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The Collective Road through Addiction

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Addiction doesn’t live in the substances one consumes. It doesn’t live in the purchasing of too many items or the endless hours striving to be adequate by starving your body or working too hard.

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To find where addiction lives you have to mine the territory of the damned. Addiction lives in self loathing and shame. It lives in the distorted messages about fundamentally what and who we are. It lives in the ways we give ourselves away seeking something we believe will be better, shinier...more. It lives in the deep sickness of a society wrestling with a past it’s barely faced, thinking that if it just shoves its misdeeds under their carpet and buys a new car, no one will be the wiser. It lives in the cumulative shame of accepting what isn’t enough, taking the crumbs and calling it satisfactory.

 

Addiction isn’t a thing, it’s a way of living, surviving, it’s an ethos that has become a societal doctrine making it barely noticeable as itself. It’s easier to distance oneself from “it'' if we make “it” about certain behaviors, brain chemistry or family history. The fallacy here is that keeps us from facing collectively what we all hold pieces of. Instead, there could be a welcoming, a coming home to all the ways we have been coping with disconnection through escape. A softening into the lineage of othering for self preservation can allow the wound of separation to begin to heal so we don’t have to feel so alone in ourselves. This is the collective road through addiction.

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Individuals and institutions must work symbiotically to overcome this systemic and generational experience of the human condition. When we address this at both levels, we begin to create a conversation that is long overdue...historically and contemporary. 

 

The Architecture of Dependency/Addiction

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The difficulties with the mental health care system echo the challenges we are facing globally. These systems of training, organizing and delivering care were also constructed within old frameworks of understanding.

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While individual practitioners and pockets of understanding have grown particularly around areas of the nervous system, the brain and trauma, our systems of care and the foundations that they are built on remain far behind. Most are messy and overwhelmed, driven by the funding of insurance agreements, aimed at containing or managing symptom expressions and creating tremendous practitioner burnout. Almost all clients seeking care cycle through multiple services, while practitioners become further convinced of their brokenness because they can’t seem to be met by the care they are seeking out. Those that are sensitive, gifted, or neurodivergent fare even worse. They are often mislabeled and misdiagnosed with personality disorders, bipolar disorder or ADHD. Their understanding and relationship to the world can be devalued, shamed and sent underground by systems that aren’t trained to recognize the intelligence at work in what appears to be what we label as disorder.

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In the same way that all of our systems have been distorted by the history of patriarchy, capitalism and colonization so has our mental health system.

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At the Edge of Worlds

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Reimagining or reinventing something is hard work, but if we want to come through on the other side with something different, it requires us to move through a process of dissolving. Then carefully discerning what it is that we take forward and how it wants to reform in a different way. It requires a good deal of time in a liminal creative muddy and stuck space. If we rush too fast or reach for this “new thing'' we will often just get the same thing we left but in a different skin.

 

Reimagining takes trust and willingness to not know. In this world of replacing, reimagining begs for the long game to alchemize for more permanence of change rather than riding the same ride over again. Reimagining invites us to take what was, see the places we are entangled, let them go and see what appears when they drop. You must throw away all of the stories and ideas you have of what’s true because all of them were built, cultivated and affirmed within the old structure. You have to be willing to investigate deeply; looking for trails of truth amidst the ruins. This is the deepest and most potent portal to discovering our own truth and becoming in alignment with deeper truths.

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What is the Possibility Program?

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The possibility program creates opportunities where there seem to be none. It sees the spaces and corners where the layers of reality have formed, seeming solid and injects life into those spaces to expand the structures and introduce different arrangements/languages/movements while holding a field for possible rearrangement. It is the movement of structural solidity into expanded fluidity for the opportunity of birthing new configuration.

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The first initiative of the Possibility Program is the health care system.  A solution in this arena must be multimodal, innovative, financially sound, contain deep efficacy, attend to all areas of functioning and be embedded within existing community structures making true multidisciplinary care available to all.  This the future of health care. A model that operates in honesty and is of benefit for all involved including care providers.  One that understands transformative process and aims at nothing less that liberation and vibrancy.  One that understands the challenges of our current landscape of interconnection, globalization, quickly dying meta systems and outdated views.  It must aim change at four target areas: clinical, educational, legislative/payor systems and community.  Anything less will cripple a new initive under the weight of the other not attended to . Solutions abound when possibility and creativity are on the table. This is true personally and collectively and at this time the only option for the challenges we are facing.

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"All this work the past twenty years has shown me structures, different ones, what they hold, where they are birthed from, the limits and freedoms they create. The past seven years I’ve been learning to play with structures in spaces where things aren’t fixed or solid. Now I’m getting information on how to refine them through a process of greater alignment to service and that then births structure but in a more organic co-creative way. The possibility program utilizes all of this acquired knowledge to introduce opportunities/possibilities in places where it seems endless and dire." -Bree