Thank you. I've come to beleive that you save people by saving yourself while in relationship. I teach people how to be in a healthy relationship with people who are not doing what they want them to do. I teach them to create healthy connection by way of empathy and compassion for self, which then translates to the loved one who's experiencing addiction.

Healthy connection gets to be established by emotional attunement for oneself and then the person struggling. Underneath all the behavior and symptoms is the common human experience of the pursuit of needs. Of course, a person experiencing addiction has the same needs as what all humans need: self-acceptance, relief of pain, peace of mind, social connection, and a sense of power and place.

Addiction, properly understood, is neither a disease to be cured—though it has aspects of a disease—nor a problem to be eliminated. On the contrary, addiction is the individual’s attempt to solve a quandary. Before we can address addiction, this simple fact must be understood. What is the problem that addiction is meant to resolve? As the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards wrote about his own heroin habit, it can be a search for oblivion. He writes of “the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours. ”Why would a person long to escape themselves? Because, as a result of their life experiences, they are intensely distressed and may feel trapped within their situation. To put it another way, all the addictive substances (and addictive behaviors) soothe pain or at least distract from pain. Specifically, abusive substances like opiates are powerful painkillers, both physical and emotional; as is cocaine; as is alcohol. Hence, the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And, again, the answer resides neither in genes nor in “choices,” but in the lives and experiences of the addicts.