What WhyNot and Twickster said, basically.
Think Emotional Intelligence. Regular use of mood-altering drugs to avoid certain emotional states (or even enhance them) will result in less facility in dealing with one’s own emotions. Or those of others, frankly.
I suppose this would include 99% of Australians where thwe drinking age is eighteen?
This idea gets quoted a lot by alcohol and drug counselors. I heard it yesterday in a somewhat-related training, in fact. However, my experience as a therapist is that people who are using alcohol and drugs a lot a) to get away from their emotions, or b) to an extent that it seriously affects their relationships with others, and then stop or cut down, are not literally the emotional age they were when they began using heavily. Rather, they have unfininshed developmental and interpersonal tasks, and/or they have not learned how to navigate the world and their relationships as unintoxicated adults. In addition, though you’ve said you’re not interested in the biological aspect, it should be said that if a person is using that heavily over that long a time, you cannot exclude the possibility that they have harmed themselves physically in a way that has psychiatric repercussions.
These “warnings” against drug-use remind me of the" warnings" against masturbation. That masturbation would have insidious, harmful effects, which would only become apparent years later; that masturbation is addictive, and spoils the masturbater for “real” relationships. Etcetera. So even if there is some truth to the OP’s theory, a large part of it could be bogeyman stories trying to scare the kids out of using drugs.
I also thought the OP’s theory might be founded on the image of the flower children of the 60’s. There’s a whole generation of which a large subgroup was reputed to be pretty much stoned through the larger part of the decade. And they were all considered rather emotionally immature by the next generation wishing to distance itself from their parent’s hippy ways. Could this theory be a way of “scientifically” validating the feelings of the generation after the hippies?
One final thing; does hours and hours of TV-watching a day count as drug? It does put people in a trance-like state…
I believe so. Last month my sister asked me to housesit while she was out of town. I discovered that there was nothing to do at her house except watch TV (no 'Net connection). So I watched TV for two days straight and definitely felt my brain turning into Jell-O.
As regards tv being a drug that would not and could not be true whether within this discussion or in reality period because I’m more so talking about ‘macs’ - mood altering chemicals or so professionals are mainly calling them now. Tv does not fall into this category my friend. Anyway The replies have really opened my eyes a little wider to this whole issue.
I feel more so now that what is in question is a case of ‘knocking one’s self back’ in terms of what one could call natural, healthy development of mind. This creates a scenario for the individual that yields intricate problems of which the dynamics can be seriously complicated and detrimental to one’s, lets face it, long term direction in life that their potential allows them otherwise. Time and tide wait for no man, as they say!
Umm, cite? The way I see it you go around once in life, and you can either spend a part of it intentionally altered or you can spend the entirety of it as sober as you possibly can be. It’s true that the time I spent drunk last night I did not, in fact, spend sober, but where is it that I was supposed to get to that I didn’t? This isn’t even a question of moderation, it’s a question of range of experience and the scope of perspective. There’s people who spend their entire life reading, and there’s people who spend their entire life drinking, and both situations are equally pitiful for the drunkard knows not of Hamlet and his plight and the bookworm has no idea where Steinbeck was really coming from.
There’s no magic to psychotropics that fixate your age. Whatever you wind up doing is what you wind up doing and whatever you wind up feeling you will wind up feeling and that will shape the rest of your life. You can screw up somebodies’ emotional development through drugs, religion, love or simply spoiling them rotten. No magic here.
I think I’m with groman on this one. I understand what QtM is getting at and it makes a kind of sense, but I’m skeptical and I think that skepticism comes from believing that maturity is really a value judgement and not a brain state.
My mom died and I feel bad about that every time I think about it, so I smoke a joint and then I don’t feel so bad.
My mom died and I feel bad about that every time I think about it but then I remind myself to focus on what a great person she was when she was alive and then I don’t feel so bad.
Aren’t they just different coping styles that lead to the same place? Most would say that the first case is avoiding the issue and the second is dealing with it but in reality neither one changes the fact that I feel bad when I think about her death. I think it’s fine for you to prefer one style of coping over the other, but how is it anything more than a value judgement on your part?
daffyduck you have used the platform of one hypothetical situation in particular that of a death/ bereavment to convey just one of the reasons for drug abuse (although chances are these people in reality would have been doing drugs before the situation given would have occured) which involves an alternative for coping through ‘natural’ methods.
Technically I do not feel these are equally alternate coping mechanisms. In fact only one is a genuine mechanism, the other factor just offsets this mechanism and is not a mechanism in itself. You might say an alteration on a mechanism.
Let me explain.
Emotions and their full range are a continually working process I reckon by and large that goes through distinct stages after any given experience and if they run their natural course we learn to deal with the situation and our feelings evolve as such over certain amounts of time. If we take a drug like hash this isnt a coping mechanism in itself because it makes you unable to cope as well as you would have if you didnt smoke it in the first place, fact!
I reckon people that abuse drugs literally stun and daze their natural mechanism for coping as such their is only one mechanism and thats your brain itself, not a drug also. The drug just offsets the mechanism of which there is only one. Whatever effect any given ‘mac’ may cause seems to me will only serve to confuse the mechanism. You always will have the memory of the death and if its dealt with right first time round you then have the necessary tools to treat that memory. If the thought has only occured while under the influence well there lies an even bigger problem.
Because if or when the day comes that you think of it or the memory comes back when your state of mind is trying to rectify its offset or is nearly regulatory once again and your brains encoding of thoughts is occuring somewhat diferently, as in more normally, you then have to deal with it in an entirely different way I reckon. You set yourself up for reliving the experience in a different way and thus have to learn how to deal with it all over again and this is where you knock yourself back.
I feel this reprocessing of experiences occurs across all the memories of a drug abuser in reform and this can give shock value to the person also. The person will learn all over again coz the rate and manner was severely altered during abuse.
daffyduck asks , ‘‘Aren’t they just different coping styles that lead to the same place?’’
No because the natural way will lead you permanently to the place you want to go yet the drug taking way will only stop you from ever gettin to cope with it in the first place, I feel.
No, unless you have a cite that the natural way will lead you to the place you want to go. Both ways are a method of administering certain chemicals to certain parts of the body, one of them is an automatic method that evolved a fairly long time ago, the other a conscious method that evolved recently. The only thing that the natural way has going for it is that the probability that it’s going to prevent you from procreating and raising fertile offspring has been most likely improved in your favor by millions of years of natural selection. Other than that even an uneducated “Hey, this makes me feel good, let me do that” is a much more complex mechanism than “Hey, if I think about all the good things I have I’ll feel better”.
Putting a bandaid and ointment on a cut is not simply ‘stunning’ your organism into healing. I suppose you feel that medicine of any kind is just avoiding the issue that should be fixed by your immune system and pure strength of self determination?