Addiction a healthy way out.

Addiction a healthy way out. To suggest that DAD or addiction is a mental illness is to suggest that something has gone wrong in the brain, that some form of medicine may be needed to treat it, that this ‘illness’ may recur, and that it may even be contagious. Likening mental distress to physical illness is inadequate because it pathologises our normal, human suffering and places it squarely in the medical model, at the whim of doctors and ‘experts’ who can label our experiences as abnormal.
I came to realise—eventually—that nothing had gone wrong with my brain: my brain did good. It helped me survive the unendurable by switching off, by limiting my awareness, by refusing to join up as a whole what is too much for a child’s brain to bear.I came to realise that my brain isn't sick. It’s what happened to me that was sick—and arguably the people who did what they did to me. My brain just reacted in the best way it could to keep me alive, and to keep me sane. DAD is an adaptation to an abusive or traumatic environment. But once that environment changed—once, as an adult, I became safe—I needed to set about the process of re-adapting my brain to a different environment, one where it didn't need to be so focused on threat and trauma and pain. That is the process of recovery, to mould my brain to a new, non-traumatic environment, not to mend it from dysfunction or cure it from illness. My brain had to learn to focus anew on exploration and relationships and joy. Dissociation was logical when I was a child in an unsafe environment. It only became illogical when I persisted in it as an adult in safe surroundings.






The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives. #childwithin#10stages