I have read the RR <online> Crash Course and have begun reading, "Rational Recovery - The New Cure for Substance Addiction".
While it does resonate, I'm having some difficulty with an aspect of the presentation.
First, I'd like to stress that my difficulty is not, in any way, a judgment of how others choose to use the terms, nor am I questioning that effectiveness for others. I'm speaking only of my own difficulty with some of this approach.
I am unable to demonize my brain. It seems adolescent and superstitious.
What I know:
- All organisms' primary directives are to a) avoid pain and b) seek pleasure (in that order)
- These directives enhance the chance of survival - the brain's #1 priority
- The greater the pleasure 'hit', the higher on the survival-of-the-species priority the activity goes (e.g. sexual activity provides a big boost of dopamine)
- The brain looks for the greatest pleasure for the least effort (the least 'pain')
- Humans, being too smart for our own good, have made the pleasure hits artificially high for almost no obtain-pain (e.g. think of a drive through fast food restaurant: the 'food' artificially manipulated to be unnaturally high in fat/protein (huge pleasure hit) and almost no 'pain' of obtaining!)
- Drugs, alcohol, foods artificially created to be high in fat/protein and/or sugar, are all items toward which the brain will say, "Hey, this item is super pleasurable and there's very little 'pain' (effort) needed to obtain it so this goes way up on my priority list to obtain!"
- That pain avoidance/pleasure seeking is evolutionarily created and designed for my survival. It is not evil. It is not a demon.
The problem, as I see it, is that we've artificially enhanced pleasure too quickly for the rat brain to evolve and, if the statistics on drug addiction, alcohol addiction and obesity are any indicator, it's going to be our undoing. We humans are using our incredible creativity to our own detriment: make pleasure greater and greater and the pain of obtaining lower and lower. The rat brain can't resist.
It is evolutionarily unable to resist.
So, to suddenly go back to the dark ages and call it a beast, demonizing it and polarizing the neocortex and the rat brain as outright enemies....it just doesn't work for me. I get that that's the dissociative piece; however, for it to be useful for me, I'll need to dissociate in a somewhat different way.
I'm seeing it as more of a mindless, childish, impulsive, blind piece of gray matter. Value to my survival? You bet. In a natural environment, over eons of evolution, did it enhance, indeed
insure, survival? Absolutely. In this new world, where humans have artificially enhanced pleasure, is it fooled - are the primary survival directives perverted to my own destruction? Without a doubt.
Dylan