Things, once learned, cannot be unlearned
Hi! Long time, no write. As one might (correctly) surmise, this final year of grad school is kicking my arse pretty hard; this ultimate term is no exception, with the second half of the Practicum, Gender Issues, and Addictions, which has become this term's equivalent of last term's Grief course in the realm of "personally relevant and challenging" experiences.
As documented on LJ, I've started the process of getting clearance to work as a volunteer in a program for sex addicts and offenders. I'm also seriously considering delaying the job hunt until the end of summer to make sure I accrue all 300 of my stage 1, AAMFT-required, internship client hours in a timely fashion (pending a full financial review with Matthew in the next few weeks to determine whether or not that's actually feasible).
The Addictions course is shaking me, in a different but every way as thorough manner as the Grief course did. For the first time - and this is saying something, as a student of Buddhism in a Lutheran semianry - I am being challenged out of my spiritual comfort zones. Or at least challenged to engage my spirituality more as a part of my daily life and professional practices; the work with sex offenders comes out of that provocation. I know things I cannot now unknow, and while the knowing, in and of itself, demands nothing of me, it does not sit well. It does not sit comfortably. There is much soul-searching going on in the quiet moments.
My current reading for this course is Gabor Mate's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which is a beautifully written, unflinching look at the lives of those who live in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside district: this is clearly where those who have fallen through the cracks of society collect and live out their days with what little dignity they can find between the methadone clinics and the social-service funded "hotels" they live in, while around the corner the City of Vancouver has been building sold-out condo towers to keep up with both general demand and the anticipated influx of people arriving for the 2010 Winter Olympics... which open today. It's a bit of a brain-bender, actually, reading on one hand the media and blogosphere coverage of the world's eyes descending on this city, touted as "one of the world's most livable cities", and on the other hand reading of the palliative care expert's daily involvements in the lives of these abandoned people.
Mate's book is a study of addiction; not the arrogant proselytizing of Christian "specialists" like Gerald May or John Bradshaw's moralising, nor even the personal recounting of addiction struggles written from the safely upper-middle-class perspective of James Nelson. Mate's intimately personal knowledge of the addicts' struggles with both the drugs and the intolerable underlying human pain underlying their addictions, is drawn from standing toe to toe with his clients in their own world. His prose is accessible; he's a successful published author and a highly educated man, but he doesn't hide behind his education nor his social status; it gets in the way neither of his subject's stories, nor his own struggles to be with them rather than become just another disengaging cog in the socialized systems that support his patients. Their stories are immediately accessible to the reader, and therein lies both the great gift and the terrible beauty of this book.
I live in a culture where recreational drug use is, for many in my social network, a no-brainer; while it is largely limited to alcohol and "soft drugs" like pot and MDMA, I know for a fact it rubs shoulders periodically with harder drugs. And where there's a supply, there are suppliers, and where there are suppliers, there is a traceable route to communities like Downtown Eastside. Mate's work does an excellent job in widening the lens of understanding on what separates the casual users from addicts, both biologically and circumstantially, without ever removing from the reader's experience the sense that there is no safety in the vicariousness of the reading experience; we are not as far removed from "those people" as we'd like to believe we are. The iconic references to the high-tech towers and high-end condos being built, literally a handful of steps away, around the corner from the crack hustlers and crystal meth junkies, drive home the proximal issues that drug use brings to any social community.
Normally when I write book reviews, I'm extolling their virtues in a sense of "really, I think this is a great book that most people would enjoy and everyone would get something out of", or even outright avocations like, "NO REALLY, YOU NEEEEEEEED TO READ THIS BOOK". In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts isn't about a beautiful world. It's not a happy book, although there are moments of mirth and even joy; it's a searching spotlight held on a part of our own culture and society that has been allowed to slip away into the cracks, a part of life that we don't look at because we don't think we need to see it. It's a book I wish people *would* read, however, not because I want the readers to get angry over how we culturally allow this kind of thing to happen to people, or to our cities; but because the book deals with people in a kind of pain that is more or less universal, even if their selected coping strategies seem so far removed from our own. We all use escapism to flee our emotional pains and our fears; I have friends who use "trainwreck TV" as a way of reminding themselves that, no matter how crappy their own lives get, "at least we're not THAT bad."
Mate's book makes it very clear that, for many of us, even that perspective is a luxury a lot of people simply do not have. They don't have the luxury of complacency in their worldviews, but it occurs to me the Vancouver addicts *do* share with the rest of us the ability to "tune out" the unpleasant aspects of life as a way of self-medicating their anxieties: they do it with their drugs, while we do it by simply pretending they don't exist and avoiding the unpleasant or inconvenient reminders that they do.
This course - and this book in particular - are personally challenging and relevant to me in ways I won't detail here, but not in the same way that the discussion about sex addicts and offenders was. I am moved to compassion through my awareness, but not to intervention. As with the sex offenders, I have no desire to "save them all", but I am trying to accept what I know now and sit with that uncomfortable awareness, even as I acknowledge I can do nothing more than let go of (*try* to let go of) my anxiously-self-protecting dismissiveness. It doesn't mean I don't sometimes want to put the book down and erase what I've learned from my brain, nor does it mean I want to encourage others to read the book as a way of provoking others to take up causes I myself cannot. I admit I sometimes want to shake people out of blind complacency, but not necessarily into advocacy roles; maybe it's more akin to "shared pain is lessened" when I can increase the number of people who have seen what I have seen.
It is not a comfortable book; it is not a happy book. It is a beautiful book, however, and a very human one. It is the kind of book I wish wasn't necessary, or relevant. But it is, unfortunately, both. Most of you will choose to ignore it for those very reasons; not everyone wants to be challenged out of their complacent and blindered view of the world. I'm not always respectful of that choice, but I understand it. I've made it myself more often than I can count. But for those of us who rub shoulders with "drug culture" in any format, even only as recreational users privileged by our non-addicted biologies, here too lies an opportunity for consciousness, conscientiousness, and perhaps even some compassion for those who, literally and metaphorically, share our world only a few steps away around the corner from where we ourselves stand.
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/3074.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
As documented on LJ, I've started the process of getting clearance to work as a volunteer in a program for sex addicts and offenders. I'm also seriously considering delaying the job hunt until the end of summer to make sure I accrue all 300 of my stage 1, AAMFT-required, internship client hours in a timely fashion (pending a full financial review with Matthew in the next few weeks to determine whether or not that's actually feasible).
The Addictions course is shaking me, in a different but every way as thorough manner as the Grief course did. For the first time - and this is saying something, as a student of Buddhism in a Lutheran semianry - I am being challenged out of my spiritual comfort zones. Or at least challenged to engage my spirituality more as a part of my daily life and professional practices; the work with sex offenders comes out of that provocation. I know things I cannot now unknow, and while the knowing, in and of itself, demands nothing of me, it does not sit well. It does not sit comfortably. There is much soul-searching going on in the quiet moments.
My current reading for this course is Gabor Mate's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which is a beautifully written, unflinching look at the lives of those who live in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside district: this is clearly where those who have fallen through the cracks of society collect and live out their days with what little dignity they can find between the methadone clinics and the social-service funded "hotels" they live in, while around the corner the City of Vancouver has been building sold-out condo towers to keep up with both general demand and the anticipated influx of people arriving for the 2010 Winter Olympics... which open today. It's a bit of a brain-bender, actually, reading on one hand the media and blogosphere coverage of the world's eyes descending on this city, touted as "one of the world's most livable cities", and on the other hand reading of the palliative care expert's daily involvements in the lives of these abandoned people.
Mate's book is a study of addiction; not the arrogant proselytizing of Christian "specialists" like Gerald May or John Bradshaw's moralising, nor even the personal recounting of addiction struggles written from the safely upper-middle-class perspective of James Nelson. Mate's intimately personal knowledge of the addicts' struggles with both the drugs and the intolerable underlying human pain underlying their addictions, is drawn from standing toe to toe with his clients in their own world. His prose is accessible; he's a successful published author and a highly educated man, but he doesn't hide behind his education nor his social status; it gets in the way neither of his subject's stories, nor his own struggles to be with them rather than become just another disengaging cog in the socialized systems that support his patients. Their stories are immediately accessible to the reader, and therein lies both the great gift and the terrible beauty of this book.
I live in a culture where recreational drug use is, for many in my social network, a no-brainer; while it is largely limited to alcohol and "soft drugs" like pot and MDMA, I know for a fact it rubs shoulders periodically with harder drugs. And where there's a supply, there are suppliers, and where there are suppliers, there is a traceable route to communities like Downtown Eastside. Mate's work does an excellent job in widening the lens of understanding on what separates the casual users from addicts, both biologically and circumstantially, without ever removing from the reader's experience the sense that there is no safety in the vicariousness of the reading experience; we are not as far removed from "those people" as we'd like to believe we are. The iconic references to the high-tech towers and high-end condos being built, literally a handful of steps away, around the corner from the crack hustlers and crystal meth junkies, drive home the proximal issues that drug use brings to any social community.
Normally when I write book reviews, I'm extolling their virtues in a sense of "really, I think this is a great book that most people would enjoy and everyone would get something out of", or even outright avocations like, "NO REALLY, YOU NEEEEEEEED TO READ THIS BOOK". In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts isn't about a beautiful world. It's not a happy book, although there are moments of mirth and even joy; it's a searching spotlight held on a part of our own culture and society that has been allowed to slip away into the cracks, a part of life that we don't look at because we don't think we need to see it. It's a book I wish people *would* read, however, not because I want the readers to get angry over how we culturally allow this kind of thing to happen to people, or to our cities; but because the book deals with people in a kind of pain that is more or less universal, even if their selected coping strategies seem so far removed from our own. We all use escapism to flee our emotional pains and our fears; I have friends who use "trainwreck TV" as a way of reminding themselves that, no matter how crappy their own lives get, "at least we're not THAT bad."
Mate's book makes it very clear that, for many of us, even that perspective is a luxury a lot of people simply do not have. They don't have the luxury of complacency in their worldviews, but it occurs to me the Vancouver addicts *do* share with the rest of us the ability to "tune out" the unpleasant aspects of life as a way of self-medicating their anxieties: they do it with their drugs, while we do it by simply pretending they don't exist and avoiding the unpleasant or inconvenient reminders that they do.
This course - and this book in particular - are personally challenging and relevant to me in ways I won't detail here, but not in the same way that the discussion about sex addicts and offenders was. I am moved to compassion through my awareness, but not to intervention. As with the sex offenders, I have no desire to "save them all", but I am trying to accept what I know now and sit with that uncomfortable awareness, even as I acknowledge I can do nothing more than let go of (*try* to let go of) my anxiously-self-protecting dismissiveness. It doesn't mean I don't sometimes want to put the book down and erase what I've learned from my brain, nor does it mean I want to encourage others to read the book as a way of provoking others to take up causes I myself cannot. I admit I sometimes want to shake people out of blind complacency, but not necessarily into advocacy roles; maybe it's more akin to "shared pain is lessened" when I can increase the number of people who have seen what I have seen.
It is not a comfortable book; it is not a happy book. It is a beautiful book, however, and a very human one. It is the kind of book I wish wasn't necessary, or relevant. But it is, unfortunately, both. Most of you will choose to ignore it for those very reasons; not everyone wants to be challenged out of their complacent and blindered view of the world. I'm not always respectful of that choice, but I understand it. I've made it myself more often than I can count. But for those of us who rub shoulders with "drug culture" in any format, even only as recreational users privileged by our non-addicted biologies, here too lies an opportunity for consciousness, conscientiousness, and perhaps even some compassion for those who, literally and metaphorically, share our world only a few steps away around the corner from where we ourselves stand.
This entry was originally posted at http://much-ado.dreamwidth.org/3074.html. Please comment there using OpenID.