Philip Seymour Hoffman, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, John Belushi and Cory Monteith. All died an early death due to their addictions. What is the origin and truth about drug addiction?
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| The recent overdose death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the great American actor, has thrust addiction and the war on drugs back into the spotlight. | |
| And I think it's very, very important, if not downright essential, that we have an intelligent, informed Medically aware, scientifically sound discussion of the origins and effects of addiction so that we can actually help people rather than persecuting them with all the armed might of the state and herding them into the rape room of American prisons wherein more black Americans languish than were slaves under the early republic. | |
| So when it comes to addiction, particularly in celebrities, The morgue list is tragic and growing. | |
| Philip Seymour Hoffman, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, John Belushi, and the Glee star Cory Monteith, the ones that pop into mind, who died from tragic overdoses of usually illicit drugs. | |
| Now, first thing to understand. | |
| There is no drug that is inherently addictive. | |
| No drug is inherently addictive. | |
| The vast majority of people who try legal or illegal mind-altering substances never become addicted. | |
| And this has been reproduced again and again. | |
| Even the Vietnam veterans of the 1960s who used heroin to survive the horrors of combat Did not, for the most part, remain heroin addicts when they returned back home. | |
| The number of heroin addicts was seven to eight percent of those who were using the substance in Vietnam who remained using it after they returned. | |
| So, what is the X factor? | |
| Why are some people susceptible to addiction? | |
| It's not the drug itself. | |
| There is some other factor, some X factor, which we're going to talk about in this presentation. | |
| And look, You can be addicted to a wide variety of things. | |
| Shopping, gambling, sex, the internet, pornography, drugs, and so on. | |
| So it is important to understand this. | |
| Most people have someone in their family or extended family who has problems with addiction. | |
| So this is very important information to understand. | |
| And I hope that it informs public policy. | |
| And, of course, the sources will all be in the description for the video and the podcast. | |
| So what is it that makes people vulnerable? | |
| Well, we have to go pre-birth to really understand all of that. | |
| We are born way too early as a species. | |
| You know, we have these giant heads that basically get pushed out of our mama's hoo-hoo about three minutes before they become too big to get pushed out of our mama's hoo-hoo. | |
| And this means that the vast majority of brain development occurs after As is true for physiological development. | |
| Like a horse can run the first day that it comes out of its mom's womb. | |
| We take about two years to achieve the same feat. | |
| So we are born with no capacity for emotional self-regulation, what is called self-soothing, which is why babies cry until... | |
| You pick them up or feed them or change them or cuddle or play with them because they don't have the capacity to soothe themselves. | |
| We are born without that capacity at all. | |
| What that means is that our brain's capacity for self-soothing develops physiologically after birth. | |
| Self-regulation is like the beard of brain development. | |
| It's long after birth that it comes into being, and it comes into being based upon the environment. | |
| So, let's figure out how drugs work and then we'll figure out what's missing for most addicts. | |
| So drugs work by binding to receptors on nerve cells within the brain. | |
| So like a plug and a wall socket, the drugs plug into these receptors. | |
| Opiates Like morphine and heroin, they work on built-in receptors for endorphins. | |
| And endorphins are the body's own natural opiate-like substances that they deal with pain and they help regulate mood and they make you feel happy and content. | |
| There's something called the runner's high, which is when you run for so long you get endorphins. | |
| Now, on the other hand, there are tranquilizers like Valium. | |
| They're of the benzodiazepine class, and they exert their effects on the brain's natural benzodiazepine receptors. | |
| They sort of shoulder out whatever's there by naturally and really plug into these things. | |
| And when you get too much of these artificial substances in the brain that bind to the brain's receptors, the brain shuts down receptors, which is why you get a crash after a high. | |
| So there are other Brain chemicals, notably serotonin and dopamine, that affect things like incentive, reward-seeking behavior and self-regulation, and they bind as well to specific receptors on neurons. | |
| So, to give you a graphic example of what that means, dopamine is a motivational chemical. | |
| It makes you yearn, it makes you want, it gives you energy, and so on. | |
| And when they genetically engineer mice to not have much dopamine, the mice just sit there. | |
| And if you put food into the mice's mouth, then it will eat it and say, yeah, that's good, right? | |
| But if you put the food like a couple of inches away, the mouse will not go to get it. | |
| It has that little motivation. | |
| It will, in fact, starve to death rather than go and get the food that is a few inches away from its mouth. | |
| So when you have no motivation, when you feel depressed, this may have something to do with... | |
| A shortage of either dopamine or dopamine receptors. | |
| Now, the numbers of receptors that you have for these chemicals and the level of your brain chemicals is not set at birth. | |
| So infant rats who get less petting from their mothers end up with few of the natural benzo receptors in the parts of the brain that control anxiety. | |
| In other words, they feel more anxiety, and when they feel that anxiety, they have less capacity to self-regulate that anxiety, in a sense, quote, to talk themselves down from that. | |
| Brains of infant monkeys who are separated from their mothers for only a few days are measurably deficient in dopamine. | |
| And the same is true for human beings. | |
| So, when you're a baby and your mother or your father cuddles and coos and sings and massages and plays with you and feeds you with eye contact and smiles and positively responds to your moods and thoughts and so on, You get endorphins. | |
| The endorphins are released in your brain. | |
| And the endorphins being in your brain promote the growth of the receptors on the cells that receive the endorphins and other brain chemicals. | |
| Now, if you don't get enough cuddling and positive mirrored interactions with a caregiver as a baby, You will not develop higher endorphin levels and you will also not develop the endorphin receptors as much and therefore you will have a greater craving for external sources. | |
| So... | |
| The emotional self-regulation and generally just being relatively happy with yourself and being alive, having the capacity to love, having the capacity to exchange thoughts and feelings with other people, intimacy and so on, these all depend upon highly complex self-regulatory systems that develop in the brain based upon Your early childhood exposures to love or stress. | |
| And if you are exposed to a lot of stress, you end up with brain damage relative to what you could have had otherwise. | |
| And therefore, it's important to understand that if you have lower levels and receptors of these very important brain chemicals, you will have a great desire, a hunger, a need to get these chemicals from somewhere else. | |
| So if you don't have a fully developed dopamine system, you're going to be far more likely to crave stimulants like nicotine, caffeine, and drugs like cocaine. | |
| This provides you that incentive. | |
| It doesn't make you feel like superhuman. | |
| It just kind of makes you feel normal, like a normal human being. | |
| And then when you crash, the agony of your prior existence is really sharply evident to you. | |
| Cocaine, for instance, which increases these dopamine levels and triggers intense feelings of euphoria and elation, wears off very quickly. | |
| And when it wears off, if you flood your body with this dopamine, the receptors turn off to shield themselves from too much of the chemical. | |
| Therefore, when it crashes, you really crash. | |
| So... | |
| Think of somebody who starts off with a happiness level of like 100. | |
| Normal average happiness. | |
| They take a drug, they go to 110, maybe 115, then they come back down to maybe 98, 90, and then a day or two later they're back to 100. | |
| So it's like, well, that was fun, but you don't have this intense hunger for it. | |
| But somebody who starts off with a happiness level of 20 or 10 or maybe even minus 10, when they take the drug and they get to 80 or 90 or 100, they actually feel pain-free, anxiety-free, agony-free. | |
| For the first time in their lives, they feel normal. | |
| Then when they crash, they go down to minus 30, minus 40, and then they really, really have a hunger to get back to that state, which is why there is this compulsion to repeat. | |
| And of course, as we know, as you continue this, your body's natural production of these brain chemicals diminishes, the receptors shut down, and therefore it becomes very hard to get out of that cycle. | |
| It's essential to understand that the brain, the human brain processes Pain. | |
| The same. | |
| Whether it's physical pain or psychological pain. | |
| Physical pain or emotional pain. | |
| So a baby experiences rejection or coldness or abuse and you know in many countries 80 to 90 plus percent of parents are hitting infants and toddlers. | |
| That level of stress, that level of cortisol that produces in the brain truly interferes with this stuff and the baby processes that agony And the brain throughout your life will process emotional agony in the same place and in the same way as it processes physical pain. | |
| So a significant rejection is processed by the brain the same as a stabbing, as a stab wound. | |
| Now, of course, if you were being stabbed every morning when you got up and you were dragging yourself through the day, winded, agonized, bleeding... | |
| And you then took a drug which got rid of that pain. | |
| And then when the drug wore off, that pain of the stabbing intensified. | |
| You would be incredibly driven and drawn to continue taking that drug. | |
| Consequences be damned. | |
| I mean, and everyone knows that extreme drug addiction leads to incredibly toxic diseases. | |
| Liver damage, hepatitis, lose your teeth, the skin gets horrifying, you lose any kind of looks, your beauty, any of those things. | |
| But life without these drugs is literally unbearable for people, which is why they keep taking these drugs. | |
| It is a medical problem. | |
| It is brain damage that results from early childhood neglect and trauma. | |
| And these people are attempting to self-medicate to supply externally the substances which the brain, had it been nurtured properly, would be producing on its own. | |
| They're attempting to fill a deficiency that results from early neglect and abuse. | |
| So, why on earth would there be a war on drugs? | |
| It's not a war on drugs. | |
| I get caught with cocaine, I go to jail, the cocaine goes somewhere else. | |
| It's a war on addicts, and addicts in general. | |
| Are victims of intense early childhood stressors, abuse and so on? | |
| And in what other field of any kind of compassionate care or public health do we round up at gunpoint and throw into the rape rooms of American prisons victims of physical ailments? | |
| It is morally revolting to do that to people. | |
| Of course, it is stress and abuse that causes these problems in the brain. | |
| And therefore, to subject these people to further stress and abuse by persecuting them, rounding them up, and throwing them in prisons only intensifies the problems that caused this dysfunction to begin with. | |
| So, it's just, it's horrendous. | |
| So, to give an example, Agabar Mate, who's been on this show, and who is an essential person to read in the realm of Hungry Ghost, is an essential book to read in this area. | |
| He has been an addict physician, a physician to extreme addicts in Vancouver's downtown Eastside. | |
| He was doing it for over 12 years, and he said in the entire 12 years, there was not one single female addict who came to him who had not been raped as a child. | |
| It's an attempt to self-medicate a spiritual wound that the body processes in the same way as physical pain. | |
| And the idea that we're going to throw these people in jail is absolutely horrendous. | |
| So he writes, here's an example. | |
| He writes about Priscilla, a 32-year-old woman who came panting into my office with a high fever and a strangulating cough. | |
| Her pneumonia began several days ago when she woke after one of Vancouver's heavy windstorms to find that the windows of her dilapidated hotel room had been shattered during the night and that the water in her sink was frozen solid. | |
| Priscilla is one of the enemy in the war on drugs. | |
| She sells cocaine to support her own habit. | |
| A dependence from which no calamity has been able to shake her loose, not the loss of her child, not HIV, not multiple illnesses, not brutal beatings at the hands of male, quote, clients. | |
| She became one of the enemy at 15, when after many years of sexual abuse by her grandfather and uncle, her mother injected her with heroin and sold her into prostitution. | |
| These are the victims. | |
| We are persecuting. | |
| This is the moral reality of the war on drugs. | |
| A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that, quote, a history of childhood abuse per se is related to increased nervous and hormonal stress reactivity, which is further enhanced when additional trauma is experienced in adulthood. | |
| And we'll talk about celebrities in a moment, and you can find this occurring over and over again. | |
| And it's not just the persecution. | |
| Although that is certainly a part of it. | |
| But the entire environment of the war on drugs continues to re-traumatize these victims of child abuse. | |
| Ostracism in society, harassment by the police, dire poverty, disease, and of course they're frantically hunting for a reliable source for their drug. | |
| And this is all completely monstrous. | |
| So, for example, if you have a cocaine habit of $3,000 a month, Not extreme, but an average habit. | |
| You have to probably shoplift about $30,000 worth of stuff every month to pay for that habit, because when you shoplift something, you just need to unload it quickly in order to get the drug, and the people who are buying the stolen goods from you know that you are desperate, and they'll generally mark down whatever it is you've got to sell them by 90%, so you have to steal 10 times the value of your drug. | |
| In order to feed the drug habit, and that is the major problem in society. | |
| It's the illegality. | |
| So, in the 1960s, before heroin was outlawed in England, You could get three hits of heroin at a pharmacy for about 25 pennies, and then a couple of years after it was outlawed, it was 10 pounds for one hit. | |
| This has huge ramifications for the war drugs. | |
| The more profitable something becomes, the more incentive people have to get other people hooked on it. | |
| So they'll give you free samples, and they'll give you increasingly strong samples of the drug in order to get you hooked because it's so profitable for the drug dealer to get you hooked. | |
| This is why they target teenagers and younger people and so on to get them hooked. | |
| Of course, because there is a war on drugs, the drugs get more concentrated because you have to hide them from law enforcement, you have to smuggle them. | |
| Therefore, the more concentrated the drug, the more profit there is for that drug. | |
| This is why marijuana has become so much stronger over the last 40 years and this is why they are including in heroin bags these days drugs that are actually designed for cancer patients to treat physical pain in cancer patients. | |
| And that is, of course, a huge problem. | |
| Philip Seymour Hoffman was found of 50 bags of heroin in his room. | |
| And this concentration of the drug is natural and inevitable as a result. | |
| And, of course, a lack of safety. | |
| I mean, you don't know how safe it is because you have no legal recourse to a lack of safety because you're in the black market or the gray market to begin with. | |
| So, if you knock out some of these brain chemicals, particularly endorphins, if you knock out these brain chemicals in mice, you separate the mice from their mothers. | |
| Baby mice don't even cry out. | |
| They lack even that motivation. | |
| So, why are some people susceptible to addiction? | |
| Because their existence is agony because of childhood trauma and neglect and abuse. | |
| And drugs fit like a jigsaw puzzle and for a temporary amount of time elevate them to a normal standard of human functioning, after which they then crash even lower than they were before to an unbearable state. | |
| And I think we can empathize with and appreciate what a difficult situation that is. | |
| You know, if a man has a brain tumor and commits a crime, Let's say that the brain tumor is attacking the neofrontal cortex, the inhibitor for the impulses. | |
| We do not charge him with the crime. | |
| We treat him for the brain damage caused by the brain tumor. | |
| In the same way, if somebody is an addict, there are ways of treating the brain for this damage that has occurred in early childhood. | |
| The treatment really is around finding safer substitutes for the drugs, slowly weaning them off and providing them therapy, love, support, understanding, compassion. | |
| These people were victimized as babies. | |
| For God's sake, can we find no shred of goddamn human compassion for the struggles that they have to endure? | |
| And can we at least not side with their early abusers and persecute them further as they enter into adulthood? | |
| It's unbelievably horrendous. | |
| So, we'll look at a couple of childhoods. | |
| There is a pattern. | |
| This is not proven. | |
| This is just a thesis, a hypothesis, I guess you could say. | |
| So, what I have found in doing some research onto the childhoods of people who die from addiction, the more that they put the blame and anger on the abusers, The better off they tend to do. | |
| And so if they fall prey to the general social commandment to forgive abusers, they generally tend to do worse. | |
| I think there are strong psychological reasons for that. | |
| But again, that's just a thesis. | |
| I'm not going to say that that's proven, but it's something to keep your eye out for when you look into this stuff. | |
| So let's start with Cory Monteith, a singer and actor who was in Glee. | |
| So he was born to an interior decorator and a military man in Canada who served in Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. | |
| And there's actually a picture online of him shooting a machine gun with his father. | |
| He has an older brother named Sean. | |
| Now, his parents divorced when he was seven years old. | |
| And his father vanished from his life for about 17 years. | |
| Now, divorce occurs after many years of tumult and not getting along, and of course his father would have been somewhat absent, as was Jimi Hendrix's father, who was actually jailed so he wouldn't go and see his son, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes. | |
| But from the age of 13, he started using alcohol, marijuana, and so on, and skipping school. | |
| And he was in a number of anti-drug programs as a teenager. | |
| He was an incredible thief, of course, stole from everyone around him to support his drug habit. | |
| And between 13 and 16, he was in 12 different schools, including several aimed at troubled teens. | |
| And a lot of these were very harsh programs. | |
| So during the years, he was locked inside troubled teen programs, which is 95 to 98. | |
| The tough love idea is how you're supposed to deal with this addiction. | |
| Tactics were aimed at breaking youth through physical and emotional abuse, everything from solitary confinement, punitive restraint and sleep and food deprivation, to public humiliation like wearing signs saying, I am an asshole, being made to dress in drag and being forced to scrub bathrooms with the same toothbrush that you must later use to brush your teeth. | |
| So if early trauma produces this brain damage, which is only alleviated by external substances, then continuing abuse and trauma and inflicting horror on these people is only going to make the situation worse, as you can well imagine. | |
| Love, compassion and therapy, understanding and sympathy seems to work. | |
| In fact, it's been proven to work very well. | |
| Abstinence from drugs does not seem to be very effective. | |
| In fact, it's exceedingly dangerous. | |
| Of course, as you know, the body develops tolerance for these kinds of substances. | |
| So as you keep taking, say, heroin, you have to take more to get the high and also takes you higher amounts to overdose. | |
| Your body develops resistance because the receptors shut down in your brain. | |
| Now, if you abstain for a few weeks, then your receptors begin to recharge, regrow, open up again. | |
| And then if you use again, what would have been normal for you in the past now becomes fatal. | |
| So most deadly overdoses occur either in someone who's never taken the drug before or when experienced users or addicts come out of rehab or prison. | |
| So the first two weeks after prison, for instance, carry an overdose risk that is more than 120 times higher than typical among users, according to at least one study. | |
| And if you doubt these correlations, the simple fact is that if you experience significant what are called adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, you are 46 times, 46 times more likely to become a drug addict. | |
| So the National Institute on Drug Abuse long advocated for a maintenance program or maintenance treatments with drugs like methadone and suboxone to treat opioid addictions rather than just absence. | |
| You can be a high-functioning drug user. | |
| One of the most famous surgeons in the 19th century in America was an unbelievable doctor. | |
| Opiate addict would take astonishing amounts of opiates and wrote one of the first textbooks on surgery, was the most sought-after and successful surgeon of his time. | |
| You can be a high-functioning addict, but of course he existed in a time where it was legal. | |
| Now, these drugs, they're not just killing celebrities, so poisoning deaths, most of which are due to drugs, have actually overtaken car accidents as the leading cause of death, or accidental death in the U.S., which they're responsible for about 40,000 fatalities annually. | |
| And, of course, one of the reasons why heroin has surged, almost doubling recently, heroin use has surged, is because the government is cutting down on prescription opiates, and that is a big problem. | |
| People can't get the prescription opiates, which are safer, of course, and so they turn to black market opiates instead. | |
| This is just another one of the ways in which government programs designed to keep people safe achieve the exact opposite. | |
| So, in late 2009, Cory Monteith Gleesinger reunited with his father for the first time in 17 years. | |
| He says, we'd spoken maybe three or four times during that period, and he reached out to me on Facebook. | |
| I couldn't shut the door, so I got on a plane. | |
| He greeted me at the airport, and he and his stepmother were so happy that they were almost crying. | |
| It was a good time. | |
| At some point, you realize your parents are human. | |
| They make the best decisions they can with the options available to them. | |
| Now, this kind of... | |
| Forgiveness, without blame or moral responsibility, again, according to my tentative hypothesis, does appear to be problematic, and we'll look for this pattern as we go forward. | |
| Babies are very angry to be abused and neglected, and if you don't process that anger, if you vault over the anger to the soft, hallmark goo of forgiveness, I think it's highly dangerous. | |
| Heath Ledger, whose last role, of course, One of his last roles was as the Joker in Batman, died as a result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of a true alphabet soup of drugs and seems to have been accidental. | |
| He had significant trouble sleeping throughout most of his adult life. | |
| He said... | |
| He said, last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. | |
| I couldn't stop thinking. | |
| My body was exhausted and my mind was still going. | |
| Now this is, of course, an absence of self-soothing, an absence of an ability to calm yourself down. | |
| And his former fiancé, Michelle Williams, said, for as long as I had known him, he'd had bouts with insomnia. | |
| He had too much energy. | |
| His mind was turning, turning, turning, always turning. | |
| And... | |
| His parents separated when he was 10 and divorced when he was 11, and he had, in many ways, quite a difficult experience as a child. | |
| Marilyn Monroe, one of the most celebrated beauties and actresses of mid-20th century, She was, according to her own reports, abused as a child and went through many foster homes and so on. | |
| And then she ended up, of course, an overdose of barbiturates. | |
| Jim Morrison, the singer for The Doors, was raised by a military father. | |
| And if you listen to the soft parade, I think you can hear him imitating his father. | |
| And... | |
| Morrison's brother Andy said that the parents had determined never to use physical corporate punishment, such as spanking on their children. | |
| They instead instilled discipline and levied punishment by the military tradition known as a dressing down. | |
| And you can find Stanley Kubrick's full metal jacket, examples of this on YouTube. | |
| They actually got a marine drill sergeant, hired him to be a consultant on a film, and he ended up actually just playing the role. | |
| So this consisted of yelling at and berating the children, We're good to go. | |
| Leads to this kind of susceptibility. | |
| Jimi Hendrix, a fiery, gorgeously brilliant guitarist of the 1960s, was again the son of a military father. | |
| His father Al was denied the standard military furlough, afforded servicemen for childbirth. | |
| His commanding officer placed him in the stockade to prevent him from going AWOL to see his infant son in Seattle. | |
| He spent two months locked up without trial and while in the stockade received a telegram announcing his son's birth. | |
| So he was absent for three years in the military while his mother struggled to raise Jimi Hendrix as a baby boy and would often abandon him to go clubbing and so on in the nightlife, go to discos and so on. | |
| And while his father was away, he was cared for mostly by family members and friends, especially Lucille's sister, Dolores. | |
| And then his father got an honorable discharge from the army at the September 1945. | |
| And... | |
| He actually couldn't find his wife, just couldn't find her. | |
| So the father went to the Berkeley home of a family friend named Mrs. | |
| Champ who had taken care of and had attempted to adopt Hendricks. | |
| Al saw his son for the first time. | |
| So here we have a lack of bonding, absent father, obviously a fairly irresponsible mother, and a wide variety of extended family and strangers, for him at least, friends of the family raising him. | |
| And this was horrendous. | |
| So, Jimi Hendrix's father united with his mother, but he couldn't find any steady work, and they ended up abusing alcohol, and they often fought, sometimes physically, when intoxicated. | |
| And Jimi Hendrix, when he was little, would be so terrified of this physical and verbal violence that he would withdraw and hide in a closet in their home. | |
| And He had a brother Leon born in 1948 but he went in and out of foster care and they lived in almost constant threat of fraternal separation and this is just horrendous and Jimi Hendrix also confided to a girlfriend that he'd been the victim of sexual abuse by a man in uniform and tragically he then ended up as a drug addict Hendrix | |
| had taken nine Vesperex sleeping tablets 18 times the recommended dosage. | |
| Philip Seymour Hoffman, I can't find much out about his childhood, so this is all in the realm of hopefully mildly informed theorizing. | |
| His parents divorced when he was nine, and again we can assume this is after years of fighting and disagreements. | |
| His mother then became a lawyer after His parents divorced, and you can imagine that she would then be away quite a bit studying for the bar, getting her degree in studying for the bar. | |
| And then his mother, Philip Seymour Hoffman's mother, became a judge in family court. | |
| For those who don't know, considered by many, and I think justly so, to be very anti-male and pro-female. | |
| So did Philip Seymour Hoffman have issues with his mother's possible hostility towards men? | |
| I mean, you couldn't be sympathetic towards men and be a family court judge. | |
| I think it would just turn your stomach too much. | |
| So does this have an effect? | |
| He thanked his mother when receiving his Oscar, so there doesn't seem to be any negative... | |
| Judgments against his parents, which I would argue is a return to the original anger of the abused and neglected infant, which is going to be the best course for getting out of this kind of dysfunction. | |
| To experience the early genuine feelings to reconnect with the violated self does appear to be one of the best ways of avoiding the cycle of abuse. | |
| I myself spent a couple of years in therapy, three hours a week, and worked like 10 to 15 hours in addition to that on journaling and self-knowledge. | |
| I got in touch with a lot of early anger, and that has really helped me to have a very happy marriage, to be a very close and happy father with my daughter, a stay-at-home dad as I am. | |
| So I think it really works, and I think there's lots of evidence that that kind of stuff works. | |
| But if you want to vault over the anger phase and go straight towards forgiveness, it seems to be quite negative. | |
| Lindsay Lohan, in and out of jail and in trouble with the law, two DUIs and cocaine possession and so on, was raised by what would appear to be a complete sociopath. | |
| Her father was in the financial industry, was a drug abuser, an alcohol abuser. | |
| She caught him cheating on their mom. | |
| And he also recorded a fight that Lindsay Lohan had with her mother and then released it to the media, which, of course, was intensely humiliating. | |
| But she claims to be very close to her mother. | |
| So, again, one parent she doesn't have any contact with and reviles as a monster. | |
| But the other parent she's attached to and doesn't seem to recognize that her mother did, in fact, choose this man as her father and has some significant moral responsibility in the matter. | |
| So she's not OD'd because she's at least blaming one parent, but she's not free of addiction because she's not assigning moral responsibility and re-experiencing the early anger and hostility that comes from this kind of stuff. | |
| So, you can, of course, look into this more. | |
| If you find more information out about celebrities, I think it's really important to understand the root causes of addiction and how it manifests. | |
| You know, one other minor example that comes to mind, Freddie Mercury used a lot of cocaine, particularly when composing music. | |
| This is where Bohemian Rhapsody appears to have come from. | |
| He was raised and sent off to boarding school at the age of eight, where he complained that headmasters were chasing him around a table. | |
| And I was in boarding school. | |
| I can certainly tell you that when the headmasters catch you, it ends a game attack. | |
| And so if he experienced early sexual abuse at the hands of headmasters in Zanzibar, this would be a huge problem for him growing up. | |
| And he had intensely vicious fights. | |
| And one time he was supposed to sing in the evening. | |
| He spent all day screaming at his boyfriend and they could barely rescue his voice in time for him to sing. | |
| Broke glass over one of his assistants' heads, had this raging... | |
| temper and drug addiction and of course was addicted to a highly dangerous lifestyle of night clubbing when AIDS was emerging in Munich and New York and even after he tested negative for AIDS continued to have unprotected sex which is obviously a form of self-destruction and he came from this separated and traumatized childhood. | |
| Brian May had a very close relationship with his father. | |
| His father actually built him the red special I think was his first guitar and Brian May never did any drugs at least according to his own So, again, that's just some minor evidence. | |
| It's not conclusive, but I sort of put this out there. | |
| So, I think the way that this can be most productively understood is to recognize that people who experience a lot of early trauma end up with dysregulated brain function. | |
| And they crave, in fact, find it better to be on drugs and risk death than to not be on drugs and survive. | |
| In other words, the obliteration of pain is in a way the only thing that keeps them alive. | |
| And this kind of tragic attempt at self-medication, which in the modern world is something which puts them into an underworld, further stresses them and recreates in a horribly tragic way. | |
| The exact same circumstances that contributed to the brain dysregulation and brain injuries that set them on the road to addiction to beginning. | |
| This is why the war on drugs can't work. | |
| You cannot solve trauma with more trauma. | |
| It literally is like saying, I'm going to cure your broken arm by breaking your other arm, and then your legs, and then your ribs, and then your back, and finally your skull. | |
| This is not any kind of compassionate or humane approach to the problems of childhood victims of abuse and neglect. | |
| I was taught as a child growing up to not blame the victim. | |
| Should damn well stop siding with the abusers of these children, continuing to abuse them, getting them off the hook, not looking at ways in which we can improve parenting for infants, ways in which we can improve compassion and care and medical care. | |
| We have women's shelters for women who are being beaten up by their husbands, even though they chose to get married and chose to stay in those relationships. | |
| Infants who have no mobility, no capacity to dial 911, who did not choose their parents, who are the truest victims of any kind of abuse that we can experience or imagine in this world. | |
| Those we side with the abusers and continue to harass these poor, hurt souls. | |
| And it is absolutely horrendous. | |
| And in the future, if we don't turn this around now, it will make the former persecutions such as Salem witch trials and so on appear benevolent in comparison. | |
| The amount of horror, waste, abuse, destruction. |