Outgrowing Addiction by Stanton Peele

Author:Stanton Peele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Upper Access, Inc.
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Our World Demands Something Better

The people described in this book—children and adults and in-between—have succeeded in overcoming a variety of addictions and other issues in sustaining and sustainable ways. They have found the strength to overcome problems because they believed in themselves, their abilities, and their own value. Along with this existential confidence, which they were sometimes hard-pressed to maintain, they expressed personal values and found—and were helped by others to find—options and opportunities in life.

The societal changes that occurred in the 1960s are still a subject of debate. Did they liberate us, or start us on the road to waves of drug addiction, culminating in our latest opioid-death epidemic? The ‘60s began the process of stripping away the blinders that prohibited nearly everyone in mainstream society from using the vast array of available chemical experiences, a process today embodied by the legalization of marijuana. This process of new ways of relating to drugs (such as psychedelics) will continue to evolve in as-yet-unknown directions.

Already, there is now no way to avoid exposure to drugs, many of which we introduce to children as pharmaceuticals at increasingly early ages. What are children who take these drugs to make of their own experiences, their own lives?

It’s the irony of the modern era: We have the freedom to believe what we want, to be who we want to be, to consume substances. Yet many of us are driven by fear to find a hiding place—Trumpism, addictive use of drugs or alcohol or some other addictive substance or involvement, an artificial identity as an addict. A number of best-sellers with apocalyptic titles such as Suicide of the West and Civilized to Death posit that, as the world and its population have become more content materially, we are no happier, and seemingly less so, than those who lived in the centuries before, when subsistence living was the norm. This thesis is supported by deepening addiction, depression, and suicide rates. What explains this?

Overarching everything in America is the loss of intimacy and community, a lack of connection to the world around us, and often a loss of connection to our own selves. This disconnect to our own true selves is a central part of seeing ourselves and our children as diseased beings.

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