Guidance

Imagine growing up in a home where nobody really notices how you’re feeling Your parents might be good people. They might love you enormously They work hard, provide for you, make sure you’ve got everything you need But somehow, you don’t feel seen Perhaps they’re always busy Perhaps they’re dealing with their own difficulties Or maybe they simply don’t know how to connect with you emotionally. You try to tell them something important, but they’re distracted You get upset, and nobody seems to notice Eventually, you stop trying And somewhere along the way, you learn that your feelings don’t really matter You become comfortable spending time alone You stop expecting people to understand you You learn to manage whatever you’re experiencing without involving anyone else And from the outside, everything looks fine Now imagine that child at 37 They have friends. Perhaps a partner, children, a successful career Yet there’s a loneliness they can’t quite explain They can be surrounded by people and still feel completely disconnected They struggle to let people get close They want connection, but something about being vulnerable feels uncomfortable Then they discover alcohol And suddenly, something changes They feel more relaxed around people They can talk more freely They stop worrying about whether they’re interesting enough or whether anyone really likes them For a few hours, the loneliness seems to disappear Imagine how compelling that experience could become for someone who has spent much of their life feeling invisible Years later, when drinking has become a serious problem, people focus on the alcohol How much they’re drinking What it’s doing to their health Why they can’t just stop And those concerns are understandable But I wonder how often anyone asks what drinking actually changes for that person What becomes possible when they’ve had a few drinks? What disappears? What do they experience that seems so difficult to find without it? Of course, not everyone who feels unseen as a child develops an addiction. And addiction has many possible pathways! But perhaps there’s something important here What if the substance became a way of experiencing the connection they’d been looking for long before they ever started using it? And what might we discover if we became curious about that? Infinite Recovery Project | People Not Pathology

One of the strangest things I’ve noticed in over 20 years working in mental health is how difficult it can be for professionals to question what they’ve spent years learning We train to understand human suffering We study trauma, attachment, psychological defences and human behaviour. We spend years in personal development, supervision and learning how to recognise our own assumptions And somewhere along the way, we can become so convinced of what we know that we stop noticing how much of what we see is being shaped by it I’ve done this myself… I’ve spent years believing I understood something, only to discover that I’d never really questioned it Here’s what I find particularly interesting When someone challenges a therapist’s understanding, the therapist can often explain that challenge using the very framework being questioned They can talk about openness, curiosity and recognising their own defences while remaining completely unaware of what they’re doing in that moment And the more sophisticated their understanding becomes, the more convincing those explanations can sound How would we even recognise that happening? It’s called a blind spot for a reason If every challenge to our understanding can be accommodated within it, what would it actually take for us to discover we were wrong? I wonder whether some of what we call professional development is simply becoming more knowledgeable about the very things that prevent us from seeing clearly Because you can spend a lifetime learning about human beings and still struggle to meet one without your explanations getting in the way Including yourself People Not Pathology | Infinite Recovery Project

Someone feels anxious and immediately tries to calm themselves down Someone feels lonely and reaches for their phone Someone feels inadequate and starts working harder And someone who’s spent years in therapy notices an uncomfortable feeling and immediately starts trying to work out where it came from We’ve become remarkably good at finding things to do with our feelings Regulate them. Process them. Understand them. Heal them But I’ve become increasingly curious about something When did we decide that feeling uncomfortable meant something needed to be done? I spent years believing that the answer to my suffering was to understand it, work through it and eventually get rid of it And I became very good at explaining myself Yet much of the suffering continued What I’ve come to question is the assumption that sits underneath so much of what we do That certain feelings are problems That we shouldn’t be experiencing them That there’s a better version of ourselves somewhere on the other side of all this work Of course, sometimes we need support. Sometimes feelings are overwhelming, and finding ways to manage them can be essential But I wonder how often the struggle begins with the feeling itself, and how often it begins with what we believe the feeling means Because if every uncomfortable experience becomes something we need to fix, when do we ever discover what happens when we stop trying? People Not Pathology | Infinite Recovery Project

“I don’t think I actually want to get better” Imagine someone saying that after spending years desperately trying to change…. What would you hear?? Resistance? Lack of motivation? Self-sabotage? A trauma response? A therapist might recognise one thing An addiction worker might recognise another A psychiatrist might see something else entirely Three professionals. Three explanations! And perhaps not one of them has discovered what the person actually means What if they’re exhausted from trying to become someone else? What if they’ve spent years being told what’s wrong with them, why they’re suffering and what they need to do to recover? What if they’ve followed the advice, attended the sessions, learned the language and understood every explanation? And they’re still suffering What if they don’t want to get better because they’re exhausted from a lifetime of believing they’re not good enough as they are? Suddenly, “I don’t want to get better” might mean something entirely different But we’d never discover that if we’d already decided what it meant And here’s what troubles me about the helping professions We can become so knowledgeable about human suffering that we stop being curious about the human being We hear something and recognise a pattern We recognise a pattern and reach for an explanation We reach for an explanation and begin treating it All before we’ve discovered whether our understanding was even correct I’m not suggesting knowledge or clinical expertise has no value I’m asking whether we’ve become so good at recognising what we’ve been trained to see that we’re missing what we haven’t Because a person isn’t a diagnosis They aren’t a trauma response They aren’t an addiction And they aren’t an example of our favourite psychological theory They’re a human being whose experience we haven’t yet understood Perhaps the most dangerous words in the helping professions aren’t “I don’t know” They’re “I know exactly what’s going on here” And perhaps the most important question isn’t “How do we help this person get better?” But “What have we already decided about them that we might be completely wrong about?“

Imagine holding a burning hot coal in your hand. Your skin is burning. The pain is unbearable. You know exactly what’s causing it. Yet you keep holding on. Would you seriously conclude that the person simply wants to be burned? Or would you become curious about what makes letting go so difficult? This is where the idea that addiction is a choice becomes ridiculous. People continue using substances despite losing their health, relationships, families, freedom and sometimes their lives. They know the consequences. Many desperately want to stop. Some have tried hundreds of times. And we still ask, “Why don’t they just choose differently?” Perhaps the more intelligent question is: What is happening in a human being that makes something so destructive feel so necessary? You don’t need a complicated theory to begin asking that question. Just a willingness to look beyond the behaviour. Infinite Recovery Project

We can explain addiction through neuroscience We can explain anxiety through the nervous system We can explain depression through psychology We can explain compulsive behaviour through trauma, attachment, conditioning and childhood experiences We have thousands of books, millions of research papers, countless therapeutic models and an entire industry dedicated to understanding human suffering And yet people can spend 10, 20, even 30 years understanding why they suffer… And still suffer They can explain their childhood Identify their triggers Recognise their patterns Understand their nervous system Name their attachment style Describe their trauma responses And remain just as trapped in the experience they’re explaining! At what point do we ask whether something fundamental is missing? Because knowing why you feel something isn’t the same as no longer feeling it Understanding a compulsion isn’t the same as being free of it And being able to explain your suffering isn’t evidence that you’ve transformed it I’m not suggesting knowledge is useless I’m questioning why we’ve become so convinced that more knowledge is necessarily the answer Perhaps we’ve become so fascinated by explaining the human condition that we’ve stopped questioning whether our explanations are actually changing it And here’s the uncomfortable part Every new model promises to explain what the previous model missed But what if the problem isn’t that we haven’t found the right explanation? What if we’re looking in the wrong direction entirely? I’ve spent over 30 years working in this field, and I’ve had to question much of what I once believed I understood Including my own explanations Because the most important question isn’t whether our theories make sense It’s whether the person sitting in front of us is actually becoming free And perhaps it’s time we stopped measuring how well we understand suffering… And started asking why so much of it continues despite everything we think we know!

How many times must someone try before you believe they want to change? How many promises must they make? How many mornings must they wake up devastated by what happened the night before? How many times must they lose everything, rebuild their lives, and find themselves doing it again? And how many times must they tell us they’re desperate to stop before we actually believe them? We tell people they have to want recovery badly enough But what if wanting to stop has never been the problem? What if someone can desperately want to stop and still experience a compulsion that feels impossible to resist? When someone succeeds, we say they were ready When someone struggles, we question their motivation And when someone relapses, we tell them they must not have wanted it enough But what if we’re wrong? What if their continued behaviour tells us absolutely nothing about how desperately they want their life to change? Perhaps the question was never whether they wanted to change Perhaps the question is What is happening in this human being’s experience that makes wanting to change insufficient? Because if wanting to stop were enough, why would anyone who desperately wants to stop still be struggling? Maybe it’s time we stopped questioning their desire to change and started questioning their desire to change and started questioning our undestanding of why they can’t  Infinite Recovery Project People Not Pathology

What if you’ve been doing the work for 20 years and you’re still suffering? More therapy More meetings More healing More self-awareness More inner work More things to fix And when nothing fundamentally changes? Apparently, you haven’t done enough work!! You need to go deeper You need to be more honest You need to surrender You need to work harder You need to do another step 4 Pray more Go to more meetings Get a new sponsor Can we see the problem here yet? We’ve created an explanation in which the person can never succeed in challenging the approach If they get better, the work is working If they don’t, they haven’t done enough work But what if the entire premise deserves questioning? Who decided you were a project that needed fixing? How much work does it take to become yourself? And what exactly are you working towards? I spent decades trying to improve myself Trying to become someone who wouldn’t feel the things I felt Trying to get rid of the parts of myself I believed were wrong And much of that effort was organised around one unquestioned assumption: That there was something fundamentally wrong with me What if the endless effort to become better is sometimes the very thing keeping us trapped in the belief that we’re not good enough as we are? I’m not suggesting therapy, recovery or personal development cannot help Of course they can I’m questioning the assumption that transformation must be the result of continuous effort Sometimes change happens through an entirely different kind of seeing Not another technique Not another intervention Not another 10 years of trying to become acceptable But discovering that the person you’ve spent your life trying to fix was never the problem you thought they were And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all! If you’ve spent 20 years working on yourself and you’re still suffering, why is the first assumption that YOU haven’t worked hard enough? Why aren’t we questioning the work?

And it tells you almost nothing about my recovery! We love numbers in recovery 30 days 90 days 1 year 10 years 20 years Eventually, apparently, 1,009,497,600 seconds. 😂 And yes, stopping mattered enormously in my life But somewhere along the way I confused the length of time since I last used drugs with evidence of how free I was They aren’t the same thing I could tell you exactly how long I had been clean But the number couldn’t tell you: How frightened I was How much of my identity was organised around recovery How compulsive I could still become around relationships, food, money, sex or work How much I needed certainty How much of myself I still didn’t understand How much of my life was still being organised by things I couldn’t see None of that reset my clean date And that’s interesting Because if our primary measure of recovery keeps increasing automatically with the passage of time, what exactly is it measuring? Abstinence? Absolutely. Freedom? I don’t think a calendar can tell us that Perhaps we have become incredibly good at measuring the easiest thing to count And then mistaken it for the thing that matters most I am grateful for every one of those billion seconds But today I’m far more interested in something I can’t put on a medallion: Am I free? Am I alive? and am I able to respond to life rather than compulsively repeat myself? Can I meet another human being without needing my story to become theirs? Maybe the most important parts of recovery were never countable in the first place. Although I have to admit… “1, 009, 497, 600 seconds clean” looks brilliant on a T-shirt. 😂

You can understand your childhood Know your attachment style Recognise your trauma responses Explain your nervous system Identify every pattern you’ve ever repeated And still experience life exactly as you did before We’ve become remarkably good at explaining human suffering But I’m increasingly interested in something else What happens when the very explanations we use to understand ourselves become the things we defend most fiercely? Someone can spend 30 years in 12-Step recovery, learn the literature inside out, and argue about its principles until the end of time But what if the intensity with which they defend those beliefs is itself worth becoming curious about? Not because the programme is wrong Not because their recovery isn’t genuine But because something that once offered safety, belonging and certainty can become so closely tied to our identity that questioning it feels threatening And the same is true of professionals A therapist can spend years studying trauma, nervous system regulation and psychological defences They can recognise a trauma response in someone else almost immediately Yet when their own understanding is questioned, they may become defensive, dismissive or desperate to establish that they’re right Knowing what a trauma response is doesn’t mean we recognise one when it’s happening in ourselves And being able to explain a psychological defence doesn’t necessarily mean we’re free from it I’m not suggesting every disagreement is a trauma response. Sometimes people simply disagree, and sometimes they have very good reasons But surely there’s something worth examining when our knowledge becomes something we must protect rather than something we’re willing to question This is where I think we confuse information with transformation We can become incredibly sophisticated at explaining ourselves without fundamentally changing our relationship with our own experience We can learn the language of healing while continuing to live through the very patterns we’re describing And perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is that our commitment to understanding ourselves has sometimes become another way of avoiding what is actually happening I’m not against knowledge, therapy, recovery programmes or psychological understanding I’m questioning whether any of these necessarily bring about the freedom we assume they do Because knowing why you suffer and no longer being compelled to suffer in the same way are two very different things And perhaps genuine inquiry begins when we’re willing to question not only what we believe abour ourseleves, but the part of us that needs those beliefs to be true