addiction

In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin.

The ultimate computer game would be a 'total addiction' - a game that shapes itself to the elements you most like to play in such a manner that it totally satisfies you. You never want to stop playing. However, any self-configuring activity always has such risks inherent in it. Will we see one day the goverment insisting that games have time limiters the way that some motor vehicles have speed limiters?

We are not consumers. For most of humanity__ existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food.We are not addicts. __ propose that most addictions come from our surrendering our real powers, that is, our powers of creativity._ We are not passive couch potatoes either. __t is not the essence of humans to be passive. We are players. We are actors on many stages_. We are curious, we are yearning to wonder, we are longing to be amazed_ to be excited, to be enthusiastic, to be expressive. In short to be alive._ We are also not cogs in a machine. To be so would be to give up our personal freedoms so as to not upset The Machine, whatever that machine is. Creativity keeps us creating the life we wish to live and advancing humanity__ purpose as well.

What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don__ need to be wasted on naming things.

Take a few minutes now and see your current circumstances- your physical condition, your emotional condition, your possessions, your financial condition, where and how you live, your relationships, the situations surrounding your life, and the way you believe other people see you- as mirrors showing you "Who You Are.

The world actually is a mirror, and as you change, you will see everything around you changing as well as mirroring your changes.

Your identity is not in who you can be. It is in who you always have been

Addiction is the primary way people escape the modern world. Unfortunately, it is destroying the modern world.

Change must start from the individual. And the individual must want and feel ready to make such change.

May you begin living beyond.

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don__ have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn__ sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That__ what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don't ever want to be again. Everything we do is part of who we are. How we choose to use those memories, to motivate or to submit is entirely up to us.

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We__ all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away.

There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: we search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like _ well, like a rat in a cage seeking another __it_, looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough.

Narrow behaviourist thinkingpermeates political and social policy and medical practice, thechildrearing advice dispensed by __arenting experts_ and academicdiscourse. We keep trying to change people__ behaviours without a fullunderstanding of how and why those behaviours arise. __nner causesare not the proper domain of psychology,_ writes Roy Wise, an experton the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in theNational Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seemsastonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be nounderstanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,without looking at __nner causes,_ tricky as those causes can be to pindown at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, areoften the active representations of emotional states and of specialkinds of brain functioning.As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brainpatterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with varioussocial and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must striveto change not them but their environments. These are the only thingswe can change. Transformation of the addict must come from withinand the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is muchthat we can do.

Be an informed advocate and support.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.