For those of you who know my work, you know that for me and the MyDiscover Model and its Select Emotional Alternatives Cognitive Application that I have nurtured through my research in clinical practice, the platform is: Those who lack perspectives of substance abuse substances for the experience of substance.  What you do is compensatory to that end, desire, goal.  The drive behind this compensatory nature is the human condition.  The human condition is a wanting condition never satisfied.  Wanting of what, wanting of competence and independence.  No one seeks the alternative: incompetence and dependence.

As I learn, discover, I will share on this platform.  My hope is to embrace this situation as an opportunity to maximize that which Carl Rogers (1969) purports as a natural propensity, and that is to learn.

During this Spring Semester (2012) I will be taking three courses:

1.    Family Therapy

2.    Cognitive-Behavioral Counseling

3.   Current trends in addiction

Three questions linger in my mind as I list the three courses.

First, I the medium of abuse the glue that holds families together or is it the antagonist to the family breaking apart?

Second, Are feelings the product of executive functioning or the outcrop to emotional capabilities?

Is addiction really a disease or the result of altering ones brain functioning?

Fixation is the act of labeling your personal self.  Labeling is self-limiting, and as experience has proven, debilitating.  No one is a finished product, at least until that point in time when laid horizontal a tag is put on your toe: deceased!  Then it doesn’t matter!  What does matter is how you frame your personal self in relationship to the world you live; that my friend is called life and life is action.

Recently, I was visiting a friend and during that visit he asked, “Do you mind if I have a beer.”  I looked at my friend and said, “Thank you for asking me but please don’t do that.”  Looking at me through eyes of ignorance I could see he was confused.  I then explained, “When you ask me if I mind if you have a beer, what you are really thinking is “I know you are an alcoholic and probably uncomfortable around alcohol.”

The fact of the matter is, I could care less that my friend drank.  It concerns me when people identify me with a behavior that I once involved myself well over two decades past.  I am no more at risk of choosing to drink alcohol — and at this point it would be a conscious choice — than I am at choosing to take a glass down from my cupboard, smash it with a hammer, take my right shoe off, and purposefully step on the shard of glass with my foot.  The result would be the same.

Indeed people are ignorant and I want to address that ignorance with two simple questions.  First: How do you experience your world?  Answer: You experience your world through your senses, for example your eyes, your eyes lookout at your social world.  You see what you like and what you don’t like, you see what is appealing to you and not appealing; you see what goes on around you.  This is how you experience your world, you experience through coventry, or wanting.  Wanting is directional.  When you want you desire comfort over the fear of discomfort.  Your actual wanting however comes through the second question: How do you know your world?  Answer: You know your world through your past experiences.  Experience teaches, and it is through the lessons learned that you regulate your wanting.

When you look out at your world and experience disappointment within, it is because you are not living the life you want as based upon fixating on the life you lived.  In effect, you are threatening yourself with your mind-set and in doing so you fear the failure of incompetence and dependence, as you desire the self-fulfillment, challenge, and purpose of competence and independence.  This interplay of wanting is what I refer to as “the” human condition.  Indeed the human condition is a wanting condition never satisfied, wanting what, wanting biopsychosocial competence and independence.  The human condition is at the core of all addictive behaviors.

The relationship between how you experience your world and how you know your world is motivational.  For example, what is the difference between age 19 and 29?  The difference is life experience.  Like written, experience teaches but only when you are open to the lesson.  I know a multitude of people who at the age of 29, experience their lives in time through the disappointments of age 19.  Why, because they fixate.  Their perspectives of “I am…., It is….., I will….,” equates to “I am not good enough, It is too difficult, and I will never be happy.”  This is a defeatous self-fulfilling prophecy; a prophecy dictated by anchoring one self to the past by fixating on regrets, disappointments, and failure.  What they then do is anchor themselves to the past by brining the past into the moment and project the lack of opportunity onto the future.  Some call this experience “stagnant water where nothing grows,” I call the experience, Sitting In The Shit.  You sit in your shit long enough and what happens is you become comfortable.  Imagine that, a life of sitting in shit as manifest through your mental masturbation of mentally beating up on yourself with I am…., It is…, I will…,; you connect the dots.  I guess once a failure always a failure! Who lives through that mind-set?  I know quite a few and they are all ignorant!

Everything is a matter of perspective

When your perspective is self-defeating and limiting, do not expect gain, for all you are doing is nurturing your own insecurity as a weakness.  You intimidate your self by your evaluative self.  In other words, your insecurity, which is the compilation of evaluative inferiority, inadequacy, and insignificance, is experienced as intimidation.  When alternatively, with the perspective of your insecurity as your source of personal and interpersonal strength, your insecurity is then self-enhancing, for then and only then are you open to the proactive opportunity to behavior change. I define behavior as a pattern of thought, emotion, and action.  You can experience psychosocial change and gain only through the opportunity of self-improvement.  The opportunity for self-improvement is the platform through which you can channel your negative addiction mind-set into a positive addiction mind-set.  Channeling your mind-set is mental health in action.

Now, they are not embarrassed about what was and what shows on their arms.  The two of them are veterans to the campaigns they fought in their heads, with their feelings, and in their thoughts of not worthy, not good enough.  They are veterans to being in the shit of drub abuse.

Now they listen, they listen to what I share as they take the time to connect.  The scars on their arms they have as not reminders, rather merits to what once was.  They were in the shit, they ate, smelled, and lived it.  But rather falling as a victim, they are doing with, embracing control over what they once did, they are learning to learn the opportunity of experience.  They have sat in their shit, and now they are cleaning themselves off.  I am proud of these two.  They are my heroes.

Read At the end of this story there is a PDF with the last statements of Tom Ball.

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I sit and listen as this young man passes on to me what he and she are doing together to get clean and sober.  He lists the meetings; outlines his and her sponsors, and talks of the future they hope to build and live together.  Without substance, he is like a spokesman of despair, outlining for me what they want me to hear and hoping I think. Little did we know that wanting a future would only be for four days.   This was a Friday night, and on Monday he died from acute intoxication.

Vows of abstinence are broken far more readily than the principles of learning that conditioned the behavior, the thoughts, feelings, and action of addiction.  Strange as I look back on my own life, reflect upon where I once was, and realize today my only concern is folding clothes after doing laundry.  Strange as I put my mind into this client’s struggle as he reached out and consumed his own death.  Not a 357 magnum or a rope, rather a substance that he chose.  Strange when I think back on several decades past when I was once there with the 357 magnum, and stranger knowing it was one thought that separated me from death.  If I could only monopolize that one thought and instill it in my clients.   There is nothing special about me, and yet I have done my very best to do with what I once did.

I want so much for MyDiscover to be my client’s discover and at times, it is frustrating.  Too many times, I have looked into my client’s eyes and stated, “If you continue to drink, you will die.”   I have no powers to predict the future, what I do have is the insight of living the dysfunction of addiction and the opportunity maximized through research, education, and training to learn all I could about the human condition and its behaviors of self-harm and abuse; substance abuse in compensation of that condition.  The human condition is a wanting condition of competence and independence, and in that course millions compensate through substances only to anchor themselves in the dysfunction of incompetence and dependence.  Faced with the human dilemma of endless conflict, the human element of rationale in want of the human condition manifests in self-defeating cyclical isolation and hurt; the want then becomes a need, the need then dictates the end.

Thirteen, seventeen, twenty one, thirty two, thirty seven, sixty seven, age means nothing, “If you continue to drink and drug you will die.”  MyDiscover is it takes only two seconds to validate a thought.  Two seconds separates the involved from death, incarceration, continued abuse – two lousy seconds!

In my office there is a clock that tics quite loudly.  My client’s ask me to remove it, but I refuse, and instead point out its uniqueness as a reminder.  It is a reminder that every click, every second is a second past that cannot be lived ever again.  Indeed, it does take two seconds to validate a thought.  In terms of relapse, that thought could be, “I am a loser,” which triggers, “It is too difficult,” which triggers, “I will never be happy.”  Of course these are touchy-feely thoughts and yet the real thoughts of isolation, emptiness, despair, and anger are private.  ”It is… is of deservedness, I am… is of centrality, and I will…. is of superiority;” they are all matters of perspective, and people choose their course in life from perspective.

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Of course the scenario I describe is insane.  After all, what logical, rational person would continue to throw glass down only to step on it again?  When it comes to addictive behavior, we are not talking about logic or rational, rather we are talking about the need, the irrational perspective  to compensate for that which a person cannot do for him or her self.

All addictive behavior is compensatory, it serves a purpose.  In co-occuring disorders, that purpose may very well be self-medication.  For those of you who find it difficult to understand this, I suggest you keep going to your favorite bookstore or group and continue to read your touchy feely self-help books, as you continue to substitute your medium of abuse because addiction, the mind-set thereof, is every bit a part of the human experience as fear and desire.  It is for this reason that in order to instigate behavioral (thoughts, feelings, and action) changes one must first gain perspective over surrendered power of control.

In part, addictive behavior is the coping with life’s drama as it rewards escape and avoidance.  Nonetheless there is no such thing as blind behavior. Indeed, all behavior is goal directed, and the goal, when in conflict, is to approach comfort and avoid discomfort.  With this said, conflict is the drive, it is the human dilemma, that one consistency we all face.

From birth, we were born into conflict.  From birth it was our wanting human condition that dictated survival.  As outlined previously, the human condition is a wanting condition of competence and independence.  When faced with the human dilemma of conflict, we all apply the human element which is rationale.  Rationale is not the same as good or bad, right or wrong.  Rationale is the composite of rational and irrational choice.  It is rational to want to maximize comfort, embrace personal competence and social independence.  Any behavior therefore that compliments such course is a pattern of functional thinking, feeling, and action.  The inverse which is irrational is of course antagonistic to the human condition and the outcome so to speak is incompetence and dependence; hmm, reads like addiction.

Look around, how many people do you see who act superficial?  Remember, your eyes are looking out and you are evaluating within through your expectations.  What of the face that introduced this article?  The act of pouting obviously is not born of challenging, fulfilling, purposeful thought and feelings.  Not at all, rather, the act of pouting serves the purpose to communicate the want or avoidance of attention.

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You know the drill.  You boarded your plane, everyone is in their seats, and the flight attendant stands in the isle and demonstrates a safety script.  ”In the case of emergency and the plane looses altitude, a mask will drop down….”

Every morning you wake it is an emergency and your first act is to dawn your mask.  We wear masks to protect our insecurities which are manifest of our comfort zones.  No one is perfectly secure, in fact those who think they are, are wearing a mask against him/herself.

They are in effect, their best worst enemy as they dawn the self perspective of fanciful fictional mysticism.  Perceptual fanciful fictional mysticism is the mind-set of “safe, secure, and protected” in a familiar world of aggregate insecurity:  inadequacy, inferiority, and insignificance.  If you think you are secure, safe,and protected in your world of regrets and disappointments please continue, for the hole you are digging  just gets deeper, and then and only then you may find out that whatever you have done up to now has not worked, so you need to do things differently.

After all the tears, self-pity, and self-criticism, your mask serves a purpose as all behavior is goal directed.  What other purpose could their be for getting down on yourself other than to keep you safe?  But are you truly safe?

Drunk: Alcohol is a mind and mood altering drug.  When a person drinks, the first element to the brain that is effected is the cortical regions.  These regions are responsible for impression management, frustration tolerance, and impulse control.  The more a person drinks, the deeper the brain is effected.  In terms of substance abuse, through these outer regions of the brain, the mind and mood alerting effects of alcohol produce the disinhibition effect.  Given the reported fact that Mark Kerrigan lived in his parent’s home basement, it is a safe bet that his impression management was filtered through self-denigration.  His alcohol abuse self-medicated his not good enough perspectives.  Involved here is also perspectives of entitlement which is notable in most instances of domestic and elderly abuse.

Perspectives of entitlement include, superiority, centrality, and deservedness.  These are sort of the filters through which Kerrigan viewed his personal self in relation to his social self, or the lack thereof.  Playing on his mind-set was the desensitization effect.  In other words, Kerrigan desensitized his perspectives of personal responsibility and accountability to claim his innate drive for competence and independence.  As a result of his interpersonal isolation and enforced desensitization, he continued to abuse alcohol.  It is just by fate that this is not a case of repeated DWI resulting in fatal car crash, for the same principles apply.

In his family setting he instigate power and control with the goal of manipulating his environment to fit his own distorted irrational needs.  I would suggest that Mark’s goal was to dis-inhibit his sense of personal competence and social independence through his alcohol abuse which fueled his perspectives of incompetence and dependence.  Validating his self-pity as enforced upon him under the wings of his sister Nancy, he strove to punish, intimidate, and ultimately eliminate his family system.

Not knowing what to do, I would think his family enabled him whereby his cycle of hostility and aggression as influence, not caused by his addiction mind-set.  Through the principles of reinforcement he surrendered control, overwhelmed himself and created a red-out whereby he lashed out at his father whom I would think he blamed for his perspectives of unworthiness.

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