June 28, 2010
quote, context unnecessary
Last September, researchers from the National Institutes of Health found that people who claimed to enjoy “an intimate relationship with God” possess bigger-than-average right middle temporal cortices.
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Uncle Ray found this troubling:
That is, the most effective treatment doesn’t work for most people who try it. I wonder, though: given recent insights in the field of positive psychology, might there be an unmeasured population of groups that produce greater effect by focusing on building a better life rather than dealing with a problem?
The thinking goes like this: spend your time working on a problem, and that problem will be your focus. In fact, you will have lots of help in spending a lot of time worrying over that problem. Were there to be a group devoted to building a better life and being supported in that endeavor, might that not be effective by replacing the problem with an aspiration–a choice to focus on something else? Is it better to work toward something or work to keep away from something?
I don’t have an answer, just those questions. I haven’t seen comparative studies and am not even sure what a positive alternative might look like. It just makes intuitive sense to me, though, that your life tends to head in whatever direction you focus on.
This is another great paragraph from the link:
“In writing the steps, Wilson drew on the Oxford Group’s precepts and borrowed heavily from William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Wilson read shortly after his belladonna-fueled revelation at Towns Hospital. He was deeply affected by an observation that James made regarding alcoholism: that the only cure for the affliction is ‘religiomania.’ The steps were thus designed to induce an intense commitment, because Wilson wanted his system to be every bit as habit-forming as booze.”
Reading this reminded me of a phrase I used to hear back in the 60s : “I used to be high on drugs; now I’m high on Jesus.” Maybe this is why people who have led lives of empty conspicuous consumption often head straight for a church that looks like a shopping mall with a giant cross on it. They trade one kind or servile behavior for another; one imagined reward for another imagined reward that is consistent with the limits of the imagination at hand.
[...] My favorite blog recently had some discussion about Alcoholics Anonymous and alternatives. I am curious about your thoughts on such groups. My roommate just left the house with a Holy Bible tucked under his arm, telling me that he and his sponsor were “on our way to a meeting”. I am distrustful of these meetings, preferring to sit on the sofa with my cat under one arm and a bottle of Ten High Whiskey under the other while watching M*A*S*H re-runs. Should I think about trying a meeting? [...]
Bingo, Joseph (and Uncle Ray). If I can be said to have a fight, as we discussed yesterday, it is a fight against assumptions underlying dominant ‘therapeutic’ models of dealing with human misery. In fact, I have a beef with the very notion of ‘therapy’ as it is widely understood and practiced.
“Spend your time working on a problem, and that problem will be your focus.” Exactly.
There are alternate approaches, to be sure. I’m still searching. Some of the Japanese-inspired methods such as quote-unquote Constructive Living registered-trademark, as well as those promoted by Gregg Krech and Linda Anderson Krech, are helpful, but their roots in a shame-based culture remain problematic for me.
Call me soon as you figure it out.
Whoa. I just plowed far enough into the article, Luke, to fix on a tidbit that is new to me. I did not know that AA founder Bill Wilson was doing the old belladonna cure when he conceived the now widely accepted precepts on which AA is based. I’ve no idea what the ‘cure’ dosage was back in the mid-1930s, but you do enough atropa belladonna and you’ll sure see God or Jesus or the entire Hindu pantheon.
Hunh.