Understanding Addiction

I just listened to the first 15 minutes of a lecture by Robert Sapolsky, a renowned biologist and Stanford professor. Sapolsky begins with an incisive lesson on why humans rely on categories. Categories, he says, make it easier to think about complex phenomena. And human social behaviour is nothing if not complex. My friend Tom […] (Read the rest.)

I’ve been working with a client (I’ll call him Robert) who’s trying to stop using cocaine. We’ve had some powerful sessions lately, emotionally moving for me as well as for him. I really want to help Robert — or, more to the point, I want him to succeed, with or without my help. He’s just […] (Read the rest.)

Hi people. I haven’t posted anything in the last couple of months. My last post went up in mid-July, then there was a guest post, and then…the silence of the tomb. But I’m still here. It has been a challenging and chaotic summer. Our planned (temporary) move to Toronto got rescheduled and rescheduled due to […] (Read the rest.)

I promised that I’d come back to the problem of the internal critic — and how it might be constructive or (more often) destructive when it comes to addiction. This was part of my plan to translate Jordan Peterson’s prognostications into practical advice for people in addiction. Now, two months later, I hesitate to refer […] (Read the rest.)

I’ve been warming up to a post or two on the power of the internal dialogue. But first, as a lead-up, here’s a little patch of last night, a mundane yet eventful exchange with my son. Strangely, it made me think about quitting drugs. So I wrote this down before I went to bed. Isabel […] (Read the rest.)