Canada Drug Rehab

Geoff Thompson, Program Director for the Sunshine Coast Health Centre, talks about overcoming fear to pursue your dream job or life’s ambition. Famed mythologist Joseph Campbell is discussed in regards to his classic phrase, “Follow Your Bliss.”

By Cathy Patterson-Sterling, MA RCC
Director of Family Services
Sunshine Coast Health Center

PART 3 OF 4

What Is The Gift Of Adulthood?

As our children mature, it is natural for we as parents to transition from the role of authority to one that more closely resembles being a trusted friend. It is a time where parents allow their children to grow into adults. As our children grow, so do we as parents where we can reclaim our own lives and return to some of our interests that were put on hold in order to raise our families.

Some of us parents, however, may hesitate to hand back to their adult children the responsibility of living independently. The reality, however, is that adult children who are developing responsibility for their own lives probably will struggle and their decisions, while not always perfectly executed, never fail to provide valuable life lessons.

When little toddlers learn to walk, their first steps are always unsteady. A few falls are inevitable. It is by falling and failing, however, that humans come to terms with reality which, in the case of a toddler learning to walk, is gravity.

Similarly, our adult children are also dealing with the realities of life such as paying the bills, embarking on a career, and finding a life partner. During this time, we as parents need to remember that, beyond providing words of encouragement and the occasional steadying hand, the bulk of the work remains with our children.

Will our adult children accept the challenge? Some will embrace this opportunity while others will do so kicking and screaming. In the case of the latter, it behooves us as parents to listen as objectively as possible, acknowledge our parenting mistakes when necessary, then support our adult children to face the most pressing challenge currently awaiting them in life.

Along these lines, here are six recommendations for parents who are supporting their adult children  as they begin to embrace their own adulthood:

Letting Go Tip #1 - Accept the Consequences

Accepting consequences is the very essence of learning personal responsibility. Any attempts by we as parents to remove negative consequences is a step backward for our adult children. 

If we are invited into solving our adult children’s problems then there must be an accountability measure in place. For example, if we loan money then there needs to be a repayment plan or a condition in which money is provided for schooling so long as the person is passing courses, staying sober, etc.

Conversely, we should be quick to give our adult children credit when credit is due for making the right decision. Our adult children may not also recognize their accomplishments so, by recognizing these, we as parents can encourage additional positive consequences in the future.

Letting Go Tip #2 - Look Past Short-Term Setbacks

There is no such thing as failure when our adult children assume greater personal responsibility. After all, personal responsibility is a verb, not a noun. In other words, personal responsibility is something that adults do, not something they possess. A mistake today will teach us how to get it right tomorrow. Furthermore, as a parent, it is important to remember that our adult children’s setbacks are not reflections on our character or our parenting skills.

Letting Go Tip #3 - Provide Emotional Support

As parents, it may be difficult to watch our children struggle through the process of learning personal responsibility. However, this doesn’t mean that we withdraw all support. Emotional support is something we all need, particularly when it is provided by a family member. Financial support is a poor substitute compared to the humanizing, empowering effect of emotion support.

A good metaphor to remember is to “walk alongside” our adult children rather than “walking ahead” to clear away problems or challenges that lie on their path. Walking alongside our adult children may sound like, “Wow! That is difficult. I wonder how you are going to deal with that” or “Yes, that does sound stressful. What did your recovery team tell you to do about that?”

Letting Go Tip #4 - Listen First, Hesitate Before Giving Advice

Further to Tip #3, emotional support sometimes means taking the time to simply be with our adult children and listen. All too often, we instinctively want to help our children by giving advice. However, when we listen we also provide the opportunity for our adult children to come up with their own solutions. When we listen in such a way that supports our children to come up with their own solution, we are practicing active listening. Active listening is much more rigourous then passive listening, which typically involves waiting for our turn to speak with little regard for the speaker.

We as parents also need to remember that what worked for us in the past may not always solve the current challenge facing our adult children. So, giving advice not only prevents active listenting, it may even be the wrong advice!

The next three tips are further along in the process of developing personal responsibility and are intended more for us as parents than for our adult children:

Letting Go Tip #5 - Hesitate Before “Collaborating”

Similar to our instinct to giving advice, we as parents instinctively may want to collaborate with our children. The truth is, however, that our children may prefer to work without our involvement. Although this may sound similar to Tip #3, the difference is that our adult child is no longer coming from a place of need but, rather, is fully engaged in the creative process.

For example, our adult children may become excited about post secondary education so we as parents rush out and get the course calendar and fill out the application forms ourselves in fear that our adult child may lose motivation. In essence, we have actually created the opposite effect by dampening their spirits. Instead, as parents we may need to give our adult children the space to create their own dreams.

Letting Go Tip #6 - Allow our Children to Choose Their Own Path

Each of us have our own unique path in life but sometimes, as parents, we may have difficulty accepting the chosen path our children. Examples include when our children choose a life partner, entering post-secondary education, or embarking on a career. We may have our own expectations of having a son- or daughter-in-law with similar values, socioeconomic status, religious perspective, etc. We may hope that our child carry on the legacy of the family business or entering an esteemed profession such as medicine, law, or engineering.

When asked for advice from the many admirers of his work, famed mythology expert Joseph Campbell advocated that we “follow our bliss,” meaning that we pursue our dreams no matter what others think. Mr. Campbell insisted that when we follow our dreams we are embarking on a heroic path of personal freedom. The path is not always easy, but Mr. Campbell promises a life infinitely more rewarding.

The business world abounds with individuals who followed their dreams and created profitable businesses that started out as mere hobbies, artistic pursuits, or crazy ideas. As parents, we provide a great service to our children by having faith that, they too, have the potential to join the long list of successful entrepreneurs or entertainers that followed their dreams.

Letting Go Tip #7 - Avoid Living Vicariously

Once our children have embarked on their chosen path, we may one day come to the realization that our children have actually exceeded our own accomplishments. While many parents are content to continue to provide the emotional support that, in part, contributed to their child’s acheivements in the first place, others may feel threatened by this success. 

For example, we have all attended amateur sporting events and have observed parents who seem just a little too obsessed with their sons or daughters winning at all costs. We may cringe when they holler at the referee, or berate their kids for not playing hard enough.

Similarly, we as parents must also learn to separate our own dreams from those of our adult children. Deep down, successful adult children may stir our own insecurities and failing to take notice of these insecurities can lead us to react out of jealousy and actually prevent us from embracing our own personal responsibility.

In part 4 of The Gift of Adulthood we conclude this series of articles by examining the transition to adulthood.

Geoff Thompson, MA, CCC

Geoff Thompson, Program Director for Sunshine Coast Health Centre, discusses Joseph Campbell’s belief that the secret of life is to follow your bliss.

By Geoff Thompson, MA, CCC
Sunshine Coast Health Center Program Director

University of Windsor professor Dr. Ken Hart and I have been invited to contribute a chapter on spirituality and recovery for a new book that will be published by the American Psychological Association. Dr. Hart is one of Canada’s foremost researchers in addiction.

Much of our job will be to get a handle on this thing called “spirituality.” When the experts try to figure out what it means, they inevitably end up using words like “multidimensional” and “complex”; not all the helpful but, then, it’s a tough idea to put in everyday language.

Here are three of hundreds of definitions: “Caring for others, seeking goodness and truth, transcendence….”; “A focus on the transcendent….”; “the search for existential meaning.” Most people would struggle with these definitions. What does “goodness and truth” mean exactly? I’m pretty sure Adolph Hitler would have an idea of “goodness” much different than we would. What does it mean to “focus on the transcendent”? It seems to me that focusing on the transcendent is exactly what a lot of addicts do: think of Hunter S. Thompson or Thomas De Quincey or, of course, Bill Wilson (‘the alcoholic is the fellow trying to get his religion from a bottle’). And “search for existential meaning”? The great atheistic writer, Eugene O’Neill, searched for an existential meaning. But, then, so did the great Christian theologian, Paul Tillich. Who’s right?

Of course, this is likely why ‘spirituality’ is such a useful term: vague enough to cover very different experiences.

But Dr. Hart and I still have to write something down.

Most addiction experts agree that spirituality is somehow linked with good recovery. Every time we study recovering addicts we discover that an increase in spirituality is correlated with less drug use and higher quality of life. We still don’t know precisely why this is—at least not from a psychological view—but we do know that we keep getting the same results in our studies. Harry Tiebout, Bill Wilson’s psychoanalyst, believed that when the self-centered addict came to believe in a higher power, then, by definition, he could no longer believe that he was the center of the universe. Addiction researcher Scott Tonigan has a different idea. He sees ‘spirituality’ as “a distinctive, potentially creative and universal dimension of human experience…,” which is needed to find the transformative change required for recovery. And these are just two versions of hundreds.

In this article, we’ll look at how some of the experts deal with this spirituality thing. Not that we’ll find any answer…but perhaps they’ll offer a clue.

Synchronicity

At our Edmonton alumni reunion in June, we spent the afternoon talking about those things in life that seem more than coincidence. One alumnus told us about a situation where he was driving past a house at the time it was on fire. He rushed out and helped extinguish it. The grateful owner invited him to supper the next day. At supper, the owner offered him a great job. Another alumnus had noticed enough coincidences that he believed that there must be some hidden hands at work for him. Another described a situation in which his sponsor told him something during the day; he rented a movie later in which one of the characters said the exact same thing. It was as if someone were trying to tell him something.

We talked about what these ‘coincidences’ meant. Several of the alumni thought that “something” was telling them something. One who said he didn’t believe in the traditional idea of God said that he thought that perhaps some force was watching over him. Another said it was God.

These ‘coincidences’ happen all the time to people in recovery (and to some in active addiction, by the way).

In psychology, we have a fancy word for these events: synchronicity. We still don’t understand it. I do, however, have a book in my library called Synchronicity, which states that there is a logic to these ‘coincidences’.

Unseen Helping Hands

We talked in the April 2008 online program about the great mythology expert, Joseph Campbell. If you’re interested, there’s a famous series of television interviews between Campbell and Bill Moyers of PBS, which will be available at your local library.

Campbell is the one who coined the phrase “Follow your bliss.” He said that when you pursue a life that you truly want, all sorts of apparently magical things will start happening. The way he phrased it was that you will feel as if “hidden hands” are helping you in your life. Here’s an excerpt from those interviews:

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Campbell has personal experience in following his bliss. In fact, he quit school because his professors were not happy with his particular interest in mythology. So, he went off on his own quest and published a wagonload of books.

Positive Living

In the past two weeks, in our work with alumni participating in the Online Support Program, we have been dancing around spirituality, without being too specific. We noted two famous descriptions of life that seem to be linked to good recovery: noticing ‘coincidences’ (what psychology calls ‘synchronicity’) and Joseph Campbell’s famous comments on feeling as if helping hands are guiding you along your life.

But there do seem to be some common elements to spirituality, no matter what you think ‘spirituality’ means. One common element is that the experience is positive. However we define spirituality, it always seems to be a good thing—a better way of living.

People who say they are ‘spiritual’ tell us that they have found serenity, peace of mind, comfort in their own skin, a sense of belonging. And they usually say their family relationships are better, they have fewer physical problems such as headaches, they are excited to get up in the morning. And Sunshine Coast’s preliminary research findings on our alumni’s progress in recovery indicate that those who say they are pursuing ‘spirituality’ report much greater quality of life.

Hope and Faith (that things will get better)

Most of those in early recovery still have a lot of ‘wreckage from the past’ to deal with. Some have large debts to pay off, some have family relationships to mend, some have to deal with problems at work, some have medical issues as a result of their addiction, and so on.

This is usually not a pleasant experience. All the guilt over what we’ve done to family and fears of their rejection, dealing with the government tax bureau or legal matters, going back to the dentist for some of us, and so on, are usually not something we look forward to. And of course, there’s all those cravings and triggers to deal with. It’s even common to hear in the program that the first year of recovery is easy; it’s the second year that’s tough. (Not exactly an inspiring message, which does not have to be true, by the way.)

So, what how do we make it through this time? Researchers have concluded that hope and faith that things will work out is the key. For some alumni this hope and faith comes from witnessing those with long-term recovery who are happy, who say that ‘things get better’. And if you are into positive affirmations, the best one is to look into a mirror and tell yourself: ‘I may not like what I see now, but I have hope and faith that I will in the future’. (This is a much better tactic than Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley who tried to convince himself, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”)

Perhaps this hope and faith is a good part of the power of spirituality. Those who feel that there is ‘something’ bigger than they are can hold on to hope and faith that this ‘something’ may know what’s happening even if the person in early recovery doesn’t. It may interest you to know that research has shown that hope and faith are consistently related to good recovery.

A Way of Life

One more of those common elements that people talk about when they describe ‘spirituality’ is that it is not a compartmentalized part of life. People are not ‘being spiritual’ for a moment or an hour, and then not being spiritual. Rather, this ‘spirituality’ thing seems to influence most of their lives—except, perhaps, during a root canal. But, then again, even there. 

Whatever ‘spirituality’ is, it informs all aspects of life. The Native peoples talk about being unified with nature and this forms the basis for living. The Dalai Lama describes his connection with the ‘hidden’ world as being a basis for his actions in everyday life. Many people in recovery describe their connection with their higher power as influencing how they treat others, how they deal with their own imperfections, how they make sense of their suffering.

Perhaps part of this is regaining a sense of awe and wonder at the world. One of the sad things about modern life is that we seem to have lost the enchantment of daily things that we once had as children. Spiritual masters often tell us that we look but we don’t see. Others tell us to “Wake up!” to the world around us. It is a human thing that we often don’t pay attention to how precious life can be until we hit a crisis, such as the death of a loved one or a serious medical diagnosis or—sometimes—a drug overdose.

But one can only ‘see’ by learning how to look, which is the subject of many spirituality books in Chapter’s or Cole’s self-help bookshelves. And learning how to see demands that we recognize that underlying everyday things is some ‘hidden’ power.

By Geoff Thompson, M.A., CCC

“The Power of Myth” is a very famous series of interviews between Bill Moyers of PBS and the famous expert on mythology, Joseph Campbell. Campbell explains his ideas on what makes people happy. Here are some excerpts:

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are - if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Recovery demands that you live the life that is suited for you, that your actions match your beliefs and values. So many people in early recovery forget that the goal of recovery is not staying away from drugs and alcohol. The real goal is to “follow your bliss.” There is no recipe for such a life; no scientific equation. It is personal to each person. Your job is to discover what makes your life worth living.

Be True to Yourself

If you are going to follow your bliss, then you have to be true to yourself. You probably know that on one side of the chips given out at AA meetings, it reads, “To thine own self be true.” Bill W. was a wise man; he understood how important this is. In active addiction, we pursued drinking and drugging, even though we did things that went against our beliefs and values. When anyone acts against his beliefs and values, the result is suffering: guilt, depression and aggression.

The idea of being true to yourself is backed up by psychology. Beginning in the 1950s, many psychologists examined healthy, happy people to understand what made these people happy. They discovered that every person has to grow and develop throughout his life and become the person he wants to become.

In other words, psychologists learned that a person’s happiness depended on his being true to himself. Any interruption to this growth led to suffering. In fact, addiction was used as an example of people who suffered horribly because they were driven by drug use, not by their values and beliefs.

Be the Author of Your Life

A key to recovery is to take control of your life. Here’s a remarkable fact: many people recover in Vancouver’s notorious, drug-infested Downtown Eastside. We don’t recommend putting yourself in such a place, but there is documented evidence that some can pull this off. The reason is that they have taken control of their lives. It doesn’t matter to them that they are offered drugs daily, witness addicts smoking or injecting, and so on, because they choose not to use.

If you don’t take control, then you are likely a victim of life. If you are reading this and in recovery, think back to your first days in treatment. Did you blame anyone or anything for your drugging and drinking: your lover, your work, your friends, your environment, physical pain? Or perhaps you were like a pinball, just rolling along until some outside event or another person knocked you into a new direction.

People who blame people or things for their suffering or who simply wander through life reacting to things are not in control of their lives.

Pay Attention to the Racehorse

My mentor, Dr. Paul Wong, told me once: “You have a racehorse, and you have a donkey. If you don’t pay attention to the racehorse, you’re stuck with the donkey.”

The racehorse represents those things and people that are meaningful to each of us, such as pursuing a cherished career, falling in love, working on a hobby. The donkey is the boring or irritating stuff of life, like doing laundry, going to the dentist, fixing the wreckage of the past, showing up for work that you find dull but which you need to pay the mortgage or rent, forcing yourself to go to 12-step meetings even if you’re tired.

What Dr. Wong is saying is that you if don’t pay attention to the things that make your life rich and satisfying, then all you have left is the dull, boring, irritating stuff. The donkey stuff becomes bigger than it really is, because you don’t have a racehorse. The racehorse puts the donkey stuff in proper perspective. 

Conclusion

I would like to conclude this discussion by repeating the possibility that “hidden hands” await for those who choose to follow their bliss. If you’re waiting for proof before you embark on this journey, chances are your tomorrows are going to look a lot like your today. Perhaps the following quote says it best:

“Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.’ ”

~ W.H. Murray
from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

About the Author

Geoff Thompson, MA, is the Program Director at Sunshine Coast Health Center, a private addiction treatment facility for adult men. His book, A Long Night’s Journey into Day, explores Eugene O’Neill’s life to uncover the truth of addiction and recovery.