Status Updates From In the Realm of Hungry Ghos...

“And this creates addiction’s central dilemma: if recovery is to occur, the brain, the impaired organ of decision making, needs to initiate its own healing process. An altered and dysfunctional brain must decide that it wants to overcome its own dysfunction”

“Thus, we might say that three factors need to coincide for substance addiction to occur: a susceptible organism; a drug with addictive potential; and stress. ”

“The fundamental addiction is to the fleeting experience of not being addicted.”

“I am prone to that human—but inhumane—failing of defining and categorizing people according to our interpretation of their behaviors. Our ideas and feelings about a person congeal around our limited experience of them, and around our judgments.”

“No matter how much he may acknowledge the costs of his addiction, he fears a loss of self if it were absent from his life.”

“Our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others … is all the more pronounced the more distant these experiences are from ours in time, space, or quality,”

“That fear of life as they have experienced it underlies my patients’ continued drug use.”

I thought I had some expertise to share. While that was true, I soon discovered that, in fact, I had very little to give—I could not rescue people from their pain and sadness. All I could offer was to walk beside them as a fellow human being, a kindred spirit.”

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“This is his world and he pays attention to different details than I do.”

“Freedom isn’t for us,” he told his fellow prisoners. “We’re chained to this place for the rest of our lives, even though we aren’t wearing chains. We can escape, we can wander about, but in the end we’ll come back.”

“The hell realm of painful emotions frightens most of us; drug addicts fear they would be trapped there forever but for their substances. This urge to escape exacts a fearful price.”

I also have to confront my own resistance to them as people. Much as I want to accept them, at least in principle, some days I find myself full of disapproval and judgment, rejecting them and wanting them to be other than who they are That contradiction originates with me, not with my patients. It’s my problem—except that, given the obvious power imbalance between us, it’s all too easy for me to make it their problem

there is no chimera of redemption or any expectation of socially respectable outcomes only an unsentimental recognition of the real needs of real human beings in the dingy present, based on a uniformly tragic past We may (and do) hope that people can be liberated from the demons that haunt them and work to encourage them in that direction but we don’t fantasize that such psychological exorcism can be forced on anyone

“ The possibility of renewal exists so long as life exists.”

“If they seem to have chosen a path to nowhere, they still have much to teach the rest of us.”