tasted like beer. They started drinking it, pounding it, really; just as hard as their big brothers might at a frat party. You know what? They got just as drunk as if they had been drinking real alcohol. They would have passed a breathalyzer test, but wouldn’t be able to drive real well. We actually talked them into surrendering their keys and calling their parents. Boy were the parents mad when they thought we had been giving beer to their children.
So, you see, it is not necessary to actually use a drug to be effected by a drug, and it’s possible to relapse without ever actually touching the stuff.
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Has there ever been a shrink that does not suggest that her clients keep a journal? None that I ever knew of.
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If you’d like to take a nap, but are not sure when, you’re probably a mother of young children or a wage slave who doesn’t have a place to hide from your boss.
If you have all the time in the world and can take a nap at any time, but are not sure what time would optimize the nap’s effect of rebooting your brain, then take the nap wheel for a spin.
I recently opened, for the first time, a volume of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson from the collection of old books in my library that I have never read. I was surprised to find that my father, whom I must’ve gotten the book from, noted on the title page that he had read it three times in his adolescence. I started to study the book, not to discover what Emerson’s thoughts were, but to learn more about my father.
When I have a client who needs to understand something about their father, I ask them to refer to the parent by name, not title. That’s because my father was a being who was born when I was born and had existence only in relation to me; whereas, Ray, which was my father’s name, lived about thirty years before I did, had experiences, thoughts, and feelings wholly apart from me, and died about twenty-five years ago, not much older than I am now. I knew him all my life as my father, and so, only knew him partially. I’d like to get to know more about him now, as a person, not just as a father; but alas, I cannot, except through Emerson.
A conscientious teenage boy might read an author like Emerson once if it was assigned. He might read it twice if he liked it, but he would not read it three times in three years if it didn’t make a profound impact on him. There had to be something about Emerson that would unlock the hidden parts of Ray to me. Emerson was the chief voice, if not the founder, of transcendentalism. Was Ray a closet transcendentalist?
These are some of Emerson’s words, taken from his essays, Nature, Self-Reliance, Circles, and The American Scholar, the anthems of transcendentalism:
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. [I think, by man, Emerson meant human.]
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds…A nation of men [and women] will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all …
Emerson lived and wrote in a country that had just freed itself from the domination of Europe. He advocated that Americans leave Europe and all its traditions behind and trust their instincts. Ray grew up the son of a house maid. His own father had gone off during the Great Depression to find work and never returned. His mother’s wealthy employers ruled in his father’s place: the autocratic and persnickety Old Lady Wightman, and Mr Wightman, an introverted man of letters. The Wightmans were British transplants.
It wouldn’t be hard for Ray, reading this book of essays, to imagine that when Emerson was addressing Americans to shake off the domination of Europe and trust themselves, that the author was addressing Ray directly, urging him to free himself from the control of the Wightmans. So, just as soon as Ray had an opportunity, he did so. At the tender age of seventeen, he joined the US Navy and went off to war. I’ve got to believe that seventeen year old boy, shipping halfway around the world to fight a desperate war, had to have a lot of Emerson inside him.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.
World War II turned out to be a blast for Ray, tooling around the South Pacific island of Eniwetok in a patrol boat long after that island had been won from the Japanese. He returned a skilled mechanic and went to work fixing cars. Did he remember his Emerson then and regret specializing only in auto mechanics, cutting himself off from his full humanity?
You must take the whole society to find the whole man [human]. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all…In the divided or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work… the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
I think he did. The evidence is that, later, about the time I was expected, he declared that he would build his own house, despite having no skills in the building trades. Everyone thought he was crazy, but he did it.
My father never talked about Emerson to me. Indeed, I rarely saw him read a book, although I always knew he held reading in high regard. I knew this because we had a lot of books in my home, many of which he had obtained from Mr Wightman, the shy man of letters. Ray, however, was an Emersonian man of action.
Emerson also had a complicated relationship towards books. He was, of course, an author and a very well read scholar, but one who valued action over analysis. I found it hard to read Emerson until I learned that his essays are best read aloud. I elected to have them read to me. He does not develop his points systematically, his writings are like a series of epigrams, nipping at his subject from a variety of angles. Listening to Emerson, it is possible to have your attention wander off for a few minutes and not miss anything because he will return to the point again and again in a new way. To Emerson, the important thing was not what he had to say, but the thoughts and actions that his words would awaken within you.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.
Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.
Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
I was a big reader when I was a kid and declared that I would grow up to be a writer. My father never pushed anything on me, but I could tell that, whatever I developed an enthusiasm for, he would delight in and support. Still, whenever there was some real work to do around the house, like when we built an addition, or the car needed something, I was right there with him, hammering and turning wrenches with him. I therefore learned to do a great many things and was never intimidated to try something new. When I, at the age of nineteen, said I would move to Western New York and build a house, everyone thought I was crazy, except my father. Ray had done something just like it. Ray was an Emersonian and he had raised an Emersonian without ever speaking a word of Emerson to me.
The secret in education lies in respecting the student.
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Children are all foreigners.
Emerson is found in practically every idea that has come out of America since his time. Everyone from the Tea Party to the New Deal, from Environmentalism to Entrepreneurial Capitalism, from the Sixties Anti-War Movement to the Neo-Conservatives of the 1990s drew from Emerson. Melville’s Captain Ahab was a mad Emersonian, Gatsby a sad one. It’s in Thoreau, of course; he being a protege of Emerson; and, by way of Thoreau, he infused Martin Luther King and Gandhi. His influence is also found in William Burroughs, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and Barbara Kingsolver. The Dead Poet’s Society is chock full of Emerson. Dizzy Gillespie played transcendentalism with his horn. Louise Armstrong sang it. Read Emerson today and he sounds like a New Age Guru. He also sounds like half of the memes people post on Facebook. Emerson is in the very air we breath. He’s in the nutrients of the soil. You don’t have to read Emerson to be affected by him, or even have a father who read Emerson. He is a pervasive, inescapable, unconscious part of modern ideology.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.
I would urge you to read Emerson even if you aren’t looking to connect with your father. Read Emerson to understand something about yourself.
If you were intrigued by my recent post about Martin Buber and the application of existentialism to psychology, then you might be interested in The New Existentialists blog. They seem to have stopped posting new articles, but the old ones are still there to read.
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I recently finished reading Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown. Since it’s a book that only the most psychoanalytically-minded shrink will enjoy, I’ll summarize it for you, so you don’t have to read it.
It goes like this. Babies experience the world with the same level of intensity, the same level of pleasure and pain, that you, as an adult, experience sex. This is what Freud meant by Infant Sexuality, or the equally misunderstood phrase, Polymorphous Perversity. Freud didn’t mean that babies are sexual in the same way that adults are sexual, only that any sensual stimulation that was not pain was pleasure, everything from sucking your thumb to taking a good dump. In addition, it was easy to take pleasure because you could suck your thumb and take a dump anytime you wanted.
This state of affairs made you, as a baby, the observant, engagable creature that you were. The whole world, including yourself, was your plaything. You learned fast, because you were so open to experience and able to experiment. Furthermore, because your parents sheltered you from many of the realities of the world, childhood was a prolonged period of privileged freedom.
All this had to change.
It began to change the moment your caretaker didn’t come when you called. You found that you were not the master of your domain. Something else, or someone else, was more important than you. You wished you could have whatever they had, so that you could have your caretaker anytime you wanted. This is what is meant by the Oedipal Phase and Penis Envy, two other widely misunderstood Freudian terms.
So, what did you do? You suppressed your desires, especially your desire for your caretaker to come immediately, so that you were not made miserable by your desires. Instead of playing freely, you did the things that effectively brought your caretaker to your side. You performed, not for your own pleasure, but for her’s. Your play become work. So that you are not driven mad with pleasure and pain, you deadened your ability to sense. You eventually concentrated sensation to a single, small, hidden part of your body, your genitals. The pleasure you used to feel wherever and whenever, you now confine to the relatively rare act of sex, in a darkened room, with the blinds shut.
Brown says this is madness.
He says that society represses you, and, to please society, you repress yourself. As a result, you cannot recognize the realities of existence. Erotic energy is sublimated and turned to the production of objects, character structures, and political organizations that yield little pleasure. You alone, of all the animals, repress your true desires, live in continual conflict and guilt, and construct for yourself a corporate neurosis you call civilization.
What does Brown propose you do instead?
Brown’s solution to your problem is the resurrection of the body. You need a science based on eros, a world animated by desire, not on objectivity that detaches mind from body. Therapy would be to return your soul to your body, return your self to yourself, and overcome this state of self alienation.
History is the story of this search to reclaim the lost body. It’s the story of the struggle of the forces of life against the limits posed by death.
Very interesting, Professor Brown, but I think you’re missing something. I’m all for partnering in a more effective way with the body. We often turn our bodies, in early adulthood, into neglected, abused, beasts of burden. We pay the price for this later. In later adulthood, we turn resentful and cantankerous toward our bodies as they begin to wear down from this treatment. Ever since toilet training, we fail to obey instinct, ignore gut feelings, deny our needs, and repress reasonable desires. We’re like masters that mistreat our slaves. The slaves revolt and then we’re in trouble.
So, connect in a meaningful way to the body you have, by all means. Take care of it. Listen to it. Sometimes obey it. You’re not getting rid of your body, so you guys have got to learn to get along. However, you are not repressing yourself just to please society. It is often necessary to repress the immediate needs to the body so that greater gains that you would enjoy can be achieved.
In other words: If you take a dump every time you want, you end up sitting around in shitty pants.
A baby’s babbling is melodious. When you were a baby, you could make every sound that a human could possibly make. Now, you’ve lost that ability because you domesticated your utterances into a language. Baby cooing is cool; but people understand language; whereas they can’t understand babbling.
When you suppress your impulses and follow the rules of a sport, you are no longer playing spontaneously. You may be playing tennis, golf, baseball, or soccer. Playing these sports can give much more pleasure than spontaneous play ever could. Well, maybe not golf.
You can think of repression as you think of the net in tennis. If you played tennis without the net, sure, you’d have longer volleys and not have to stop and pick up balls so often, but there wouldn’t be a challenge and you wouldn’t experience the beauty of meeting that challenge with power and grace.
History, you see, is a lot like tennis. It’s the story of how you play within limits. You can’t do whatever you want for as long as you want with whomever you want. There are lines, nets, and rules. When you accept those rules and play within them, that’s how life prevails over death.
Keith Wilson - Counseling