Ross A. Laird

It’s right here:

Check it out. (And let me know what you think.)

I spent most of today at The Orchard on Bowen Island. I met with the clients as well as the staff. Much of the day was spent talking about the relationship between childhood development and addictions, and the relationship between nervous system imprinting and recovery. It was, therefore, a day of ideas, personal process, and engagement.

The Problem:

Addiction is a positive urge thwarted by negative circumstances. Almost all habitual substance users are searching for a means of dealing with psychological stress that is usually associated with childhood and adolescent development.

The addict is drawn to a culture which promises to complete the unfinished impulses of childhood and adolescence. The cultures of technology are sufficiently broad as to offer the psychological rewards of all the cultures of substance use combined.

Early on mornings like this — when rain is falling upon the roof, and the street is gray, and damp cold pervades the air — the glowing screen is a warm and inviting refuge. It does not demand but waits, offering its aura and enclosing hum. Alive and breathing with the sound of its hidden workings, promising and almost delivering wonder, the machine is an opiate as well as a stimulant. Indeed it conveys the appeal of all the stimulants stacked together and interchangeable at the flick of the wrist: hallucinogenic reverie, alcoholic nostalgia, distance and peace to match the most rarefied bud. All our proclivities, our hidden dreams and fantasies, the knotted spine of our desires: it’s all there, splayed and displayed, laid out and waiting. Some of us are too old for this: we don’t get the appeal, the machine seems too slick and needlessly complex, the ephemeral world it offers feels cold and impersonal. We do not perceive the machine to be an extension of our own consciousness. But for the young, for those growing up immersed in the online stream, theirs is a consciousness nurtured by, and to some extent dependent upon, the technology of self-creation. The older among us are dismissive of this reality, a schism is growing between the ages, the binary web multiplies.

I read the online news, check my email, and wonder once again about the persistent ingress of this technology into my life. I think about my ever-increasing screen time, I worry about repetitive strain injuries, I ruminate on the line between healthy geekiness and Internet addiction. And I recognize that the computer has become indispensable. It is both a portal and a vast library — infinite, almost. I think of Jorge Luis Borges and his story about an endless library, a library that comprises an entire universe and is also a prison. I no longer visit the library at the university — why bother, when I can access everything I need from home — and my six hundred dollars in overdue fines remains unpaid. But I do miss the smell of slowly-moldering books, and the enforced quiet of the stacks, and the margin notes made by careless readers that I used to find in old books. Notices were posted against defacing books in this manner, yet sometimes such errant scribbles were an un-looked-for confirmation that someone — anyone — had been here before me, searching, as was I, for illumination within the books of lost ages.

The Web does not offer such accidental and imaginal histories. Its architecture is shifting and ephemeral. Nothing stays for too long, nothing remains the same. The Web evolves, which is part of its appeal. It’s always fresh, edging toward the new and the innovative. For someone like me — habitually looking forward, hungry for knowledge and change — the online world is like crack cocaine. My curiosity is nurtured there, and satisfied, and amplified again, so that I become ever more curious. I wander, and join virtual communities — of programmers and Linux freaks and conspiracy theorists — and feel that I am learning, and growing, and preserving a youthful spirit. Yet this morning, as on many mornings, I look toward the trees and the wet lawn and I trace the contour of the creek and I wonder about my sacrifices: less time spent in nature, fewer new books for our home library, decreasing effort to spend time in the shop on woodworking projects. In these moments I become certain that I am indeed an addict.

Next Tuesday I will be presenting at the Jack Hirose conference on youth and addictions. I will be offering three sessions, as follows:

Using Creative and Expressive Interventions with Adolescents
The traditional modes of counselling and therapy (sitting in chairs, talking) do not always work well for adolescents, who require more active styles of engagement such as physical activities, games for teaching and mentoring, sports, and creative practices. This is especially true for substance users, who are caught in patterns of the nervous system that cannot be addressed by talking and insight alone. This session offers participants a smorgasbord of practices and approaches that involve creativity, play, and physical expression. The emphasis is on practical tools that can be immediately applied.

Creative Mentoring for Adolescents
Healthy development in adolescence hinges upon the availability of dependable adult mentors. In today’s world, such mentors are difficult to find, and often this role falls to the social service provider. Such a role can be profoundly transformative for adolescents. Yet mentoring requires immense sensitivity and interpersonal skill. This session offers participants a set of basic mentoring skills that can be applied in the context of creative interaction (sports, the arts, teams, community involvement, etc.). The emphasis of the session is on practical tools that arise from a philosophical orientation to the important work of youth mentoring.

Designing Creative Activities for Users of Specific Substnaces
Creative and physically expressive activities can be designed to address the healing needs of adolescents who use specific substances. This session offers participants tools for designing and facilitating creative activities tailored to users of four classes of substances: hallucinogens, opiates, stimulants, and alcohol. The emphasis is on practical strategies that can be immediately applied.

I have put together a combined resource package for these sessions (attached as pdf to this post, and available by clicking on “attachment” at the top of this post). As usual, feel free to download, copy, and share.

Alcohol offers the drinker a reverie, a nostalgia for the way things once were, or are imagined to have been. Alcohol halts the inner life, or guides it to splendors of the past, or comforts the lost self in the present. Whereas the stimulant user always gazes forward, hungry, the alcoholic seeks to look back. The here and now is unacceptable, it rankles, and the alcoholic possesses no solution for the future. Save one: to continue the fight, to reclaim lost dignity or power or pride, to sweep the old wounds away with a single, defiant gesture of omnipotence. For this is the underlying promise of alcohol, its unspoken secret: that we can remake the world.

Sometimes, as I’ve been explaining ideas from the new addictions book to students and colleagues (see link at right for more info about the book), I have been challenged on my theory that childhood experiences such as trauma and neglect…

I had dinner last night with some of my colleagues in the Vancouver Community College counselling programs. One of the things we talked about was the upcoming introduction of buprenorphine (info from Wired magazine) to the Canadian addictions treatment regimen….