Before We Change

19 January 2022

Most readers of this blog are people recovering from addiction or people related to others recovering from addiction.  To do what I do, and to write what I write, I am clearly invested in the proposition that recovery is possible.  But what are the assumptions validating that position?  If recovery were not possible, what would be the point of learning and disseminating philosophy, science, and psychology?  Without choices, and routes to full health, all research and argument would be moot.  It has long been my belief that knowledge of and engagement with philosophy, science, and psychology is an eminently practical exercise with applications that arise almost each minute of a self-aware person’s day.

That statement, in itself, is worth dissection. Why is self-awareness required and why are self-aware people taking stock so often?  The answer is that we humans spend our lives in pursuit of goals.  To pursue goals well means retaining focus.  To retain focus requires self-awareness. In essence, life is a series of goal-directed moments.  The better focused, integrated, and acted-upon those moments, the more successful the life.  There’s a bold premise!

What I am leading to is the set of assumptions beneath the type of therapy I hope to deliver.  If any of what’s written above is valid, people must have the ability to make choices, to act on choices, and to believe that those choices are necessary and ultimately effective.  This is agency, the ability to act (or not) in the interest of our own actualization.  If you do not believe you can choose, act, and be effective in those acts, you are probably standing still.  As I pointed out in an earlier blog (Resilience #5, 3 June 2020), standing still is an illusion.  Because life is constant change, standing still is being left behind.  Life, by its fundamental nature, requires movement and, as that blog stated, all human movement has direction and momentum—both of which can be chosen or fallen into by default.  That’s precondition number one of effective therapy: investment as an agent in one’s own actualization.

The second precondition (there are only three!) is implied above: direction and momentum.  I think of this force as an ends-based pull toward goodness.  Regular readers will have seen the word eudaimonia used in this blog before.  I strongly prefer it to the purported English equivalent: happiness.  Eudaimonia comes from two Greek roots: eu for well and daimon for spirit; daimonia is the state of being spirited or inhabited by spirit.  In its original understanding, when the Erechtheion (pictured above) was still rocking, I believe the word was meant more literally; to be eudaimonic was to be inhabited by a good spirit.  With the Erechtheion now a partially restored ruin, eudamonia is understood as well-spiritedness in the sense that the person possessing this quality approaches her days with intelligent good will toward self, life, and others.  If you do not accept yourself as having the capacity for well-spiritedness, you may be beyond the reach of agentially appropriate (i.e., voluntarily subscribed to) therapies.

The final precondition of change is an understanding and belief in the engines of change itself.  I have been in philosophy classes and recovery meetings with people who profess themselves determinists.  (“Determinism, the view that the state of the world at any instant determines a unique future, and that knowledge of all the positions of things and the prevailing natural forces would permit an intelligence to predict the future state of the world with absolute precision” Audi, 1998, p. 197). The opposite of a determinist is probably (technically) a volitionist; one who believes in the effective agential power of freely chosen human actions.  I am a proponent of volitionism or, as it is more commonly called, free will. 

More importantly, I believe anyone who wishes to maximize the capacity for change, in his own life, is better off as a volitionist.  Evidence in support of this premise is neuroplasticity, one manifestation of our third condition.  (Neuroplasticity is the brain and nervous system’s ability to adapt & grow anew.)

The architecture of the brain...and the statistics of the environment, [are] not fixed.  Rather, brain-connectivity is subject to a broad spectrum of input-, experience-, and activity-dependent processes which shape and structure its patterning and strengths...These changes, in turn, result in altered interactions with the environment, exerting causal influences on what is experienced and sensed in the future (Spoons, 2007, p. 179 in Clark, 2016, p. 280).

Clark (2016) and a growing number of other scientists, philosophers, neuropsychologists, and medics are publishing research in favour of embodied intelligence, situated not just north of the shoulders but distributed throughout the body.  Point being, if that architecture of plasticity prevails, it is physical evidence in favour of the proposition that the self-directed life is in complete harmony with our own fundamental nature.  In conclusion, before we change, we need the capacity for change which is furthered through agency directed at actualization in a well-spirited being capable of a lifetime of neuroplastic evolution. 

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.

References

Audi, R. (Ed.) (1998). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.  Oxford University Press.

Fletcher, B., Sir, Musgrove, J., Editor, A History of Architecture, Nineteenth Edition, Butterworth Group, Toronto, 1987.