A Reading of The Urge: Our History of Addiction, Part I I’d like to devote a few posts to chew over Carl Erik Fisher’s book, The Urge: Our History of Addiction. Fisher is an addiction psychiatrist, bioethicist, and assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.
Tag Archives: Addiction
Wreckage on the Road to Reconciliation:
The Helpless I’m glad I didn’t decide to be an experimental psychologist. If I had, I might’ve had to lock dogs up in cages and shock them for the sake of science. As it is, others can do it and we can benefit from the things they learned by doing so. Continue reading →
Wreckage on the Road to Reconciliation
Meaningful Suffering Versus Becoming an Impossible Martyr Is the hurt you are experiencing from your loved one providing the meaning and purpose to your life? Continue reading →
Victims in Denial
One type you’ll see on the side of the road to reconciliation are the Deniers. You’ll see them, but they won’t see you. They’re blind, deaf, and insensible to touch. They only know what they want to know, what’s convenient to them, what fits in the worldview they feel they must have. If the evidenceContinue reading “Victims in Denial”
Listen to Your Lookout
If you’re in a close relationship, you have a resource others don’t have. You have a lookout. When the wheels start to come off, everyone is prone to develop their own kind of problem and make their own kind of mistakes. Some get depressed or anxious or angry or just withdraw into themselves. Others useContinue reading “Listen to Your Lookout”
Don’t Play the Problem’s Game
When Problems Take Over a Relationship How does a persistent problem get started and what keeps it going? Why does it seem to be immune to your attempts to defeat it? Let me explain how it gets so hard and how problems manipulate you into feeding them. Continue reading →
Ride The Ego Balloon
The ego is a good tool if you understand its uses and limitations It all starts with you being a child. You have it really good. People take care of you, they feed you, clothe you, give you hugs, and put your awful drawings on the refrigerator with unrestrained praise. But nature cannot allow youContinue reading “Ride The Ego Balloon”
Feed the Person, Starve the Problem
One Halloween when I was a kid, I came home from trick-or-treating with a plastic pumpkin full of chocolate. My mouth had been watering ever since the second doorbell, but my costume prohibited taking an early snack. As soon as I got home, the mask came off, and I had my first piece of chocolate.Continue reading “Feed the Person, Starve the Problem”
When Problems Take Over a Relationship
Even when people are firing on all cylinders, relationships can be tricky. When there’s a persistent problem, like an illness or an addiction in the mix, they can be impossible. Persistent problems can be the source of much harm. The alcoholic you can’t rely on. The gambler you can’t trust with money. The depressive whoContinue reading “When Problems Take Over a Relationship”
See, Do, Teach
If you think that going to therapy means you can go to a shrink’s office, unload all your problems, and walk away a new man, you’ll be disappointed. You might feel better for a minute, but if you go home and do the same things you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. TherapyContinue reading “See, Do, Teach”
Keith R Wilson 