This Just In… Curing Addiction?
Thanks for tuning in! This week’s post features: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (book), Best Way to Recognize Emotions in Others: Listen by American Psychological Association (blog), The Happy Secret to Better Work by Shawn Achor (ted talk) & more. Enjoy…
Book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (188 pgs)
Another Classic. I love this story; there’s so much greatness in this book. It far surpasses either of the movie renditions. The style that F. Scott Fitzgerald uses is so brilliant that Hunter S. Thompson rewrote this book word for word, “just to get the feeling of what it was like to write that way.”
I know it’s hard to imagine this book that (again if you’re like me) you grudgingly dismissed in high school could be considered a masterpiece; especially after watching the movies. But trust me, reread it. Try to identify the overarching themes like the horrors of a careless life and the shallowness and selfishness of people, and pay attention to the seemingly meticulously crafted sentences and you will understand the greatness of Gatsby as well.
Blog Post: Best Way to Recognize Emotions in Others: Listen by American Psychological Association via Science Daily (2 mins)
To follow up last week, I want to offer one more tip for effective listening.
Contrary to popular belief this article states that verbal only (ie. listening with your eyes closed, or in the dark) communication is better for identifying others true emotions as opposed to seeing body language and facial expressions. Some potential reasons being it’s easier for people to use their facial expressions to mask their emotions (since we have so much practice doing it) and/or multitasking is hard. If too much information is trying to be processed at once nothing will stick.
Listening with your eyes closed or in the dark might be better because it limits distractions and helps you zero in on what the person is really saying. Simply put, try to focus on being a better listener. My challenge to you this week is to have an emotional conversation in the dark with someone. Sit down, get comfy, turn the lights off and get real with each other. Let me know your experience with this.
Ted Talk: The Happy Secret to Better Work by Shawn Achor (12 mins 14 secs)
Brilliant and funny.
Do you think that someone’s external world is a good indicator of their internal world? If you saw last week’s bonus section, you would know that only 10% of long-term happiness can be predicted by someones external world. This, of course, is an average, and we have a problem with averages.
Determining the average is an attempt to figure out what normal is and when we focus on average we ignore potential, when we focus on average we will remain average. So forget about being normal, don’t try to be average. Be weird, be an outlier, put the extra in extraordinary, be above average. Focus on your potential in all areas of YOUR life instead of averages that statistics determine. Force the average to play up to your standards instead of playing down to theirs because living up to your potential is the key to happiness.
Bonus: A conversation with Gabor Mate by Genius Recovery (15 mins 05 secs)
This might be the most paradigm shifting talk I have heard thus far.
Gabor flips the common notion of addiction and trauma on its head. He links the two by explaining that trauma is more often than not the cause of addiction. Gabor says trauma isn’t what happens to you, its what happens inside of you. Internal trauma is not caused by the events, that is the secondary trauma, the real trauma comes from how we reacted to the events that happen to us. If we react in a negative matter and suffer, we seek to alleviate our pain. This is often the start of addictive behavior.
As Gabor says, addiction is a byproduct of pain, for each person, their addiction is their solution to their unique trauma. Initially, addiction help’s you solve a problem that you don’t know how to deal with and can conceive of no other solutions for. Unfortunately, this ends up being more destructive than helpful in the long run.
With this perspective, however, we can begin to tackle addition because we take the focus off of the drugs and we will shift the focus to the people in pain. Will see that this isn’t so much of drug problem, it’s an emotional problem. Meaning that addiction isn’t the core problem, addiction is an attempt to solve the core problem. So instead of tackling addiction at the surface and ignoring the underlying issues, we should be attacking the core pain inside of each individual.
That being said, the real question shouldn’t be what are we going to do with addicts, the real question should be how are we going to help them alleviate their true problems. We are treating the wrong problem because we are asking the wrong questions.
Currently, addiction is either confronted on a legal basis, which says usage is a choice, therefore, we must punish them; or a medical one, which says its usually a genetic or inherited disease and addicts have no power. Clearly, neither of these approaches are working and Gabor’s psychological approach may be the answer.
With this approach, the first step to solving this crisis is to treat addicts with compassion. Not with judgment and not with prosecution. People should not be punished for being in pain. The next step is to treat the trauma, not the addiction. Ridding the addiction will only happen through ridding the trauma. Tackling the addiction without dealing with the trauma will inevitably lead to relapse because we are slaves to the problems inside of us. Our “attempts” to solve our problems are only amplifying them. We are digging ourselves into a deeper hole each time we partake in our addiction. Once this process starts it will have a ripple effect. Once we help one person we can help more, because trauma is a vicious spiral.
One traumatized person traumatizes another, and then they traumatize another, and so one. The more hurt someone is the more they need to escape. The more someone heals the more appreciation they can have for a miserable reality and thereby treat others with the same compassion they lacked. It’s only once someone heals and become comfortable with themselves that they can stop this cycle. The more one heals the more they will find themselves having compassion for other traumatized people and the more they will help others on their journey to recovery.
If you want more of Gabor he was just on The Tim Ferriss Show, he does an exercise with a little under 30 minutes left in the podcast that is worth doing in order to help identify the source of your pain. If you are dealing with any sort of emotional pain that is manifesting itself in an addiction the way Gabor defines, please watch this video, follow Gabor, and most importantly get in touch with someone that can help.
Quote: “Strive not be a success, but rather to be of value” — Albert Einstein
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To your growth! Stay curious…
P.S. If you want my notes for the book above, send me an email with the subject “Notes for (insert book name)” and I will happily share.
