Understanding Addiction

Following that invitation to meet with the Dalai Lama, I’ve been looking more into Buddhism and studies that link it with neuroscience – and with addiction. In one recent article, I learned that mindfulness/meditation (let’s call it MM) changes the brain in one important way. From the treatment community, we also know that MM helps […] (Read the rest.)

For you Australians who’ve just come to visit this site, thanks for your interest! I’ve taken about a three-week break from blogging, but I’ll post again very soon. Meanwhile, you might want to catch up with some of the topics we’ve tossed back and forth on the blog. We’ve had some excellent dialogues, but will […] (Read the rest.)

Last week I was trying to think like a Buddhist, in preparation… I thought about the self-reinforcing nature of “attachment” (à la Buddhism) and the self-reinforcing nature of addiction (which we all know about from our, ahem, independent research). What Buddhists describe as the lynchpin of human suffering, the one thing that keeps us mired […] (Read the rest.)

So I’m having this relatively uneventful week, doing a bit of homework for my Dutch lessons, preparing for a class I’ll be teaching next term, defrosting the freezer, debating with a publisher as to why she should accept my next book, driving the kids to soccer and always arriving late, though no one seems to […] (Read the rest.)

In the last two posts – one by Persephone and one by me – we talked about the possibility that 12-step treatment offers a “static” rather than “developmental” approach to recovery. Persephone argued that certain features of 12-step practice kept the addict or alcoholic in a frozen state of heightened anxiety, much like PTSD. My last […] (Read the rest.)