Pubdate: Sat, 25 Nov 2006
Source: Maple Ridge News (CN BC)
Copyright: 2006 Maple Ridge News
Contact:  http://www.mapleridgenews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1328
Author: Kristen Thompson

A JOURNEY INTO SUBSTANCE ABUSE

A Maple Ridge addictions counsellor is challenging mainstream 
perceptions of substance abuse and treatment therapy in his new book 
about a novel approach to substance abuse therapy.

A Long Night's Journey Into Day, written by Geoff Thompson, a 
clinical addictions counsellor at Maple Ridge Treatment Centre, is a 
psychobiography of American Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning 
playwright Eugene O'Neill, whose recovery from alcoholism is used as 
a model for a new approach to addictions therapy promoted by Thompson.

O'Neill's struggle, exposed through his writings and interviews, 
shows how addiction and recovery are not about a medical condition, 
but about a person overcoming an existential crisis.

Thompson suggests mainstream perceptions of substance abuse 
incorrectly assume addiction is simply a medical or moral defect, 
rather than a part of the human condition, and proposes the use of an 
existential psychological method to treatment which, he purports, 
matches the manner in which O'Neill overcame his own struggle.

O'Neill, who died 53 years ago this week at 65, was only able to quit 
drinking when he found a life worth living. His recovery, said 
Thompson, depended not on refraining from drinking, but on resolving 
his own spiritual crisis.

He said the perceived lack of a meaningful life, as in O'Neill's 
case, fuels an addict's dependence on drugs or alcohol.

"They're struggling as any other person does. [Many] can't rely on 
any kind of middle class respectability. They can't say, 'Well, at 
least I'm a good father or have a job.' They don't have that luxury. 
They have to face the cosmos naked, and there's no easy way around 
facing loneliness and boredom. So they use the drug as part of a 
coping mechanism to survive in that existence."

"[O'Neill] was as big an addict as we have at the Maple Ridge 
treatment centre," said Thompson.

It was his approach to life that helped him recover, and Thompson 
said he can help his patients in the same way.

He said that mainstream therapy -- which teaches harm reduction and 
coping skills -- doesn't do enough to address the underlying cause of 
addiction, which centre around feelings of displacement, disconnect 
and a sense of having no purpose in life.

Recovery, he said, requires finding a resolution to the deeper 
existential crisis that fuels drug use. This, he said, is the 
existential-spiritual approach to understanding and treating addiction.

"The idea is actually thousands of years old, but it's recently 
emerged as a new way of looking at addiction," said Thompson. "It's 
on the cutting edge of psychology. There's no pathology involved. 
We're dealing with individuals instead of making sweeping statements. 
We don't pin it to a drug. The way it's phrased by neurologists is 
that addiction is not in the drug, addiction is in the person. 
There's something in the person that makes them vulnerable to that drug."

Thompson said the medical community often uses the same 
existential-spiritual template when counselling geriatric patients 
and patients in palliative care, but only recently is it being 
applied to addictions.

The title of the book plays on that of an O'Neill play called Long 
Day's Journey Into Night, an autobiographical account of living with 
a drug-addicted mother and alcoholic father. Thompson switched the 
words in the title to represent the struggle through the dark night 
of addiction to emerge into the light of health.

Thompson has been a counsellor at MRTC, a residential addiction 
centre for men, since 1999, and received his masters degree in 
counselling psychology at Trinity Western.

He is in the process of contributing to another book focusing on the 
application of this therapeutic process.

The first book, he said, lays the groundwork, and "deals with the 
theoretical aspects of addiction, and now we're going to actually 
write an application for it."

Thompson will co-author the follow-up book with his mentor, Dr. Paul 
Wong, a clinician and researcher out of Ontario.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine