By Laurence Guinness

I’m delighted to be here and before I start I would just like to say how much I appreciate the wonderful and important forum for the exchange of ideas that William Pryor has created with the Unhooked conference.

When William told me the theme of this conference is Love and Baggage I started to think about the baggage question.

What exactly is baggage and is it important? And if so why?

So today, in a round about way, I want to try and answer a couple of simple self posed questions related to the subject of baggage handling that I’ve found fascinating.

How important is story and self-narrative to the addict in transition and if it’s important why?

These are two little questions that I’m going to try and shed some light on primarily by asking a whole bunch of other questions and in doing so will hopefully provide some ways of answering these two questions.

I’ve been thinking about the transformation of the self.

Having experienced self transformation it’s a subject dear to my heart, but I’ll talk about myself in a bit.

Those of you in the recovery business, which I’m assuming is a large part of the audience, well, you’ll know firsthand what I’m talking about when I use the word transformation.

What is actually happening between the point at which a person presents themself as helplessly unable to behave in ways that they say they want to and the point at which they feel they are free from the behaviours and thoughts that they were unable to control?

It is another perplexing question, and one that I’d like to explore from both a subjective and objective position using the idea that “The Self” may be viewed as a flexible narrative entity that is contextually constructed to order by consciousness.

In other words when I look for my self, or think about myself through introspection what I may find and how I make sense of it, me, can vary depending on where I am, who I’m with and how I’m feeling.

Like at the moment I’m trying to construct a self narrative that portrays me as confident, clever and not at all anxious, and, as I keep telling myself that I’m not anxious then I feel I’m lying to myself because at this moment in time I feel pretty anxious.

But last night, in the luxury of my hotel room - I not only fully believed the story - but felt it too.

Was I the same self then as I am now? What’s changed, the story or me? Are they one and the same thing?
If I’ve changed yet the story remains the same then is my anxiety compounded by this cognitive conflict? This is another one of things I’m going to talk about in a while.

For the moment… If it’s true that the self is to some extent a flexible construct, dependent on social context and experienced emotions then the mode of self awareness as a narrative becomes all the more important when considering the plight of an addicted person in transition.

If the narrative holds or is strong enough in a variety of contexts then identity can be stabilised and personal wholeness can be experienced.

The story we tell ourselves and others and how we and others construct that story from the baggage of our lives could come near the top of the hierarchy of levers that professionals need to fiddle with in order to empower clients to think, feel and behave in ways that make sense for themselves and their social relations.

Or alternatively, are stories about the self, just that, stories and is introspection based on the recall and editing of our experiences akin to archaeology - you may find a lot of artefacts but no real idea of what purpose they actually served, like the case of a stone bowl found in an archaeological dig in Chile,
Was it a sacrificial blood vessel?
Was it a mortar for grinding herbs?
Was it a funerary object for use in the afterlife?

All these are rich and evocative stories that direct our attention and imagination down narrow allies.

The truth was eventually discerned through electron microscopic examination and the stone bowl turned out to be the natural product of the forces of water on stone.

The need to make sense of the bowl was compelling in itself and our minds can’t help filling in the gaps whenever we lack information.

This may be fine for stone bowls and archaeology but a little more important when faced with a person who sincerely and urgently wants and needs to change their lives for the better.

So the business of storytelling is actually be quite a serious one, both to the addicted individual who wants to change and to the professional hoping to motivate that change.

This begs the question, that if story is so important and the mind so willing and eager to make up stories then is the dogged pursuit of truth through the archaeological process of rooting around in a person’s baggage, actually the pursuit of a jolly good story?

Could it be that this is what’s already happening between addiction service users and the vast array of addiction workers?
In my experience of working with substance misusers I found that most of the people I engaged with were fantastically open and willing to having me help them make sense of their baggage for them, which is exactly what I was told not to do during my counselling training.

So being told not to do something set my alarm bells ringing.

I’m always suspicious when I’m told not to do something, I was raised in the Jewish faith and was told not to eat Pork - why, I still don’t really know? I ate pork and I’m still alive, although I do feel anxious…

My wife was told by her priest not to have sex before marriage and she told me it was actually very good, at least that’s what my best man told me…

So what could be the harm in helping someone make sense of their lives - a little more actively - if that’s what the addiction professional is already facilitating?

How far should an addiction professional go in directing the service user? In a politically correct, professionally standardised environment counsellors and key workers are most definitely discouraged from directing the client.

Let me try and unpick this idea because I believe it’s important to try and understand what’s going on between not just a counsellor and a client but between any human relationship - functional or otherwise.

If we take the general sociological idea that one’s self perceptions are an internalization of the perceptions of the views of others as conceptualised by Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead and somewhat empirically confirmed by current research, and accept that the “looking glass self” is a very real phenomena whereby a person views themselves through others’ perceptions and in turn makes sense of themselves and then we apply some of the most recent research by Yeung and Martin at Rutgers University that confirms Cooley’s assertion that we are more influenced by those we feel are “ascendant over us” then we can start to see that the relational encounters of a person desperate to make or should I say remake sense of themselves are profoundly important.

They are at the point whereby any interaction with a professional or someone viewed as ascendant to them can literally help them to create a new self.

So whether they like it or not the counselor is a story maker and hence life builder of sorts.

Continued on The Unhooked Thinking Blog - The international, multi-disciplinary and iconoclastic enquiry into the very nature of addiction in the widest sense of the word.