Episode 15: Guy du Plessis – Existential Integral Recovery Beyond the 12 Steps
Episode 15:
Guy du Plessis
Existential Integral Recovery:
Beyond the 12 Steps
What are you searching for?
That deep, existential feeling of longing is the common denominator of human experience. It hums in the background, permeating our lives. A hole inside, longing to be filled.
Addicts have a deep, experiential knowledge of longing and craving. And for many of us, the road to addiction began with the search to fill the existential void. To satisfy our unmet needs. And for a time, it may have worked. But as the disease progressed, we began to conflate our unmet existential needs with our craving for drugs and alcohol; a fundamental misalignment of intentions and outcomes in what often began as a search for joy, freedom, and meaning.
In this episode of the Journey of Integral Recovery, Guy du Plessis, author of An Integral Guide to Recovery: Twelve Steps and Beyond
Guy du Plessis brings a strong academic pedigree, intellectual depth, and heartfelt personal experience to this teaching, elucidating how the road to recovery from addiction is about learning to satisfy our needs in healthy ways, through the adoption of a lifestyle and Integral daily practice that leads to growth, transformation, and evolution in all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, and all types.
Learn more about Guy du Plessis and his work at: GuyDuPlessis.com
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Episode Resources:
Guyduplessis.com
An Integral Guide to Recovery: Twelve Steps and Beyond
Mind-Body Workbook for Addiction: Effective Tools for Substance-Abuse Recovery and Relapse Prevention
Drugs, Addiction and Initiation: The Modern Search for Ritual
Integral Recovery: A Revolutionary Approach to the Treatment of Alcoholism and Addiction (SUNY series in Integral Theory)
Deep Recovery – a guided meditation from iAwake Technologies
In this episode:
[1:10] Guy du Plessis’s pedigree and contributions to the field of Integral Recovery through intellectual depth, personal experience, and seminal books and articles on the subject.
[5:15] What is an existential or phenomenological perspective, and how does studying and understanding our experience in the upper-left hand quadrant teach us about addiction and recovery?
[9:35] What is the bridge between existential philosophy and recovery, and why is an integral approach to recovery necessary? How do we use Integral Recovery to develop not only a roadmap, but a set of headlights?
[13:57] Addicts are the experts on the phenomenology of addiction, making AA and the twelve steps, at their core, a phenomological approach as we share our experiences in meetings
[16:26] What makes sustainable recovery through an existential lens, and how does this help us as we deal with existence, search for meaning, find freedom, and confront the inevitability of death?
[17:56] How does confronting our existential challenges contribute to addiction, and how do we deal with satisfying our existential needs on a personal and societal level?
[20:02] What happens when our attempts to meet our needs becomes pathological?
[24:11] How does considering our “destiny” and the search for meaning, by turning our focus to the future, work as a tool for recovery?
[27:08] The distinction between substance use and addiction, and how the need for ritual influences our behavior.
[29:02] Associating the rituals of drug use with an existential need and how our cravings to meet these needs get neurologically cross-wired with substance use
[31:42] Guy’s personal story and the wisdom of common sense in bringing the first person perspective to the third person perspective of academic study, and why the study of addiction and recovery is about learning how to satisfy our needs through a lifestyle of growth and transformation
[36:03] Insight into the stages of recovery and why the integral approach is fundamentally a developmental one as we address the needs and challenges of each level or stage and at each stage of recovery
[40:06] How bringing a developmental approach to the fellowship of traditional recovery programs can improve their relevance and efficacy in treatment as we progress through the stages of recovery and development
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06/02/2017, 47:44, 32.7 mb (Audio)