By rosslaird on July 22, 2004 - 11:56am
As I've been working on the new book, wandering around the Downtown Eastside, talking with counsellors and outreach workers and addicts, I've been making little notes about approaches to recovery and healing: for parents, siblings, spouses. Here are a few:
The various tricks, systems and strategies all distil down to one thing: focus on yourself. You cannot change the habits or behavior of anyone else. If you are a professional counselor or social service worker, focus on empathy and clarity. Understand that the various recovery strategies for substance use (motivational interviewing, medications, cognitive behavioral treatment) are simply means of making contact, nothing more.
If you are the parent of an adult addict, work on your own emotional management your anger, your disbelief, your fear. Stop lecturing your child about their addiction. Offer them resources -- books, counseling fees, a safe place to get away from the clamor and grit of the addiction lifestyle -- but offer these as investments, not conditions. Offer them freely, as open-ended gifts, without the requirement that your child redeem such gifts by discontinuing substance use. If your child is actively using, you will lose any negotiation involving abstinence. Accept this.
Understand that the choices your child is making are beyond their conscious ability to manage. Addiction hijacks the personality (though not the spirit). Express your love, ask how you can help, and acknowledge that you cannot make your child stop using. If you try hard enough to make them stop, you will lose them (though teenagers are a special case, and require special care; the book devotes a chapter to them). As a parent, your task has always been to create and sustain the safe harbor. Keep doing this, and wait for the time that you may be needed.
By rosslaird on June 23, 2004 - 4:32pm
For those addicts genuinely seeking a resolution to their struggle, I’ll tell you the great secret up front: find something else to be addicted to, something healthier. That’s all. Addiction is not a light switch, on or off; it’s a way of being in the world, a part of who you are, a kind of hunger that expresses itself in many ways. What you’ve found are all the ways in which this trait sidelines your life. But that’s just its shadow. Find the other side of it. Successfully recovered addicts find new obsessions: spirituality or exercise or meditation or kayaking or whatever. Find something to love that gives you the same hit as the juice. Eventually it will give you a better hit. You’ll find it, if only you give yourself the chance.
That’s not all, of course.
By rosslaird on June 22, 2004 - 9:28am
I stand in the great hall of the Museum of Anthropology, head bent back, gazing up forty feet to where precise images have been carved into cedar totem poles by craftsmen whose art has been almost entirely erased by time. This museum possesses one of the finest collections of carved wood artifacts in the world, and I feel quite at home here. Near the bottom of a nearby pole, a smooth shouldered wolf rests in the shadow of a killer whale. The eye of the whale is a shadowed well. This wood, these bones, trace the nature and purpose of a vast awareness, a living spirit in the grain, each knot and every growth ring a secret hieroglyph worked carefully into many layers of meaning. The echo of leaves is here, the resonance of damp fields half submerged in twilight, of dark soil and tales of night. And long, interwoven strands of time knitted together by wood and human hands. The wood has been coaxed into shape – whittled, chiseled, sculpted with broad, incising strokes – by tools of utmost antiquity, by weapons, by stones, by meteors, by fragments of ships: countless forms oiled by luminous skin.
Although the focus of the collections is northwestern – hundreds of examples – I also find works from Indonesia and Greenland and China, specimens of all kinds and of diverse ages: an eagle with a five-foot, intricately carved beak, a tenebrous skull shape, moons and ravens and wild spirits of the forest.
By rosslaird on June 22, 2004 - 9:01am
Joseph Campbell once speculated about the emergence of new mythologies in our age. He believed that the classic fables, dependent as they were upon images and stages not yet influenced by individual psychology, would be augmented by the evolving myths of individuation. In Creative Mythology, Campbell says:
By rosslaird on June 18, 2004 - 11:09am
Next time you’re walking in the downtown area — Commercial Drive, the West End, Howe Street — look for castaway slips of paper, cardboard. or stickers that say "repent sinner" on them. No one knows who produces these, but some strange soul devotes countless hours to making thousands of individualized slips with identical messages. I have heard that as many as a hundred may appear along a single block. And I have heard, but cannot confirm, that sometimes the message is scrawled in graffiti on sidewalks and buildings. Who does this?
I imagine a man, late fifties, living alone in a small walkup apartment. He doesn’t sleep well, has few acquaintances, and has spent some time in hospitals. At night, when the city sleeps (as someone once said), he goes to work: spending the time in the devotions of his faith, meditating, repeating, inscribing.
Then he goes out, early, around 5am. Before the street cleaners start up on Robson. Sometimes he sees the Sun trucks delivering their bundles, and once he saw a man in Oppenheimer park with a knife in his throat. He sees many more things, but he tells no one about them. Instead, he walks.
And he delivers his tiny messages, not knowing how people will respond to them. Perhaps he doesn't care about this. He walks, and scatters, and is gone again.
By rosslaird on June 17, 2004 - 9:46am
In Vancouver, smoking a joint is part of everyday life for almost everybody who owns a mountain bike and an iPod. But most folks who use marijuana don’t know the whole story about its risks and effects. At the addictions clinics on the Downtown Eastside where I supervise counsellors, we frequently see habitual pot smokers who struggle with anger and anxiety when they reduce their use. It seems that marijuana is good at managing emotions; but, like most substances, not good at teaching emotional management. Once you quit, you’re on your own emotionally, and this can be overwhelming.
It has been a hard sell to convince habitual users to tone it down (or to quit). But recently a slew of studies has yielded some new and disturbing results.
By rosslaird on June 16, 2004 - 1:14am
I'm a writer -- and if you've seen "Wonder Boys," the finest film about writing in a long while, you know the mantra: A Writer Writes.
So here I am. And elsewhere, too (on the weblog at my own site). I'm writing for Urban Vancouver because this town is my home, like the Springsteen song says. This is where, more than a hundred years ago, my grandparents came to live in a small house on Davie street (across from what used to be Hy's Mansion) and rowed across to West Vancouver for camping trips.
I've lived here all my life, and I've come to know this city. I've been inside the secret World War II gun turrets on the UBC grounds (designed to halt the feared Japanese invasion). I know where the walled-up rail tunnel is near GM Place, and why there's another tunnel that runs all the way from the main post office building to the waterfront.
I know the best place to spot aliens (at a certain location on Granville Street), and I know exactly where the secret, unmarked (not even an address) cheque-clearing building is on Main Street. Millions of cash dollars pass through there every day.
I know there's a huge aquifer beneath VanDusen Gardens, and I know that the architect who built the Sun Tower fell to his death down the spiral staircase he designed. I know lots of things about this city. And I worked at Expo 86. No greater initiation into the life of this city could ever be had.
