This brings me to the point of my posting. What has not been carefully considered is the truth value of Mr. Frey's summary of his trully remarkable {fanciful?} self treatment and cure.
If I got the facts straight Mr. Frey was a drug and alcohol abuser for ten years before he decided in a relatively short period of time to go straight. Apparently he always had a sense of self sufficiency that took the form that the only true way to recover from his addiction is to take seriously Ms. Reagan's advice to JUST SAY NO. This assumes an iron will and the psychological capacity to go cold turkey and sustain it.
Apparently aiding him in his self treamtment regimen was resonating to the zen like readings that describe states of at-one-ment plus the experience of having fallen in love with Lilly.
Now to my point. Having been on the front lines of addiction recovery for the past 38 years {one of the founders of Odyssey House - an innovative therapeutic community for the treatment of heroin addicts in 1967) - I have never worked with a substance abuser who could effect such an impressive cure using will power alone {and or feeling in love}such as that descibed by Mr. Frey.
If my experience is accurate then what are we to make about Mr. Frey's testimonial? That he was a substance abuser I have no doubt. But in my experience the key to understanding the individual substance abuser is not in identifying the symptoms but in assessing the relative strength or weakness of the individuals' psychological structure. {Structure = the integration or lack of integration between the id, ego, super ego, and self}
In my professional experience: truly entrenched substance abusers suffer from a lack of a solid identity { an incohesive self} and massive ego weaknness { the internal traffic cop that mediates between the drives (id wants, and the internalized law (super ego shoulds and shoul nots).
Such ego weak people are reactive lacking the capacity to reflect due to their undeveloped egos. We refer to such people as impulse driven. Simply put: they are unable to be patient.Unable to wait patiently they act rather than to reflect when they find themselves stuck. Such people complain about an inability to trust anyone including themselves. This is so because their deficiencies prevent them from sustaining constancy with either others or themselves. They appear to be all over the place. Is this fixable?
Developmental research indicates that the key to the spontaneous development of a cohesive self and a strong ego is the capacity of any person to be able to tolerate increasing dosages of frustration and other so called negative affects such as anxiety, depression, ambiguity, ambivalence, not knowing, weakness, inadequacy, and the like. At the slightest signs of being disappointed or in disappointing they tend to cut, cut off, and run, hide, duck, freeze, become numb, dissociate, lie, cheat, streal, and or use a substance to either hide the pain or create artificial excitement.
Applied to substance abusers, if the above analysis is accurate, then the most effective substance abuse programs will be those that focus mainly on aiding the patients to increase their affect tolerance {mainly negative but sometimes positive as well} resulting in the spontaneous growth of a cohesive self and a strong ego.
This process has to be carried out in an atmosphere that by its nature is trustworthy. Trust is defined as I say what I mean and I mean what I say. Such an atmosphere has to be free of double messages and denied contradictions. This is so because the substance abuser who suffers from a lack of basic trust needs to connect to at least one trustworthy 'counselor' to have an experience of trust so as to make a connection with the self as trustworthy. {In virtually all of the entrenched substance abusers I have worked with, they have communicated a litany of traumatic betrayals of trust with one or more seminal authorities in their lives.}
At Odyssey House - despite some glaring contradictions - there were enough counselors who were truly trustworthy to enable many raw addicts (often subtance abusers with serious records over ten and more years} to use as a bridge eventually enabling them to become solid psychological citizens in only 12 months of concentrated treatment.
That Mr. Frey claims he did it on his own in 6 weeks - all the while distrusting the counselors in his program - strikes me as a total fabrication of objective reality. Accepting the fact that he was to some degree a substance abuser my conclusion is that either (l) the degree of his addiction was from the start much much less than he claimed and, or (2) his psychological structure was considerably more developed than than that which fits the pattern of the entrenched "junkee" he claims to represent.
So what is my point? My concern is that that the readership indicates that there is a wide audience of those touched directly or indirectly by substance abuse {and implied childhood trauma}. Many of these readers are no doubt looking for inspiration, hope, and, a quick treatment fix. I fear they will be seduced into thinking that Mr. Frey's so called truthful account of his inner struggle for self mastery fits less the objective facts - hence truthiness- and, instead, is more a romantic fantasy of his yet to be identified and worked through grandiosity.
They will likely start of like roman candles sparked off on New Years' Eve but at the first crisis of trust they are likely to be traumatically disappointed and fall into an even greater hole of depression, and despair.
With even the most virulent symptoms of substance abuse, cure and self mastery is possible but if my personal and professional experience counts for anything, it is only possible if the substance abuser engages in a dedicated process of struggling with struggle for self understanding. There is no quick cure, in which will power alone is not the answer.
The substance abuser in search of self mastery has to engage in a committed relationships in which they can experience all of the colors of their own personal rainbow thus learning how to trust one other real live person as a bridge to learning how to trust themselves.
The words of Spinoza are apt: "All excellent things worth attaining are as difficult as they are rare."
Frey writes book, makes up stuff, gets caught, will write another book about the whole thing. And make even more money.
Posted by: Daniel Zukowski | January 28, 2006 at 11:12 PM