15 December 2021
Again, I return to salutogenesis, the origin of health:
Salutogenesis has one major premise and three ancillary premises. The major premise is that stress must violate your sense of coherence before it can cause harm. The three ancillary premises define one’s sense of coherence:
Last week the main message was that radical acceptance allows us to live meaningful lives. With acceptance and meaning comes manageability and comprehensibility, all of which foster Aaron Antonovsky’s sense of coherence i.e., my life makes sense to me.
In this blog, we will unpack the paragraph immediately above and, if space permits, compare this line of thinking to the narrative theory of Dan McAdams.
Why do I believe that radical acceptance of life—as it is—allows us to live meaningful lives? The first reason is that meaningfulness is personal—what means the world to you may be of little consequence to me. Given that meaning is personal, the recognition of meaning depends on our relationship with the world we inhabit. I am speaking of our personal realms, not the broader world.
For example, if a person is in so much pain that they use drugs or sex or gambling to cope with that pain, that person is not in a posture enabling her to recognize the values that give her life meaning. Instead, her self-posture is enmeshed in a web of self-protective deceit. When the stress is too much, she looks for casual sex, a casino, or a bottle of vodka to help her leave the stress behind. At first, she feels some pleasure while experiencing her addictive behaviour but afterward comes shame, sadness, and a low that is lower than what she felt before she acted out addictively. This is the addictive cycle; she now needs the addictive behaviour to combat the low, never mind finding a better high.
In such a space, one is not in pursuit of meaning. Nor is life manageable, comprehensible, or coherent by rational standards. So let us fast forward this person’s life to a point at which addictive behaviours are part of her past, not her present or future.
In this space, she is scrubbed raw. Everything hurts because she is practiced at dulling her thoughts and feelings with addictive behaviour. Yet she no longer wants to do that. And... some good things begin happening. She attends meetings which allow her to feel she is not alone in her own private hell. Others are experiencing some of the same things. And she feels a connection with those others. That connection is meaningful.
After attending a meeting each day for 100 days, she feels she is gaining a bit more confidence in her ability to navigate her own life. So she reaches out, to people in the meetings she attends, and eventually finds a part-time job paying minimum wage. She’s stocking shelves in a building supply chain, but she shows up on time, works steadily, and doesn’t cause any fuss. Her manager and coworkers find her quiet and hard to read but they like her dependability.
It is a job below the socio-economic status of the family into which she was born, and this bothers her sometimes. But the therapist she has been seeing asks her what that job is doing for her. She answers that it gives her a reason to get up, more income than she’s had in ten years, and a bit of self-respect because she’s valued in the stores and does her work well.
We could spin this story further, but I hope the point is emerging. If you are entering or occupying a well-spirited space of your own, gratitude alone highlights meaning. Stocking shelves can be an enormously meaningful job for the right person at the right time in his life. What other people say can hurt, but only if we fail to combat that hurt with well-reasoned arguments: 1. Stocking shelves allows me to pay some of my costs. 2. Stocking shelves is something I can do well. 3. I feel better about myself and my life when I do something well.
Those reasons for continuing, toward a fully occupied self, address the three points of salutogenesis: a more comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful life. Had our shelf-stocking, meeting-attending recoveree not fully accepted the reality of her situation, she might still be living the agony of addiction. Instead, she took steps toward constructing a coherent life.
Next week, per the promise above, we can discuss how I believe the exemplified recovery fits into Dan McAdams’ theory of narrative understanding.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
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