Ross A. Laird

An interview with Jeff Fisher (of Therapy Talks and Counselling BC) on addictions, trauma, and the role of the nervous system in recovery and healing.

It’s right here:

Check it out. (And let me know what you think.)

I’ve been working with a group of instructors and administrators at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (this group includes Sibeal Foyle from the Fine Arts department, Genni Gunn and Sheila Hancock from the Creative Writing department, Don Hlus from the Music department, and Humanities Dean Linda Schwartz) to develop an undergraduate stream in Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts.The first course in this new stream begins in Fall 2008. If you are interested in finding out more about the program, visit (and join, if you want) the development group. These courses represent a significant milestone in education for students in British Columbia: never before have interdisciplinary expressive arts courses been offered at the undergraduate level in BC.

What are Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts?

Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts refers to a specific set of educational activities, goals and strategies. Based on innovative pedagogy and integrative approaches to learning, interdisciplinary studies involve the synthesis and synergy of various disciplines toward a cohesive, unified educational experience. Interdisciplinarity is much more than enrollment in courses from more than a single discipline. Authentic interdisciplinarity emphasizes the linkages between disciplines by focusing on contrasting and complementary aspects of diverse educational domains.

The Problem:

Addiction is a positive urge thwarted by negative circumstances. Almost all habitual substance users are searching for a means of dealing with psychological stress that is usually associated with childhood and adolescent development.

The addict is drawn to a culture which promises to complete the unfinished impulses of childhood and adolescence. The cultures of technology are sufficiently broad as to offer the psychological rewards of all the cultures of substance use combined.

The word mentor is Greek in origin. It refers to a character in The Odyssey, a friend of Odysseus who offers counsel to his son during the father’s long absence upon the sea. But the sage Mentor is actually Athena in disguise, the goddess of war and wisdom who guides and sustains Odysseus through his journey. A mentor, therefore, is a wisdom guide.

The mentors of literature are always wanderers. They have traveled, they understand the ways of the road, they have traversed their own circuitous paths in the desert. They have experience, hardscrabble wisdom, clarity, a history of grappling and reaching and searching. Of having faced up to it — whatever it is.

I will be making several public presentations in the coming months. Below is the short list of events:

April 22, 1pm to 4:30pm
Mentorship for Youth
Richmond City Hall

In this workshop, participants will learn how and why mentorship is the key to healthy development for youth. Good mentorship promotes resilience, reduces interpersonal conflict, enhances well-being (for everyone) and diminishes the developmental susceptibility of youth to challenges such as addiction, obesity, and isolation.

April 30, 7pm to 9pm
BCACC Counsellor’s Cafe

I will read from the new book on addictions and will discuss the themes surrounding the rise and persistence of addictions in our society. Particular focus will be on the root causes of addiction, the surprising links between early childhood and later addictive behaviour, and the ways in which adult addiction is a mirror of the inner life. Also, I will explore the types of support and care (from parents, spouses, siblings, friends) that are most likely to assist the addicted in discovering a path of healing.

May 28, 1pm to 2:30pm
David Berman Conference
Coast Plaza Hotel

More from the new book, with emphasis on mental health, mentorship, wellness, and professional interventions.

May 30, 9am to 11am
David Thompson High School

A workshop for teachers on technology addictions: their cause, effects, and resolution. The emphasis will be on interventions for teens, and developmental themes for kids of all ages.

July 3, 6:30pm to 9:30pm
(10 Tue/Thurs evenings, plus Saturday July 12)
VCC City Centre campus

Basic Counselling Skills course for those interested in personal and professional development and/or a career in the social services.

November 12, 1pm to 5pm
Jack Hirose conference

A workshop on mentorship for youth, with particular emphasis on creativity and interdisciplinary approaches.
 …

If you are interested in any of the above, drop me a line.

Sometime in the spring of 1974 — another year of persistent underachievement in my elementary academic life — I wrote a poem about a penny. It was called “Richard Penny.” My teacher liked it. Later, the principal congratulated me. It was the only time I spoke to that man without the shadow of discipline between us.

It was during this time, or soon after, that I began to imagine the various ways in which writing might be a part of my future life. It took quite a while for my imagination to promote me from writer to author; but once that was done — perhaps by the fall of grade eight — the trajectory of my creative life was pretty much set.

Twenty years later, when my first book was published, many of those early dreams took final shape and were fulfilled. I have many fond memories of that period, during which I reached back, in my mind, to that young and struggling kid and told him that yeah, it had worked out. One way or another, it had worked out.

Now, as I approach the publication of my third book, I’m starting to think more and more about what this writing gig is all about. I’ve received that confirmation I sought for so long; I’ve had more praise than I deserve; I’ve met and heard from many kind readers and supportive friends of my work. It has been a wondrous ride.

Though not without hurdles. And increasingly, those hurdles have to do with what writers (ahem, authors) are required to do in order to keep their work in front of the reading public. These days, writing books seems to be as much about business as about the call of creativity. Likely it has always been this way, and I’m just slow in figuring that out. At any rate, what I’m returning to — what I’m finally coming around to, what I discovered with that penny poem — has more to do with the joys of creativity than with the business of publishing.

And so, with my upcoming book on addictions, I’ve decided to move beyond the machinery of the publishing industry. I’d like to craft a small and interesting book, something I can design and produce and share with others. It has taken me quite some time to arrive here, and I apologize to the many people to whom I’ve given provisional answers about when the book will be coming out. It has been more difficult than I thought it would be to decide, finally, that I would like to carry this book within the circle of my own care.

As my wife reminds me whenever I need reminding, no one will ever care about my creative work as much as I do. If I want to cherish that work, to usher it into the world with an integrity that matches my vision, I must be the architect of that process. No deal, no contract, no royalty will replace the sacredness of the trust that my creativity asks of me.

Thankfully, I don’t earn my living through writing. If I did, the situation would perhaps be different. I have the luxury — perhaps that’s the wrong word, but it’s the word I have — of treating my creative work as a devotion, and of investing time and energy (and money, too, after all) without profit at the top of my list of priorities. I have the luxury — and here it’s the right word — of responding to my work with the authentic joy of that boy who loved writing poetry. For the joy of the adventure, and of what it brings.

And here is where the adventure lies now: the text is almost complete, the editing is almost done, the design is beginning to take shape. I’m thinking about a fall release, a small event with friends and interested readers. If you want to be a part of this event, just drop me a line.

The journey of the new book starts here, in this moment in which I decide to return to what I glimpsed so long ago: the work, always the work and its promises. My work.

I've been reading quite a bit of non-fiction science lately -- mathematics, history, the philosophy of science -- and for a small break from the density of that material (quick: why do the non-trivial Riemann zeros lie across the critical line whose real part is one half?) I decided to re-read a book that I retrieved from the bookshelves a few months ago, for some now-forgotten purpose, and which has since been migrating across the piles of stuff on my bedside table: Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.

One of the first surprising items I discovered was the original price sticker, from when I purchased this book, in 1985, from the UBC bookstore: $2.95. My, how times have changed.

The Man in the High Castle is one of the first alternative histories. Though Dick is considered a writer of sci-fi (and films of his work, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report are certainly within that eclectic genre), TMITHC is not science fiction in the strict sense: it's not about the future, there is no advanced technology to speak of, and no extraterrestrial aspects come into play. No, TMITHC is about a world -- our world, but not quite -- in which the Nazis won the second world war. This is a theme that has recently been taken up by Philip Roth as well, in his The Plot Against America; but Dick was among the first to explore such alternate universes.

It was refreshing to revisit TMITHC after more than twenty years. The story is simply told, without the postmodern tropes and adornments that one finds in almost all literature today. Dick does not trick the reader with overlapping perspectives, or knots of fancy language, or strategies of symbolism cobbled together from simple psychologies. He does not try to untangle the mystery of the story: which is that our world and the alternative world both exist, somehow, and are connected by means of various bridges: the arts, spirituality, philosophy.

The language of the book is interesting: Dick uses a pidgin-ish narrative both for his descriptions of scenes and for the internal dialogue of most of the characters (except those who seem to understand the nature of their interpenetrating realities). It's as though he's asking the reader to narrow down modes of thought, to restrict imagination and creativity in the manner demanded of the society inhabited by the characters. It's an interesting approach; subtle, and quite effective.

In many ways, TMITHC is an abstract book. Its generous use of the I Ching -- or, perhaps, its dependence on the flow of energies within the I Ching -- will be off-putting to some readers, as will the generally Jungian approach to self-psychology. But for those with a philosophic frame of mind, TMITHC is a great book. The story is clear, and strong, and an unbiased reader will be carried by its momentum. And within this trajectory, the reader is asked to consider profound questions about the nature of reality, the nature of character, and the manner in which human societies grow. TMITHC is a traditional narrative, a narrative of the old school, in which the asking of big questions was not yet considered quaint.

One scene of the book is of particular interest to me as a counsellor. It involves a character who comes into possession of a small pendant, upon which he meditates, and which leads him, momentarily, across the bridge between his world and ours. He crosses over, returns again to his own reality, and is changed. In his own life, Philip K. Dick underwent a number of altered state experiences -- what might be called psychotic breaks, in fact -- over several years following dental surgery in 1974. These may have been provoked by his frequent use of stimulants or by his own underlying temperament, which seemed prone to the types of internal splits seen often in artists and writers. At any rate, here is how Dick described one of those experiences:

My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February of 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentathol. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman -- who wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.

"What does that mean?" I asked her.

The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a sign worn by the early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication.

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

TMITHC was published in the early sixties. Dick's encounter with the woman above took place in 1974. The scene in TMITHC is essentially identical to what happened to him almost fifteen years later. I wonder about this; it intrigues me. It's as though an underground stream ran through the narrative of his life, weaving in and out of his books, following him into the reality of his own life, prompting questions from him about his own identity, his reality, his consciousness.

Today, Dick would have trouble getting TMITHC published. There's no hook to it, it's too abstract for most readers, it requires a contemplative approach to reading. Where's the market for such a book? Perhaps I'm being cynical -- but it is my belief that many of the classic books would not make it onto the shelves today. Now that publishing is an appendage of the entertainment industry, books are no longer the culture bearers they once were. Movies now occupy that position. At least they do for the most part. Yet sometimes, great books still exert their own power, beyond marketing and franchises and the mercurial public. There's no question in my mind that The Man in the High Castle is such a book.