12 August 2023
We’ve been exploring the notion of craftsmanship applied to human lives, particularly the steps involved in moving from a life of addiction to a balanced life in recovery. Two weeks ago, the general idea was explored. Last week focused on the first point of SMART Recovery’s four-point program, building and maintaining motivation. Our takeaways were, first, understand the problem, and second, know and live your prioritized values to stay motivated. Today, the focus is on the urges that too often lead us astray.
For better or worse, the writing of this blog coincides with an exploration of depth psychology brought on by my work as a therapist, the last paper of my M. Ed., and a Netflix/reading experience I can’t shake. The Netflix experience was two viewings of Jonah Hill’s Stutz, about Hill’s therapist and the approach he takes. The final M. Ed. paper was a self-selected summary of constituents of the human soul starting with Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE) and ending with Jonathan Haidt et al, 2023. Depth psychology concerns the subconscious and the preconscious, those parts of our own selves about which we remain (mostly) unaware. So here’s where all of that meets urges.
A big part of fighting urges, in recovery from addiction, concerns triggers. A trigger can be any stimulus that preconditions a person to expect a known response. People, places, phone numbers, times of day are all triggers for different people I’ve worked with. SMART Recovery, based on empirically derived principles from cognitive behavioural therapy, suggests we catalogue our urges and the details around them. The more diligent and self-disciplined of SMART participants fill out the list of factors surrounding each trigger and apply these to their lives by literally steering away from those triggers. Patient: It hurts when I scratch like this. Doctor: So don’t scratch like that.
And the doctor’s advice holds until you have to scratch like that because it’s the only way to relieve the pain. But what if that pain isn’t physiologically created i.e., it’s not from dry skin, a pulled tendon, a fracture…it’s from a self-destructive impulse you don’t recognize causing you to hurt yourself through relapse?
About two-thousand years after Heraclitus wrote about the unity of opposites, a German philosopher-psychologist, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841, pictured with this blog) affirmed Heraclitus’ notion stating that many impulses are caused by interactions between internal faculties. Skip forward to Freud who stated, revoked, and re-stated that humans have within them a death instinct (Thanatos) and a life instinct (Eros). Jung basically agreed and many depth psychologists today affirm the same thing. Which is why Stutz amazed me. After our son told me I was going to love this guy, I watched the Netflix show. Then I was given Stutz and Michels’ (2017) book last Christmas. I’ve gone through that book carefully because they don’t cite theoretical roots. It took your dear scribe a bit of time to clue in, but I got there. What Stutz & Michels refer to as Part X is what Freud referred to as the death instinct. What Stutz & Michels refer to as the Life Force is the life instinct. Just to ensure you’re paying full attention, let’s say a better way to describe these is as entropy and order.
Entropy fascinates me because it can also be seen as a giver of life which may be why it has remained so intoxicating to so many for so long. Here are some of the derivations of the word: n. 1. A measure of the capacity of a system to undergo spontaneous change…2. A measure of the randomness, disorder, or chaos in a system…
Order is the opposite of entropy. n. 1. A system of logical or comprehensible arrangement among the separate elements of a group. 2. a. A condition of methodical or prescribed arrangement among component parts, such that proper functioning or appearance is achieved (both words, Morris, 1975 pp. 437, 924, respectively). Hopefully, Figure 1, below, makes the comparisons simpler.
| Freud | Stutz & Michels | Preferred Terms | SMART Recovery |
| Death instinct - Thanatos | Part X | Entropy | Submitting to urges |
| Life instinct - Eros | Life Force | Order | Living one’s values |
Figure 1: Different takes on the drive toward life and death.
Now think about SMART Recovery’s Hierarchy of Values. What is it if not a methodical or prescribed arrangement among component parts, such that proper functioning or appearance is achieved? Understanding values, knowing and acting on priorities, is evidence of order. Returning to a way of life that requires theft, lying, sex work, poverty, and years of solitary self-destruction and pain, is disorder or entropy. Yet both impulses exist inside any human being simultaneously.
Above, I claimed that entropy is also life-giving. Think of the Dionysian rituals of intoxication, wild dancing, followed by orgiastic pairings. Think of the forest fires whose ashes eventually facilitate new growth. It is in these ways that new life eventually arises because a new order prevails. However, the period (or duration) of that natural cycle can be nine months (Dionysian) or decades (burnt forests). Within a human life, the addictive cycle can be as short as less than a year to multiple decades of largely fallow time-killing.
Returning to Stutz and Michels (2017), that fallow time can be made more productive by increasing order. In their terms, every time we resist Part X (entropy, urges) our life force (order, health) becomes stronger. Whichever force you feed the most becomes the dominant force in your life. In short, when we give in to urges, over and over, the urges actually take over.
Stated another way, last week, at the end of the preceding blog, I claimed that the degree of success—at living a life of well-spirited values—is in your hands. Although the route through urges has been long and arduous, the takeaway is identical: the more you do the next right thing, the more engrained that habit becomes or, as Will Durant wrote upon reading Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
Kim, Alan, "Johann Friedrich Herbart", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/johann-herbart/>.
Patrick, G. T. W. (Tr.) (2013). The Fragments of Heraclitus. Digireads.com.
Stutz, P., & Michels, B. (2017). Coming alive: 4 tools to defeat your inner enemy, ignite creative expression, & unleash your soul’s potential. Random House Canada.
Comments