Surviving (Adrenalin) Addictions, Chapter One, Part 1: Alienation

Anastasia’s Introductory Comments on Chapter One, Part 1: Alienation.

The introduction to the original manuscript (1990 – 1991) has been revised here for this blog site. Originally the introduction to this chapter was written to be included in the burgeoning addiction recovery genre of literature that was in its heyday during this time period.

My work at the time was primarily as a psychotherapist, using the Transactional Analysis and Gestalt therapy models. My focus was on relationship and personality addictions, working with individuals, couples and families –- and – most importantly interweaving that private work with a therapeutic community treatment approach that included regular ongoing support groups.

Today I no longer do private therapy nor do I run a therapeutic community. Rather I have enhanced the skills I formerly used, expanding them into applications for community development and violence prevention consulting and training.  Community discourse has become one of my most fulfilling and prized advancements from this growth.

The original introduction, as it was, seems outdated for the impact I would like your reading of this book to have. So I have tried here to retain, at this writing, some of the essentials of that former introduction while updating this text for the general population as opposed to an addiction recovery culture.

Always, then and now, my focus was and is on the addict personality whose base line addiction is to adrenalin.

In a culture such as ours this includes better than 99% of the population. I am hard pressed to find the rare few in our society who are the exception.

This is the character of the survivor/addict personality as I have come to know it.

Now, I offer you my first attempt at translating my earlier work into today’s culture and its problems.

(The original manuscript version, 1990 – 1991, is the one in the hard copy. Should you wish to purchase it, details are at this link.)

Chapter One: Surviving (Adrenalin) Addictions

1.      Alienation

All day long, into and throughout the night, online activity persists ceaselessly; the new way of being with people that has almost no need of people at all; faceless, formless, often anonymous nonentities, serving as relationship substitutes. Thus the alienation and isolation that often troubled earlier generations have now been replaced by laptops, smart phones and whatever else emerging generations latch onto next.

Still the words of “The Rose” --

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance 

(Words continued below and incorporated with the artwork below.)

--  continue to endure as aching reminders of the dearth of human and spiritual connectedness throughout our country. At rock bottom the emptiness knows no class, racial or economic distinction. Lawyers, doctors, elected officials, the disenfranchised as well as the privileged, human and spiritual disconnect is without limitations.

Adult men and women, college and high school students, tweens and little ones know in the very depths of their tiny beings the psychic deprivation pervading this country, in the midst of what passes for abundance for some.

If examined carefully the desperation for authentic human contact and caring, lying closely guarded, exists in all of us, especially in the most avid of on-liners, out of awareness other than to the most astute.  Emotional nourishment, stability and security once expected from marriages, families or other intimate partnerships has all but fallen by the wayside.  This is America, the land of the free and the home of the brave in the new millennium.

We have a new way of ME-ness living that reveals just how far the people of this country are willing to go before they will take a pause, consider that there is something wrong with this new way of life and reach out to others to reestablish communities that work well together.

On the other side of the coin is the likelihood that the troubles we currently face in our society and politics actually come to us as a gift, pressing us to right what is wrong on a human level. With the aid of our information resources and the vast social networks available we, now, have opportunities as never before to understand the personal and interpersonal underpinnings of what makes humans tick, optimally.

All of this provides us, additionally, with tools with which to challenge – and – rectify the lack of human excellence that evolution and our efforts to date to civilize ourselves have failed to achieve.

Appraising our current social and political circumstances and the emotional/psychological and practical survival crises they represent, many of us find ourselves forced to look ever more deeply at the human and spiritual structures that support our lives, or fail to, as the case may be.

In doing this a re-evaluation of our values, priorities and lifestyles are called up for investigation. Thus our current crises, for those who allow it, provide us with a much-needed catalyst propelling personal, communal and spiritual growth.

Sharply confronting our gravest problems such as police brutality, racial and economic disparity and the terrorism that threatens our country’s boundaries, the very fiber of our lives comes regularly under close scrutiny these days, including, of course, the dreaded ills of violence, drugs and alcohol abuse and their origins in the dysfunctional family, neighborhood and community. 

Today, however, these might even stand a fighting chance to be rooted out, at least for some who are the most fortunate. Optimally, someday in generations to come even violence could be obsolete as we learn enhanced ways of relating and coping.  

Coming next: Part 2, Challenges: How this book addresses the problems