ADDICTION & DISLOCATION
“Psychosocial Integration” is a profound interdependence between individual and society that normally grows and develops throughout each person’s lifespan. Psychosocial integration reconciles people’s need for social belonging with their equally vital needs for individual autonomy and achievement. Psychosocial integration is as much an inward experience of identity and meaning as a set of outward social relationships. Establishing the delicate interpenetration of person and society enables each person to satisfy simultaneously both individualistic needs and needs for community -- to be free and still belong. An enduring lack of psychosocial integration, which is called “dislocation” is both individually painful and socially destructive.
It denotes psychological and social separation from one’s society which can befall people who never leave home, as well as those who have been geographically displaced. People can endure dislocation for a time. However severe, prolonged dislocation eventually leads to unbearable despair, shame, emotional anguish, boredom, and bewilderment.
Material poverty frequently accompanies dislocation, but they are definitely not the same thing. Although material poverty can crush the spirit of isolated individuals and families, it can be borne with dignity by people who face it together as an integrated society. On the other hand, people who have lost their psychosocial integration are demoralized and degraded even if they are not materially poor. Neither food, nor shelter, nor the attainment of wealth can restore them to well-being. In contrast to material poverty, dislocation could be called “poverty of the spirit”.
The process of achieving psychosocial integration and establishing the delicate inter-penetration of person and society enables each person to satisfy simultaneously both individualistic needs and needs for community – to be free and still belong. Psychosocial integration makes human life bearable, and even joyful at its peaks.
Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and Competition, dislocating them from social life. People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us.
History shows that addiction can be rare in a society for many centuries, but can become nearly universal when circumstances change – for example, when a cohesive tribal culture is crushed or an advanced civilisation collapses. Of course, this historical perspective does not deny that differences in vulnerability are built into each individual's genes, individual experience, and personal character, but it removes individual differences from the foreground of attention, because societal determinants are so much more powerful. Addiction is much more a social problem than an individual disorder.
The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit by Bruce K. Alexander.
Quote from this author:
Although I am not a theist of any persuasion and do not believe in any kind of life after death, I am part of a civilization that has been profoundly influenced by two millennia of Christian philosophy. As I dig deeper and deeper into the topic of addiction, I find it increasingly necessary to draw on the strengths of this Christian heritage…
The author is writing from a perspective of the social / cultural capital of the church. A brief way of describing dislocation may be "lost." The church informed about addiction can be the ideal spiritual setting and context to address recovery.
Summary of Globalization of Addiction
THIS IS HIS WEBSITE WITH PIVOTAL INFORMATION:
http://globalizationofaddiction.ca/
This Article on his experiments with "Rat Park is Pivotal to all his thinking that followed:
http://www.globalizationofaddiction.ca/articles-speeches/177-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park.html
Summary of Globalization of Addiction
THIS IS HIS WEBSITE WITH PIVOTAL INFORMATION:
http://globalizationofaddiction.ca/
This Article on his experiments with "Rat Park is Pivotal to all his thinking that followed:
http://www.globalizationofaddiction.ca/articles-speeches/177-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park.html
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LECTURES ON ADDICTION:
Brain Development and Addiction
Childhood Development of Addiction and ADD
*Author of: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close encounters
with Addiction.
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PSYCHOSPIRITUALITY OF ADDICTION
KEVIN P. McClone, M.Div., Psy.D.
LECTURES ON ADDICTION:
GABOR MATE MD*
*Author of: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close encounters
with Addiction.
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PSYCHOSPIRITUALITY OF ADDICTION
KEVIN P. McClone, M.Div., Psy.D.
Discusses dislocation as a "person having no real being or is a lost soul, disconnected from self, others, and God in a profound way. Psychospiritual recovery is the movement out of being lost, isolated, alone, afraid, and without meaning and purpose, to an inner-directed hopeful search for serenity and peace rooted in the best spiritual principles of love, community, and intimacy with self, God, others, and nature."
http://www.nacoa.org/pdfs/McClone%20%20Sem%20Dept%209-5-06.pdf
http://www.nacoa.org/pdfs/McClone%20%20Sem%20Dept%209-5-06.pdf
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