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Re: Alcoholism

At 16:19 03/10/1996 EDT, you wrote:
>Bernard,
>
>a very interesting post! 
>Please expand on the topic!
>
>I gave training to therapists at alcohol & drugsclinics. Many of them seemed to
>suffer from burn-out symptoms. Substance abusers seemed to 'use' human
relations
>in the same style they 'used' addictive substances, which seemed to me a factor
>of severe wear and tear to the therapists. Some became severely dissociated,
>others also cynical, others -noticing the effect- quit their jobs. I
remember my
>first impression: Who are the patients and who are the therapists? I couldn't
>distinguish on a psychological level. Your experiences?
>
>Kind Regards,
>Rene Duba
>
>

Hi Rene

Things are running fast on the internet and on this mailing list. As English
is not my native language I have to run an 'emulator' in my brain. Those who
had used a 'windows' emulator on their MacIntosh will understand what I mean:
an emulator is slow, it produces sometimes unexpected interrupts and so..

Let's go ahead.

My experiences ???
First I am not working in an institution and I doubt I will in the future. So we
are running intensive courses '5 days seminars' and sometimes we are doing
individual sessions. All you wrote about burn-out and so is true. Therapīsts
working in the field of afddictions are usually not at their right place. Most
of them want to be 'usefull for the community' as motivation and their are
facing
to people without any interest about their 'usefullness'. Most of the time
addicted people are rude. So am I.

My motivation is to have fun (yes *fun* !!). I do actually like working with
addicted people : they are very responsive to NLP stuff. It's a trip. To 
understand things better, you have to assume that addicted people are severely
dissociated people : I am speaking about sequential dissociation (please refer
to chapter 6 of Reframming from Bandler and Grinder, Real People Press, ISBN ???
can be found at WWW.NLPINFO.COM (I guess so)).

Sequential dissociation means that their personalty is divided into two
exclusive
parts : the Addictive Part (AP) and the Sober Part (SP). These parts cannot be
*present at the same time*. They are in their AP or in their SP. All their
skills
and memories and so... are divided into these 2 parts. In some ways every time 
you are in contact with an addict you're dealing with half of a person.    

Frequently you may encounter some very strong amnesia beetwin these 2 parts.
Most
of the time, all the fun is in their AP so when you are facing to an addict in 
an institution you're facing to his SP (Sober Part) who is generally sad, partly
imcompetent, totally convinced that 'drinking is wrong' but completely unable
to do anything by his own but jumping into his AP (addictive part) and being
drunk
again.

An another important point is to consider that addicted people are in some ways
very competent at dealing with their own internal states, with their mind (using
substances ok but efficiently) much more than their therapists. So in an NLP
point of view, if we assume that therapy is about influencing people to bring
them into specific internal states, they are very good at this game, once again
much more than their therapīsts. So in spite of influencing their patients
most of the therapīsts in this field are influenced by their patients !!!
And these
patients generally had already driven crazy all their familly and relatives.

So to be efficient as therapist in this field of addictions you must follow 
some guidelines. Here are mine's :
- To have ***FUN*** (great fun) doing this job.
- To have guts (yeah !!) or in other words to have big balls ('huevos grandes'
  in spanish and 'avoir des couilles' in french) those who had attended to
  Richard Bandler's trainings inthe last 5 years know what I mean ;-) !!!
- To be able to manage your own internal states and your own level of
  conciousness to follow and to lead  (***lead*** not pace) addicted people
  towards their own internal states.
- To be able to experience and project the ludicrous side of life as horrible
  as it could be...

That's all folks. But as addictions seem to be interesting for people here, I 
will forward 2 postings I wrote recently for the NLP and ADDICTIONS mailing
list I am curently moderating. These postings are about DECISIONS STRATEGIES.

Have a nice day Rene,

-Bernard Frit