Individual Excellence: Part 1b: People

20 January 2024

What follows is a continuation of last week’s entry, repeating only last week’s final paragraph, immediately below.

Despite the bleakness of Larkin’s conclusion (from his poem), there is wisdom in the general idea that we are affected by the biases of our parents and grandparents, or other influential people in our lives.  This Be The Verse is a ratification of the basic premise unearthed by Bowlby, Ainsworth et al., underlying attachment theory.

About 2,500 years before Bowlby, Ainsworth and others, Aristotle laid down an idea about the formation of good human beings.  His premise was that if a young person was not well habituated, that young person was not suitable for the highest reaches of society.  I recall a Woke professor, in my undergraduate degree, stating that she rejected Aristotle’s thought due to this perceived aristocratic elitism.  And yet, here we are, in light of attachment, seeing that Aristotle was not so far off base.  Let’s look at that in some detail.

What has convinced me that Aristotle got it right is that some part of the purpose of psychotherapy is the re-habituation of misdirected souls.  The souls I most often work with are those of young men who have grown up mostly in the 21^st century, or people of all ages who use psychoactive drugs as a means of avoidance*.  Avoidance might be seen as useful as it fosters denial and attentional procrastination as means of coping—often with trauma, pain, shame or some sad combination of these factors.

Those damaged souls, who I have come to love, come from highly dysfunctional families (and from all socio-economic strata).  Many were misunderstood in their schools and friend groups.  Most didn’t make it into or through universities or colleges.  Most have difficulty relating to groups or romantic partners, but most punishing is their relationships with self. All of those groupings involve relating—being with or being part of.  This is a large part of Aristotle’s habituation because if we can’t be at peace with self, how can we be expected to be at peace with others?  We can’t, is the obvious answer. 

The reason we can’t be at peace with self is that we attached anxiously or avoidantly or in some variant of those conditions.  To simplify, to be anxiously attached is to be insecure and needy, always feeling you’re not enough and that you are not and will not be well cared for.  In turn, such people don’t tend to care well for themselves.  To be avoidantly attached is to be fearful enough of others to shun connection.  Intimate connection is shunned because the avoidantly attached person believes connection = pain and/or injury.  As you may already know, through the work of Maté and others, Johann Hari’s (2015) now famous (at least in the addiction community) dictum emerged: The opposite of addiction is not sobriety; the opposite of addiction is connection.  Per Aristotle, Bowlby, Ainsworth and others, that re-connection involves re-habituation.  Please bear Hari’s dictum in mind as we continue to fathom the nature of needing people as a condition of eudaimonia*. 

Perhaps the most poetic description of this requirement came from Dr. Anthony Clare, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, when asked by the author, Gyles Brandreth (2021, p 432-3), to define happiness.  “Next, be a leaf on a tree.  You have to be both an individual—you have to have a sense that you are unique and you matter—and at the same time you need to be connected to a bigger organism, a family, a community.” (Dr. Clare’s full explanation will appears in later passages.)  We started this part of the book with the premise that one component of eudaimonia is people. 

Now imagine a person who has sold their body, cheated their family, cheated their friends, and cheated self to obtain the money for their drug of choice (DoC).  What connection does that person have with family, community, or self?  Per Clare’s metaphor, they have denuded and poisoned that tree by abusing the nearest leaves too often. 

In my training as a psychotherapist, I attended maybe a couple of hundred supervisory sessions with more senior psychologists, psychotherapists, professors, psychiatric nurses etc.  One of the things I was told was that hopes and strengths are not effective in treating addiction.  This is a true statement, but its truth is convoluted and was something I discovered by facilitating recovery groups.

The reason hopes and strengths don’t initially work, with people suffering addictive behaviours, is that newbies are not able to believe in self.  Having torched themselves, and most of the leaves on their trees, for the first years of sobriety/recovery most people with an addictive history are unable to accept a compliment.  And while many well-functioning adults are happy to waive praise, the case of addiction is more serious.  The former is well-intentioned modesty, the latter is a (hopefully temporary) inability to believe in the goodness of self. 

As I understand it, that is where the necessity of connection becomes real.  Those souls, who find themselves in sobriety, after years, or decades of addictive behaviours, need others to see what it is to be reintegrated into society.  That need is the organic beginning of re-habituation.  This is perhaps the primary reason 12-step programs are so effective: you are conditionally accepted as a qualified and loved member, so long as you stay clean.  And it is that unfortunate condition that proves the undoing of many a potentially recovered human soul.

Much of what I may know about addiction has come from facilitating two groups for Self Management and Recovery Training aka SMART Recovery.  In SMART Recovery, we accept people into meetings whether they are seeking harm reduction or a life of recovery.  We don’t count sober days and we don’t punish lapses or relapses which are both expected behaviours within the stages of change cf. Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, (1992).  What we hope to do is add a few more leaves to the fledgling tree that each newcomer is seeking to grow.  But, most importantly, every disciplined non-conformist (cf. Dr. King’s quote, title page) needs to learn, test, and practice the habits necessary to keep her unique leaf exposed to sun, wind, and water—because that’s how we live eudaimonic lives.

To be continued next week.

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 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.

Definitions:

Attachment “n. the emotional bond between a human infant or a young nonhuman animal and its parent figure or caregiver; it is developed as a step in establishing a feeling of security and demonstrated by calmness while in the parent’s or caregiver’s presence. Attachment also denotes the tendency to form such bonds with certain other individuals in infancy as well as the tendency in adulthood to seek emotionally supportive social relationships” (APA, 2024).

Avoidance n. the practice or an instance of keeping away from particular situations, environments, individuals, or things because of either (a) the anticipated negative consequence of such an encounter or (b) anxious or painful feelings associated with them. Psychology brings several theoretical perspectives to the study of avoidance: its use as a means of coping; its use as a response to fear or shame; its existence as a personality style or predisposition; and its existence as a component in anxiety disorders (American Psychological Association, 2024).

Eudaimonia From the Greek, eu, well, and daimon, spirit.  Happiness is often used as the nearest English language equivalent of this word.  Well-spirited seems much fuller, deeper, and more satisfying so that phrase or this word will be used throughout. 

References

Brandreth, G. (2021). Philip: The Final Portrait. Coronet.

Hari, J. (2015, July 9). Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9DcIMGxMs

Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., & Norcross, J. C. (1992). In search of how people change. Applications to addictive behaviors. The American psychologist, 47(9), 1102–1114. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.47.9.1102