GrokWerks Podcast#1

                  Podcast #1 Script

Introduction

Hello, this is the first podcast in a series produced by GrokWerksBlog.com.  My name is Harry Knowles and I will be exploring some solutions to the perplexing contradictions that arise in the treatment of people that suffer from drug and alcohol addiction and other related mental health disorders.

The Problem

We are told, as we enter the field, that we must express empathy in order to establish a personal connection with the client, that we should reflect what the person is saying to show that we are listening.  However, just about every perception that the person may have has been distorted by the alteration of the brain that occurs in these circumstances.  There is only limited benefit in repeating what the client says.   

An Example

Let’s suppose that I am talking with someone who is complaining that their employer gives them a hard time about coming in to work with a hangover.  I know already from this that alcohol is a problem and that this person is using all of his faculties to rationalize continued drinking.  This person would traditionally and also wrongly be called “in denial”.  In fact, the person may actually want to stop drinking, but the whole decision making process has been hijacked by addiction.  I have to remember that if I argue against alcohol, I am arguing with alcohol itself.

A Solution

A possible approach is one called amplified reflection.  I might say something like, “Well, if drinking is not the problem, perhaps you should consider quitting your job.”  There is what is called a decisional balance happening inside the mind of the person and by taking the side of the alcohol, I am appealing to the side of that balance that will speak up against it.  The person would most likely object to the suggestion of giving up the job and, consequently, be joining me on the side of recovery.  In effect, we would be outsmarting the hijackers.  Another part of the approach would be to refer to the boss’s complaining as a response to what the person is doing.  I might say, “What can you do to change the way your boss is responding to you?”  This puts the ball of responsibility back in the client’s court.

Summary

The point I am trying to make is that, from the moment a person walks into the office, there are ways to engage them in a conversation for change.  That should be our goal.  Science has been telling us recently that addiction rewires the brain.  The resulting thoughts and feelings are part of the disease and have very little basis in reality.  The quicker we put distance between them and new thoughts, the better.

Conclusion

That’s the time we have for now.  I’m Harry Knowles looking forward to having you join us for another podcast courtesy of BlogWerksBlog.com.

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iPhoto

I have been fiddling around with iPhoto for some time.  I like it, but now that I have been exposed to Photoshop, it seems pretty primitive.  Here is a shot I took at the British Invasion.  I had left the date on, so I had to crop and blend a little.  I also blended out my own reflection and adjusted the color.

Photoshop.com

This version seems to be less complicated than the store bought one, but it was fun to play with.  In this example, I used the sketch effect after I enriched the color some and increased the contrast.

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer was a cross between photoshop and iPhoto with some cutsy effects thrown in.  What made it different from another site, Pixir, was that I could change the opacity of a layer.  I did a little composition that was not quite what I wanted, but gives the idea.

What's Wrong with Blogs?

When I was a kid, my mom told me a story about her first year at Vassar.  She was getting acclimated and finding the work a bit overwhelming at first.  One of her assignments was to read a book and be ready for an exam.  It was particularly difficult reading and she struggled through the exam, feeling very dissatisfied with the result.  To her surprise, she got an A while every other single person in the class failed.  It seemed that the cliff notes of the book had a bit of storyline that did not exist in the original.  One of the questions on the exam made specific reference to that bit of story and my mom left it blank.  She was the only one that read the book.

I was talking with a friend of mine who is a retired literature professor.  He was telling me that it used to be that an educated person would at least have to be familiar with all the bible stories, the classics and Greek and Roman mythology.  She would have to be versed in all the themes and characters.  Before she could presume to call an idea her own, she had to be aware of the whole range of ideas that had come before.  When it came time to publish an idea, there was a process of editing and review, by someone else.

Nowadays, anyone with the even the faintest notion can push a few buttons and spew it all over the universe.  Someone who has never gotten out of their barcalounger is now having their opinion on world politics featured on CNN.  Social media and, yes, blogs have inundated the human race with a flood of useless nonsense.  The exaltation of the self that I mentioned before, along with exponentially progressing technology have enabled the huddled masses to publish without having read the book.

What is a blog?

A Blog (noun), a condensation of “web—log”, is the twenty-first century e-version of what used to be a newsletter or journal.  Similar to a website, it is a place with an address on which to disseminate various information and media on the World Wide Web.  What makes a blog unique is that it is mainly comprised of entries, or posts, that are updated frequently in chronological order and are archived in such a way as to be easily retrieved.  Another feature, differing from regular websites, is that each post becomes its own permanent link to the web, making it more readily available to search engines.  A blog also usually allows for visitors of the site to contribute comments.  It is fluid and up-to-the-minute.

What are some types and examples of blogs?

The most popular blog on the web is The Huffington Post, created by Arianna Huffington, an adroit media sensation in her own right.  It imitates a traditional newspaper format, but is laden with political opinion and editorial license.  Other types of blogs include how-to or instructional, cultural or lifestyle, and reviews of products, food or the arts.  The second most popular blog is TMZ, which stands for the thirty mile zone around the Los Angeles area.  It is a cultural phenomenon, covering all the latest happenings of the stars, but is also stingingly satirical, another form of blog altogether.  There are collaborative blogs and ones that take on the form of personal diaries or, even, temper tantrum rants.

Why do people blog?

I found the word, Meme, used to describe a blog and it may be a good way to illustrate why people use blogs.  Coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, “meme” is a derivation of ancient greek, related to “mime” and analogous to “gene”.  Just as a gene transmits biological attributes from one organism to another, a meme is a unit for passing cultural ideas, symbols or practices from one human being to another through imitable forms of expression.  Some examples Dawkins gave were melodies, catch-phrases and fashion.  Blogs could be viewed in this way as part of “cultural evolution” with their own natural selection determined by popular interest.  They have, in a very short time, become woven into the fabric of international human interaction.  

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. James Baldwin (1961)

I chose this quote to use in a posterboard presentation about addiction for school a couple of semesters ago.  It was grouped with a few other notable words, such as George Carlin’s phrase, “Just because you’ve got the monkey off your back, doesn’t mean the circus has left town.”  I must admit that I hadn’t the faintest notion of the context of the quote or even where it came from, but the words have resonated with me in so many incidences since that it came to mind right away as probably my favorite quote of all.  Though the message has obvious connotations to the phenomenon of addiction, I have found that it has a much deeper meaning as it relates to the human condition in general.

James Baldwin used this sentence in the introduction of his book, Nobody Knows My Name, a collection of essays about race relations in America.  It was relatively early in his career, when he was still referring to himself as a Negro.  The affliction shed pertained to the racial prejudice that had “menaced” him his whole life, until he decided to move to Europe to pursue his writing career.  There, Mr. Baldwin found that the color of a person’s skin did not have the same importance as it did in the US, that he could no longer count on the two strikes against him that he was used to.  He said that, suddenly, the ingrained responses he had clung to for so long had no meaning, that for the growth of his creative process, he now had to look within his own self.  And that self did not have the crutch of blame to lean on.

What is this self, as if no one has asked this question countless times?  Carl Jung, in The Undiscovered Self as psychoanalysis was taking hold, was staking claim to psychology as the window to the unconscious, which he said, “if not regarded outright as a sort of refuse bin underneath the conscious mind, is at any rate supposed to be of ‘merely animal nature’.”  The animal nature part was a dig delivered to Freud as part of their ongoing feud; he thought the unconscious might be somewhat more important.  We have to remember that the world had, at this time, engaged in devastating world wars that had been enabled by rapidly progressing technology.  Humankind had become acutely aware of an uncertain future, even to the extent of possible annihilation.  Just as in feudal times, huddled masses sought the protection of the church and the State was emerging as another social construction, providing these same masses with the comfort of nationalism.  Jung and many others were espousing a new exaltation of the individual in response to the horror that mass mentality seemed to be perpetrating.  Jung said that, “absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proof”, referring to God as the explanation for everything.

It was only surprisingly few years later that James Baldwin, during the beat generation to be followed by the whole Civil Rights and Hippie Movements, would be looking to the individual self as the answer.  I find it a little more surprising, though, how quickly it became fashionable to find one’s self, sitting alone on a mountaintop or staring into one’s navel.  The absolute certainty that Jung was talking about was being taken to an extreme, along with just about everything else.

Today, science shows us that the brain houses trillions of neurons that fire messages back and forth in numbers that have hundreds of zeros at the end.  Only a miniscule portion of that activity is what could be called conscious.  If anything, the dangers to life present a hundred years ago have expanded to such a degree as to be incomprehensible, along with the population.  It may be time to face the fact that whatever our conscious mind thinks about it all is relatively insignificant.  I believe that our affliction is one of the soul and it can be gauged by the difference between our view of our self and how others see it.  David Brooks, in his new book, The Social Animal, said that “a brain is something that develops inside the skull of the individual; a mind grows through interaction with others”.  He points out that our every expression, the words we use, just about all that we would call our self, we got through our relationships with someone else.  I think that our crutch is the insistence on our certainty as individuals.  We hold on to blame, as Baldwin did, and our reasons to dislike and our excuses for wrongdoing, as if no one else could see.  The fear is that if we reached out, letting go of theses ingrained responses, we would be rejected.  The paradox is that the self must be cast aside to reach its own fulfillment, just as the actual crutch must be in order to walk.