Category: Connect

After all this public speaking, I’m going to get really personal in this post. Sort of like spring cleaning. It’s also a good chance to practice my narrative writing, in case I ever manage to start my next book.

I just woke up from two rotten dreams. They used up half my night. In the first, I was in love with, or at least dating, an unknown woman. It seemed we had a future together. Then, in the middle of some sunny, social activity, she turned to me and said: “The trouble with you is that you talk too much.” I was stunned. How could she? It reminds me now of the time Lissy, the girl across the road, suddenly turned to me and said: “The trouble with you, Marc Lewis, is you’re fat!” I was eight at the time, not actually fat, but the memory still burns. Back in the dream, this woman’s invective spelled the end of our relationship. I flung back a stinging rebuke: I told her she raised her voice unpleasantly at the end of her sentences. So there! But now I was stumbling down a dirt road, utterly alone and lost, wondering where I could find drugs or booze.

Next, I was in a Chinese restaurant with family, friends, and someone resembling my ex-wife. I’d been dumb enough to order the buffet menu, when only a few scraps remained in the big pans on the counter. I saw the contempt in her eyes. I felt humiliated and isolated. The restaurant was going to close soon, and there I was, with a big bill and a small meal. But Ms Ex was not only contemptuous, she also turned cold and distant. Disconnected. That’s always been my worst fear. Next scene, I was at home (some home) with family, wondering if our visitors had brought a bottle of painkillers I could steal from.

When I woke up, ouch! What a way to start the day. But I lay in bed for awhile,  thinking about my second marriage and how it ended. I’d been a good husband, actually a very good husband. Loving, supportive, faithful, as passionate as possible with three kids around, working my butt off to take care of those kids while earning tenure at the University of Toronto. Rushing home to help with dinner, then working late to get everything done. (Was that the problem?) And teaching an extra course to pay for our trip to England — my first sabbatical! Eleven days after we landed in Cambridge, nine years after we first got together, I discovered that she’d been having an affair with some Italian guy the last several months in Toronto. There was a half-finished email to a friend, open on the computer in the living room, describing how much she missed him.

A million times ouch! I drove around England for three days, nearly suicidal. Drinking and driving. Taking crazy risks. Then back to Cambridge, where there were kids to consider.

Things went downhill pretty fast after that. She left for Toronto within four months, then we separated legally five months later. She had not been eager to patch things up. Meanwhile, I’d spent most of my sabbatical in beautiful Cambridge slumped in depression, pretending to work and caring for my 8-year-old daughter. I’d loved that woman. And now she’d become cold, distant, and uncaring. Just like the woman in my dream, her ghostly descendant. I’d been off opiates for roughly 15 years at the time. Was I tempted to go back to them? Of course I was! But instead I drank. Every evening for a few months, scotch and/or beer. A lot. But not too much to put my kid to bed and get her up in the morning.

For me, substance use and substance addiction have always been a remedy for loneliness, abandonment, disconnection. The formula in my child’s mind is a simple one: disconnection from someone you thought was there for you = isolation = danger!!! Opiates made me feel safe. Booze at least numbed the anxiety. Ever since those years in boarding school, and probably long before that, loss of connection was my primal fear. It’s why I became an addict. And it’s still my primal fear, hence the dreams last night. I don’t think those things ever go away.

Yesterday I had a long lunch with a 24-year-old guy who’d had a serious — really serious! — video game addiction. “Pieter” wanted to meet me after reading my book. While nibbling and basking in a rare stretch of Dutch sunshine, I asked him about the games he’d played. He’d been a captain, a general, a Roman conqueror, leading his army over the mountains to subjugate foreign armies and occupy new lands. He was a great leader of men — for 10-15 hours a day. And then he’d come back to the real world and realize that another month or another year had passed, without having accomplished anything at all. Finally, at the age of 19, he was so tortured by his addiction that he managed to give it up. He couldn’t stand the idea that he was a hero in his games but an abject failure in his life. He spent the next two years emerging from a deep, lingering depression.

The longer I talked with Pieter, the more I noticed something odd. He had a strange, half-hidden arrogance mixed with his humility. He ended our lunch telling me, in great detail, how he’d connected deeply (during a workshop) with a really unattractive woman and taught her that even she could be accepted by a man as, um, accomplished, cool, and desirable as himself. It hit me like a ton of bricks: he still construes himself in terms of status and prestige. He always has. Which means he’s always been afraid that others would not recognize his value — something he soon confirmed.

What he’d gotten out of his gaming was a sense of mastery — exactly what he couldn’t find in his life.

He’s still missing epic-hero status, but he stuggles to stay in the running. At least he’s past his addiction and has a chance to recognize what he’s missing. And maybe to learn to live with the next best thing: a modicum of success. And I’m still missing a deep sense of security. But at least I’m past my addiction, and I’m (still) learning to live with the next best thing: a degree of self-trust, and a family who loves me and needs me for now.

 

…But if you try some time, you might find…you get what you need!

–The Rolling Stones

Yesterday was the day. I was pretty nervous all week. About every second time I practiced it, I seemed to get something wrong, like taking a wrong turn on a country road and ending up at a muddy dead-end, looking at a swamp. But the auditorium was beautiful. Plush and purple and warm with people who really wanted to be there. The audience was roughly 1,200, and that’s a lot, but the house lights were up halfway, so you could see their faces, and I think that’s what made it okay. I felt their interest and their support.

As my turn approached, I kept expecting my heart to start racing. But it didn’t. I told myself quite a few times: Self-trust, remember? Then when I went out there and started talking, I felt insanely calm, if you can say such a thing. And it just went fine after that. There were a couple of minor goofs, quite a few um’s and ah’s, but nothing too serious. There were even a few chances to crack a joke. For one thing, the clicker that advanced the slides was very sticky, and I had to stab at the button in order to get it to cooperate. While this did not produce gales of laughter, it at least got some chuckles. So here it is.

Today feels like the first day of summer vacation. I even slept in. Now I will study my Dutch for the first time in ages. Lesson this afternoon. And hey, the sun seems to be out!

What a great conference!!! PINC (People, Ideas, Nature, Creativity) is like a Dutchified version of TED, and the main theme seems to be creativity — that’s what the “C” stands for — and what creativity looks like across disciplines including: science and its societal relevance, art and design, food, philosophy, and a few others. It was beautifully executed, as would be expected given the price tag of  €900/seat for non-speakers — the timing and lights, stage design, headphones with spontaneous translation of the Dutch talks (about half), sound quality, music…yes music!…and dance! The day opened with a pair of tap-dancers who were just excellent, and it ended with a 13-year old boy playing Brahms and something else on piano, at a level that easily matched adult solo concert performers. He was shockingly good. And in between, all these 20-minute talks…

The talks were so good that I felt quite insecure about mine. So I snuck out during coffee breaks and lunch to revise and upgrade my slides. Then, at the end of each break, they played a recording of an oom-pah-pah band..which actually got louder by the minute, in order to herd people back in. Pretty progressive, don’t you think? Rather than flashing the lights and hollering. Boisterous happy music at swelling volume to get people to stop chatting and sit down. That’s the sort of creativity that characterized the whole thing.

How do I give a sense of the diversity of the talks? Well, one was by an American living in Antartica to study penguins and another was by a Swiss biologist who had camped out with bears for 3 months in Alaska. Then there was the harder science stuff — but mixed with liveliness and humor and surprises. For example, a pair of guys who came on like comedians — Mikael from Finland and Roman from Switzerland — Laurel and Hardy? They stood on either side of a tippy blackboard, took turns with the chalk, and showed how the curve describing the success and failure of political figures (high rise, low dip, then slow rise and plateau, or not) was mathematically identical to that describing the rise and fall (and hopefully rise again) of marriages. (By the way, that corresponds perfectly to a neurochemical model, by which the first year of a romantic relationship is all about the rise and then fall of dopamine, as the “reward” gets more “predictable” — to be followed by an attachment relationship based on endogenous opioids. Must publish that some day, though it’s probably been done.) Then, my favourite, a condensed history of the Corduroy Appreciation Club in NYC.  The speaker was dry and pedantic (a spoof, as it turned out)  and revealed many interesting factoids, including the significance of meeting dates. The annual meeting is always held on November 11, as the date so nicely symbolizes the very essence of corduroy (11.11). Of course the big one was held in 2011. The secret handshake, that involves interlacing but parallel fingers. There was even video footage of one member being dragged out by (hooded) security guards for a major infringement of the society’s policies: he was only wearing two pieces of corduroy — not three, as required for the annual meeting. The silly bugger: I mean, adding a corduroy tie would have been sufficient. Other talks included one session on baking bread in Africa and one on how to fold paper so as to create amazingly detailed works of art, such as the Escher-like staircase you see here. The angle of the light turns out to be all important.

Then there was me, talking about addiction, self-destruction, ego fatigue, and the absence of self-trust. I felt like a bit of a downer, but I tried (and got away with) a few jokes. Examples?  One about my ambivalence about the publicity I’ve gotten here in Holland — like bringing the boys to school and having the other parents smile and nod at me: Oh, you’re the drug addict! Saw you on TV last night. Chuckle. People seemed to appreciate the talk. Lots of nice compliments afterward. The Dutch really like honesty — one reason why I really like the Dutch. I’ll see if I can figure out how to post the talk. But maybe TED will be more polished. I can only hope.

Here it is, guys. A write-up of that talk I’m going to present. Actually, it’s a bit of an approximation, because I have to give another talk next week, before TED, at something called PINC, and I’m allowed 20 minutes instead of 8 minutes. So….this is more elaborate than what I can say on TED. It pretty much captures what I think about the issue of trust.

 

Nobody can trust an addict, least of all him- or herself. And that’s what I’m going to talk about: this lack of self-trust and why it’s so pivotal in addiction and recovery.

First — my history of addiction…(blah blah). And then, the 187th time I tried to quit, it actually worked. I think quitting became possible because, this time, I found a part of myself I could trust.

But why was it so difficult until then? Why is it so hard for addicts to “just say no?” We can answer this question only if we can explain what it is about addiction that works against self-trust.

There are two psychological phenomena that help explain it.

First phenomenon: Ego depletion. The inability of people to maintain impulse control for a long period of time.

Areas of prefrontal cortex in charge of self-control run out of fuel. Like muscles, these areas get weakened and strained with continuous use. So, you can maintain self-control for a while — but not for very long.

Classic experiment described: subjects come to the lab hungry. They are told not to eat from either a bowl of chocolate chip cookies (one group) or a bowl of radishes (the other group) sitting right in front of them. After 10 or 15 minutes, they have to complete cognitive tasks requiring self-control. Those who had had to suppress their impulse to eat the cookies did less well on those tasks. They had used up some of that precious cognitive resource.

Ego depletion is a serious problem for addicts of all stripes: because the thing you’re trying to control is there all the time. The bar on the corner, the phone number of your dealer, waiting in the phonebook — cues associated with your addiction are always present.

And addicts have to control their impulses, not just for minutes, but for hours, day after day, week after week. So, they run out of capacity, and they give in.

Recent research shows: people who believe in their capacity for self-control are less affected by ego depletion. But why should this be so? How can a subjective state, a feeling, have such influence on a fundamental brain mechanism?

I think it’s because, if you don’t believe you can do it, the task is actually two tasks. You have to control not only the impulse but also your own doubt. Trying to maintain that double inhibition, to maintain your confidence while controlling your actions…. it exhausts your resources all the sooner.

That makes it very tough for addicts. Why should they trust their impulse control? They’ve failed time after time. So for them, ego depletion is like a sledgehammer, quick to overwhelm them. And they fail yet again.

I’m always struck by a certain irony: People think addicts are weak and lazy. In fact it’s the opposite. Addicts work harder than anyone else at the task of self-control.

Second phenomenon: Delay discounting. This is the tendency to devalue long-term rewards in favour of immediate rewards. Example: You might choose 5 euros today vs. 20 euros in a week. The immediate reward is exaggerated in value.

For addicts, this amounts to getting high tonight, or going to the casino, or eating the whole cake, at the expense of future happiness: e.g., having a happy marriage, a good figure, or keeping your job, or money in the bank, or staying out of jail. These future reward are devalued — they seem not to count for much.

But the appeal of addictive substances and acts is made all the more powerful by the release of dopamine. Dopamine’s job is to rivet attention to immediate gains.

Dozens of studies show greatly increased dopamine when addicts encounter cues associated with their addiction. A kind of hyper-conditioning. This narrows their attention, and their desire — to what I call the neural now.

The only antidote for this delay discounting may be: having a dialogue between your present self and your future self, whereby the future self takes your present self in hand and says: trust me — things will soon get better. Stick it out…with me.

But addicts have a very hard time seeing their future self as anyone but an addict.

Yes, addicts have dialogues with themselves, but the problem is that they can’t find a future self who is trustworthy, who can carry the present self past the intense attractions of “now”. Any future self they that’s credible is NOT where they want to end up. There is no future to value.

Because it’s so hard to trust themselves, addicts trust the only thing they can trust: their drug, their drink, or the behavior that brings them temporary relief. And that works for a while, but then you wake up, empty, broke, betrayed, in even worse trouble, perhaps with withdrawal symptoms starting up….and you have failed yourself yet again.

Self-trust is hard for addicts to find, but when they find it, they may also find a pivot point. Their whole life can swing around: they may start controlling themselves because they believe they can, because they’ve caught a glimpse of a self they can rely on.

Unfortunately, current treatment approaches often don’t encourage you to trust yourself. They encourage you to see yourself as a helpless addict, a person with a disease. They encourage you to trust in a higher power — in God, or the group, or the doctor — not in yourself .  (Trust in the group is not a bad thing, and it may be a means to an end — the end being self-trust. But the question remains, do they help you find that self-trust?)

Yet treatment centers based on empowerment are starting to spring up, and I think that’s an encouraging sign.

Here’s how I quit. Quitting attempt #187: I wrote the word “No” in big letters, tacked it to my wall, and recited it 50 times a day, so that I couldn’t stop imagining it. And I saw that I could keep saying “No,” next minute, next hour, next day. I’d found a way to believe in my ability to stop, and that felt like a new self — or at least a different part of myself — I could rely on.

So, for me, self-trust and recovery started at exactly the same moment. In a way they were the same thing, as self-trust initiated the first steps of recovery, and those steps reinforced the sense of self-trust.

 

 

Hello! It’s been awhile. This is vacation time in the Netherlands. The kids are out of school for two weeks and we’re trying to do family-type things. I know, it’s a strange time to vacate, but the weather here is so spotty, this might be one of the few periods likely to get some sun and warmth.

So I thought! Last Saturday we rented a boat. A very large boat (11.5 meters/ about 38 feet) with cabins below deck and all that, and the four of us set off from a town called Sneek (pronounced Snake). Well named, because the waterways leading out of the harbour were so incredibly narrow and sinewy that we got lost before we ever got to the main canal. Ended up in some cul-de-sac where an irate man with a house on the water kept waving us away. That’s because we kept almost ramming his house, which was very close to the shore. We were trying to make a U-turn in a narrow spot — just about impossible, especially because I had not yet discovered the “bow-thrusters” among the many Dutch-named switches on the instrument panel. When he finally realized that we didn’t understand a word he was saying, he started again in English: “Practice!” he yelled. “Go on the lake and practice!”  Yes, yes, an obvious suggestion. If only we could find the lake.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun. Isabel and I mostly sitting up on the top deck sharing a big steering wheel, watching the cows and sheep going by, and the boys down below, playing cards, with occasional sojourns to the upper deck to help steer. As I am constantly reminded, seven-year-olds don’t want to watch; they want to do. But it was cold out! Polar winds blowing through us except when we were huddled under this massive flapping plastic tarp. Oh well, it was still great, and we didn’t hit a thing in four days. Well maybe just a few tiny bumps. Tiny!

Isabel and I are going to drive over to France in a couple of days. It’s only a few hours, and it’s worth it just for the food. But meanwhile I have two talks to prepare, and one of them is a TED talk. Yes, TED! I was invited to join this TEDx event held at my university, and I’m getting pretty jazzed about it. The theme of the conference is “trust,” so naturally my talk will be about trust and addiction.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to approach this topic. You can’t trust an addict, right? How do you know an addict is lying? Because his lips are moving… Hah hah. No, wait a minute, how about…addicts can’t trust the treatment community? We know that people are almost always let down by their experiences in rehab, whether in- or out-patient, and so much of the treatment world is dominated by 12-step philosophy, which is certainly not for everyone (right, Persephone?), and a 30-day stint of treatment is about as useful as a bath during a dust storm, and the revolving door of addicts coming in and out is closely matched by that of the treatment staff, who come and go at an alarming rate themselves, and most of whom really don’t have the knowledge or the credentials to help people in serious trouble. The general public can’t trust addicts, addicts can’t trust public institutions..etc, etc… Could that work?

But is seemed a bit superficial, a bit too obvious, no real bite to it. And then, about two weeks ago, it hit me: The main issue with trust and addiction is that addicts can’t trust themselves. Of course! You can’t trust yourself to take care of yourself. Because, when you tell yourself you’re going to stop, or at least slow down, or at least stop injecting, or whatever it is, and swear up and down that this time is the LAST time, and it will NOT happen again….you end up betraying yourself. Time and time again. Why would you trust yourself after you’ve let yourself down 50 or 500 times?! But it’s worse than that: you hardly even have a self to trust. You (or I) lose the sense of a grown-up conscientious self that can soothe you, hold you, get you through the rough times, tell you that it’s just craving and it will not last forever… That self is so damned hard to find after a while that you stop believing it exists. No, you can’t trust yourself. (And surely, as a consequence, no one else can trust you either.) So who/what do you end up trusting? Your addiction, of course! You trust that a hit of smack or a bottle of vodka or a few grams of coke or yet another roller-coaster ride of sex or gambling or that bowl of chocolate ice-cream or even the glazed eye of your computer screen will make you feel better. At least for a while. And it might. For a while. We put our trust in the thing we’re addicted to…because there is no one and nothing else to trust. And of course, of course, each time we do that, we lose even more ground with our self. The ability to trust ourself takes yet another soul-crushing hit. Vicious circle. And how.

This TED talk thing makes me nervous. I have to stand on a stage in front of 1,200 people, knowing that every move I make, every sound I utter, will appear on computer screens all over the world and become inscribed in the holy scrolls of YouTube for time immemorial. With no notes! No powerpoint slides at my fingertips to remind me of what I’m trying to say. Not even a podium to hide behind. Scary!

But I think I have a good talk. I’m going to present two psychological phenomena that make it particularly hard for addicts to trust themselves: ego fatigue (see previous posts) and delay discounting (the tendency to place way too much value on immediate rewards, at the expense of long-terms gains….like, oh, keeping your marriage or your job intact — a result of that dopamine/craving wave). I’ve got it down in my head, why these phenomena stack the deck against us. And why that makes it just so hard to quit. I’ve practiced it in the car. And once in front of Isabel. It’s going to be good.

And I’m going to practice it with you. Next post. Stay tuned.