Episode 395: How Culture Shapes the Way We See Addiction: Stigma, Willpower and Why Environment Matters with Dr. Maria Cichosz

0:00All right, everybody, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Wired for Addiction, and honestly, I am so excited about this partnership. You might remember Dr. Evelyn Higgins from when she came on the show to talk about the biomarkers of addiction. That episode landed in such a powerful way for so many of you, and I really believe in the work she's doing. Here's the thing, if you or someone you love has been caught in chronic relapse, addiction switching, or treatment that only works for a while, the issue may not be behavioral. It may be biological, and that changes everything. Dr. Higgins and her team actually measure the underlying biomarkers driving these patterns, dopamine, cortisol, inflammation, mitochondrial function, and then build a personalized plan to bring your biology back into balance.

0:52She put together a free guide for you, the Biology of Addiction 10 Core Biomarkers, downloaded at theaddictedmind.com forward slash wired. That's theaddictedmind.com forward slash wired. There'll also be a link in the show notes. And I want you to know, you are not broken. Sometimes your biology just needs to be understood, and I think that brings a lot of hope. All right, on to this episode. All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of the Addicted Mind podcast. I'm Dwayne Osterland, and I'm your host.

1:31You know, speaking as someone who's experienced, like, family members' addictions, I think it's hard enough to get empathy going towards someone who you care about and love and is struggling, especially if their behavior repeatedly hurts you, let alone a stranger that's abstracted from you in this like really wide social context. So, yes, to say it's their fault is just like an easy out.

1:55So here's something I've been sitting with. when you're struggling with addiction or you love someone who is, so much of what you feel about it comes from a story. A story about willpower, about what kind of person ends up here, about whose fault it is. And a lot of those stories, we didn't necessarily write them ourselves. We inherited them. My guest today is Maria Chihosh. Maria is a writer, a critical drug studies scholar and a professor of literature and creative writing at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Maria is the author of the novels Cam and Beau and Middlemen. And in this conversation, we go way back to Roman times, actually, to where the word addict even comes from.

2:43And we trace how that idea shifted over the centuries. It started as something you could be devoted to, like prayer, and then it became a disease of the will, and now we have what we call the brain disease model. And Maria helps us see what that model gets right and what it can miss. And we also get into stigma, harm reduction, and why fiction might be one of the most powerful tools we have for building empathy. It's a big, thoughtful conversation, and I think it might change how you hear the word addiction. So let's jump into this episode.

3:27All right, everybody, welcome to The Addicted Mind. I have Maria Shihosh with me. I am super excited to have you back because we tried this interview once and it was super interesting, but we had some technical difficulties. And so I'm really happy that you were willing to come back and give this another shot and come back onto the podcast and rerecord and do all this work. So let's jump in. Maria, introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about you and we're going to go from there. Yeah. Thanks again, Duane, for making time. Hopefully the tech gods are with us today. My name is Maria Chihosh. I'm a critical drug studies scholar, which is the term for folks in the humanities who study drugs from like a cultural and social perspective.

4:14If you think about how drug research is done, a lot of it is, say, in the sciences, where we think about biology and psychology and neuroscience and how these things impact behavior. And then on the other side, you've got like the sociologists and they look at things like, you know, crime and policy. And they think about things like deviance, which is a term that I would take some issue with. And then there's folks like myself who think about how the cultural narratives we have around things like drug use and addiction impact the lived experience of folks dealing with those things or folks who use drugs and who think about the power of story and the power of history in understanding why we talk about these issues in the ways that we do.

4:56I think this is such a fascinating topic because so much of how we conceptualize the world is through story. We pass story from generation to generation. It feeds how we interact with the world, what we learn. So I'm excited to have this conversation again with you about it because it's so fascinating to me to see it because when I work in treatment and I've worked helping people struggling with addiction, so much of it is formed around the stories we tell about it. Yeah, I think stories literally make our reality. It's hard to overemphasize how powerful they can be from the personal level of the kinds of stories you tell yourself day to day inside your head about what kind of person you are, why you act the way you do, and what we would, I think, broadly call negative or positive self-talk, all the way up to the very broadest levels of the cultural myths we have around like, what is addiction?

6:00Why do people encounter it? Are certain people more susceptible to it than others? And then those stories, of course, have implications as to then, well, how should we treat addiction and how should we treat folks who live with it? Yeah. So let's go backwards a little bit in time to the history of the idea of addiction, right? As now in the model we are here, you know, presently we look at it from this medical perspective, but I would love to get some of that history from you and what you know about it and how that shifted over time. Yeah, that's a great question. Addiction has a long and tangled history and the form in which we see it today really didn't exist in the cultural imagination until pretty recently in historical terms.

6:50By recently, I mean maybe the last 200 years or so. If we go way back to, like, say, Roman times, and we think about what the term addict, which was like the way they would have had it, meant back then, it was a legal term, which was a dissery, which was to give property or to give a person, like a slave essentially, over to another property owner. So there was always this like connotation of giving something over or giving something up or giving up one's will to a force greater than oneself. But at that point, it was a legal technicality. And then in the early modern period, the way that folks would have talked about this would have been to say they were addict to something.

7:35So one could be addict to something negative, as we would imagine it, like a vice of some kind, gambling, sexual impulses, a substance, sin, essentially. Or one could be addict to something positive and worthy of admiration, for example, prayer, devotion, commitment to a community. So again, there was this sense of allowing oneself to give to something and to be enthralled to something, but not necessarily something bad. Over time, you start to get this moralizing connotation of addiction being a weakness of the will. But hold on, I want to go back to that first part just to make sure I really understand you.

8:17They could see even back when we look in the history of Roman times that this was something that had some kind of power over somebody. Like they're losing control to it because the idea of giving property over or you no longer have control, you no longer have power over it. That's what I'm hearing you say. Yeah, 100%. A major thing that's always at issue in addiction across time is will. And with what you're saying, like this act of giving over, that very much implicates like, yes, a giving up of willpower and of like personal freedom, which of course today, there's always this question of like, are people fully in control of themselves when they're experiencing addiction?

9:01and should they then be held responsible for the things they say and do when they are experiencing that condition. But you can see that as you say, like, yes, going all the way back to this legal definition where, like, there is a giving over or a giving up. And that gets complicated pretty quick. But what's interesting to me is that this is something that was recognized all the way back in Roman times. It's not something necessarily totally new, right, when we look at this terminology. So going a little bit more forward into what you were talking about, this moralization of it or this starting to put a moral context on it.

9:41Yeah. So there was eventually this idea of like the disease of the will, which is how the first physicians to really think about addiction from a medical standpoint conceptualized it. And this was a big change because previously, like I said, it could be any behavior that one was addicted to, a good one or a bad one, quote unquote, that was desirable or not desirable. And so it used to be that if folks, say, had tendencies toward excessive drinking or were particularly fond of, say, opium, which was a very common substance, historically speaking, that wouldn't be given necessarily a value judgment.

10:19It was just they were more inclined to have more of that than others. And it was just like something they did. Whereas when this idea of the disease of the will came up, what you start seeing is the notion that there's something wrong with that person's inner decision-making capability and something wrong with really their soul. Like will being a more secular way of talking about the soul. So if there's like a diseased will, your will isn't acting in your favor or in ways that you're fully in control of. And that's really like the beginning of really a definition of addiction that perhaps pathologizes the person experiencing the condition rather than just seeing it as a feature of their more general behavior.

11:02Now it's a feature of something that's inside of themselves and is toxic or diseased or malformed, all of these negative connotations. So in history before, there wasn't this moral connotation to it as much. I mean, I still hear the part where you're losing control, you're giving control over to something else, but that moral piece wasn't as apparent or wasn't as strong or focused on. So how did this moral piece start to get incorporated? Where does that come from? What was happening? Where did the culture start to pick that up? Yeah, so it's fascinating to look at something like alcohol, for example, which used to be just like a part of, say, religious celebrations or like I was reading a record of like a wife of a preacher in like Puritan New England who died.

11:57and there was just like wine flowing at the funeral in a way that wasn't frowned upon at all. And I think that sort of like normalized view really shifted when we started having our society go more toward like an individualistic model where people need to work and be productive in order to make money and frankly survive. When you think about these earlier contexts, it's like folks lived in communities where they could to some degree rely on each other. There was this form of social accountability, a sense of responsibility toward one another, and a sense in which people weren't just like on their own and say like a nuclear family that was separated from the rest of the community.

12:39where you get folks needing to, like I said, work nine to five to make a wage and to support themselves and those who are dependent on them, you really get a negative connotation around any activity or behavior that would make you unlikely to do that, or that would make it difficult for you to do that. And so this disease of the will idea comes in, especially with like the temperance movement really took this up. They were really concerned with like, well, if there's a diseased will, how does that impact, you know, if it's say like a man in question, how does that impact like the wife, the children?

13:13How does that impact their ability to be someone who is a productive member of their family and their community? So I think you would have to think about the way that we understand our responsibility to each other shifting under what I would call capitalism, like the way that we are, the way that we have to work to live these days. So there was a shift in culture and the needs of the culture at the time that any of this behavior impacted, would impact that negatively in a way. So there was a social constraint on that, it sounds like, started to pop up. Can you talk a little bit about what the temperance movement was?

13:53When you say the temperance movement, some people may not know that history. Yeah, absolutely. The temperance movement was a widespread attempt with a religious edge and largely among women who were concerned about the effects of alcohol on their communities to basically ban drinking, to restrict alcohol and to make that argument from the basis of, again, how is this affecting our community? How is this affecting our ability to be enmeshed together as a social unit? And the outcome of that ultimately was a brief experiment in prohibition, which wasn't long-lived, but was based upon such arguments that there's something about alcohol and other substances that weakens the will and therefore weakens the social fabric.

14:40Can you talk more about, I'm thinking about or imagining, I guess, someone in Rome, right? Where if you have a loss of control, is there some judgment about that loss of control versus the temperance movement where they're seeing the impact of substances on people, right? On things that are happening. And I'm wondering about those judgments. Like, how are those different? And when we look at that piece. And then I'm also wondering, as the medical model comes on and then challenges that moral view, so I guess I want to paint a picture of how those things all kind of come together. Yeah, so in terms of judgment, I think in the Roman context, I would say very little judgment.

15:29People just took it for granted that if you are engaging in this legal procedure of, say, selling your slave to somebody else or selling your herd of sheep to somebody else or your property to somebody else, it's purely a legal and financial transaction that's happening. So the morality really wouldn't have been there. You get a little bit of that with like the giving oneself up to say sin versus prayer in the early modern period. But certainly by the time we arrive at the disease of the will, it really is like there's a moral judgment of personal failing. Like the person who had their will compromised and is engaging in excessive behavior of whatever kind, they're certainly being judged from a social perspective.

16:11And they're probably also internalizing guilt as an individual in a way that they would not have in, say, 1500. With the medical model, what's really interesting to me is that some of these notions of personal responsibility and the weakness that is within one, they not so much disappear, but become translated into a new sight, which is not the will and not the soul, but is the brain. Right. Right. So there's a real difference there. And we start to see that. And I think when you start to look at that, you're questioning, where does my will lie? How much control do I have? Versus how much control does my brain have on a chemical level that has nothing to do with my sense of self, I guess.

17:00And I guess we're thinking about those things and really starting to challenge that thinking. And I don't know if any of us really know where that is yet. And that's up for debate. But I see that change and that shift. Yeah, I think there's been this desire to just find out, like, what is the source of addiction? Where does it come from? And for these folks in, like, the 19th century, the answer would have been, like, the will or the soul. And for us, the answer, scientifically at least in this mainstream model, is the brain. Like, it comes from the diseased brain. Like they say, addiction is a brain disease is the major tagline or synopsis of the brain disease model.

17:42And so, like, yes, you're not pointing to someone's innermost sense of self, but there is a suggestion that the reason they act the way they do is because there's something wrong in their brain. Something's gone awry. Something is broken, which I think to your point of how that affects one's sense of self. On the one hand, like if it's something that's going on neurobiologically, it's not your fault. Like there's nothing you can do about that. It's just something that's gone off with brain chemistry the same way that depression is not anyone's fault. Or cancer, which is cells going out of control, is not anyone's fault.

18:19But on the other hand, there can be this deep sense still of like moralization and guilt as in, oh, something is wrong with that person's biology. They're somehow different than what we would consider a quote-unquote normal human being. Right. Talk a little bit about this idea of willpower, right? This idea of the will. I think this is a really important concept because for a time being, my understanding, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that there was a strong belief that, you know, especially, I guess, in Christian Western culture, that we're given this will, that we have complete control and the choice is all ours.

19:04And here we have that message changing with understanding how the brain works and realizing like, wait a minute, maybe we don't have that. And the wrestling of these stories in our culture that I think we're still wrestling with now. Yeah, this is why I think the brain disease model is so interesting. because it really is trying to figure out where is will in this whole puzzle, I suppose, of addiction. And what a scientist who researches this and subscribes to the brain disease model would say is that the person experiencing addiction does not have control over their will. They do not have free will, which we could think about in several different ways.

19:50But one thing that's really advantageous about that is to shift this idea that addiction is a personal moral failing and more to see it as any other condition that is deserving of treatment and empathy rather than, say, stigma or punishment or criminalization. So, for instance, like suicide used to be considered a crime. And if one committed suicide, then one's property was forfeited to the state and like one's family wouldn't get anything from that. And there was a great sense of shame around that. Whereas now we understand that that suicide has a complex set of neurochemical, psychological correlates.

20:30It's related to one's circumstances of living and many other things. And so we don't have that same sense of stigma and shame. And similarly, I think the upshot of understanding addiction as a brain disease would be to imagine that, you know, it's not the fault of the person experiencing it. They are experiencing a crisis of will that is grounded in biology. And so then you can have things like maybe your insurance company will cover this if it's a disease. Maybe your family will have more empathy for your situation if they understand that it's not your fault. Like there's all these practical outcomes of calling it a disease and a brain disease that very much are trying to get away from the idea that it's a personal failing of willpower.

21:15I think you bring up a really good point about that. And this is the thought that came to my mind about that, because I was thinking about how 12-step came into being back in the 20s, right? That people who were stuck in this, right, who were drinking in a way that was detrimental to them, didn't have anywhere to go because the medical community basically said, oh, you know, this is just a problem with your will. You know, I think 12-step formed out of that problem. These people wanted some kind of support for this. Also informed by the temperance movement, which impacted the beliefs around alcohol and all of that.

21:59But I'm just wondering, you know, looking at the idea of story and culture and how we conceptualize everything, how that influenced the growth of that movement. And then moving all the way to today to see how, you know, this medical model comes in and starts to change that. And then, like you said, insurance comes in and says, oh, well, insurance will pay for that now because it's not just a will thing. And I'm just wondering about your thoughts about that as you've looked at history and story and how that all plays out. Yeah, so I've been talking a bit about what I call the upshots or upsides of the brain disease model.

22:40And like, they're all these very practical ones of like, we can take this away from any sense of personal responsibility. And we can see it as a disease as any, like any other, which I think is very productive. It also gives family members the sense of closure, of understanding like, oh, it's this that caused it and not something else. There's a very simple answer there, which is you can look at someone's brain and understand that there's something going on there. And in fact, you can even point to it on like a brain scan, an fMRI, which is like the most reassuring possible thing. It's the same as seeing like a scan of like a tumor or something and understanding like, oh, that's where that's coming from.

23:18That's on the plus side. I think one thing in terms of cultural narratives that is missed when we look so much at the scientific view or neuroscientific view of addiction is the broader world around the person whose brain is diseased. So we can, again, look at this scan and it's like a picture of a brain in a vat. It's very abstracted. It's like, oh, yes, this is where the problem is. It's a problem of biology. It's a problem of neurochemistry. But that neglects the fact that every brain is inside a human skull and that human skull is part of a human person who's walking around in the world, has had different life experiences, has encountered things that are specific to them and is dealing with a whole set of complex sociocultural factors that I think are no less important in understanding why they're experiencing addiction than the brain scan.

24:11Like the brain scan is a piece of that puzzle and is important for all the reasons we've talked about, but also perhaps misses some very important contexts. Yeah, to really understand what that person is going through. You know, as you're talking, I was also thinking about this idea of treatment, especially in the United States of this abstinence model, like verse maybe more in Europe, I think they embrace a harm reduction model and being able to look at substance use from a more nuanced perspective, right? Especially as we, you know, understand some of these drugs that were, you know, just horrible bad are now being used to treat PTSD and trauma and stuff like that.

25:00So I'm watching how these stories influence how we think about this and how we deal with this, not just on the individual basis, but as a society as a whole. Yeah. Harm reduction is a really good example as a counterpoint to just like a neuroscience perspective of addiction or of drug use in general, which is that harm reduction considers context. It considers what psychedelic researchers call set and setting, which is the idea that the outcome of any drug experience will always be shaped by not only the person who is ingesting or using that substance, but also the setting in which that substance is being used, which could be as simple as like the literal room one is in or the community of people one is ingesting a substance with, or it could be as broad as the culture one lives in and the kinds of narratives that they're being told about substance use.

26:00So in harm reduction, there's nothing inherently wrong with using a drug. What one would consider is how is one's environment set up to make the use of that drug as safe and productive as possible, versus just seeing it as something that's acting only on your brain. It's something that's interacting with your whole environment. So this gives, yes, a great deal of complexity, I think, compared to just a focus on biology. So when you look at this, what do you think are some of the major stereotypes or preconceptions, mis-stigma assumptions that circulate in our culture now, in our society now that you think need to be challenged, that you think need to be looked at?

26:47Well, one is always in my face when I open the morning newspaper. I live in the city of Toronto, and we have a cost of living crisis here, and we have a huge unhoused population. And every day in the paper, there's an op-ed that basically uses terminology like calling folks who are out on the street zombies, imagining that they are a harm to those around them and to society in general, and seeing them as some kind of inconvenience that is getting in the way of quote-unquote normal upstanding citizens going about their day. The term zombie comes up all the time, and I think that relates to this idea about willpower.

27:28You know, in science, folks have gotten their heads around the idea that it's not an individual person's fault, But I think culture is very much lagging behind that. We definitely see folks who are dealing with addiction, especially those who are the most visible and who are out, again, in public spaces and don't have other places to go, as being somehow lesser, somehow damaged, and almost like less than human with this terminology that's often thrown around. So that's one really major myth that I think is extremely harmful, that there's something fundamentally different about someone experiencing an addiction than somebody who is not, to the point that it's very deeply embedded in them and that you could say, oh, there goes that drug-addicted zombie, which is a literal quote from an op-ed I read recently.

28:15Right, which then really stops us from looking at the broader humanity that all of us come to this life with. Well, this is the thing. I mean, I think we have so much empathy for so many different social issues and causes in our society. And for some reason, this is just a sticking point. And it doesn't seem to be one of them. Like, it's very difficult for someone who's never encountered addiction, whether personally or through someone they know in their community or family, to understand that, like, yes, extending empathy to another human being is a much more productive approach to try to get addicted.

28:54understand what their life experience has been, where they're coming from, and to really hear what they have to say about what would be helpful to them, rather than trying to foist some kind of narrative on them of what we should do to help them, which at least in the Canadian context, I know several states have laws like this as well. One of the major approaches to responding to addiction has been forced treatment in several states. And Canadian provinces have laws on the books that allow a person who is experiencing addiction to be basically incarcerated medically against their will. Again, so this question of will comes up.

29:35It's like, well, they're not in control of themselves. We know what's best for them. Forced treatment. Right. Which has a ton of implications right there. I mean, what does that mean when the state has that kind of power over somebody, it could be really, really detrimental, as you were saying earlier, especially if we're not looking at the context of everybody's life and where they are in this moment. Yeah, which I think the other thing is, if we're not looking at context, the story that gets told too is that it's the individual's fault, and then we can step back as a society and say, we have no part in that.

30:13But really, I think what radical empathy would require would be to imagine how the structures that we all live in and support every day actually create conditions for some people that leave them much more vulnerable to something like addiction than the rest of us might be. By that, I mean structures like poverty, racism, systemic inequality, access to basic necessities, job stability. I can think of family trauma. If you're experiencing something like PTSD from whatever has happened in your life, you're, again, much more susceptible. to lean on a substance or behavior to allow you to cope with that than someone who has not experienced that.

30:55These are all the things that get lost in the narrative when it's just a focus on, well, it's their fault and they've made bad choices and that has nothing to do with me. Whereas I would say it has to do with all of us and the world we've created. Yeah, but it's much easier to blame it on somebody when it's all about their will. Yes. It's an easy frame to be able to say, I have nothing to do with that because it's their will and they failed somehow. They're somehow broken. It's not me or the society that I'm participating in, and I have no responsibility to the whole. Yeah, I mean, it's hard enough to get, you know, speaking as someone who's experienced like family members addictions, I think it's hard enough to get empathy going towards someone who you care about and love and is struggling, especially if their behavior repeatedly hurts you, let alone a stranger that's abstracted from you in this like really wide social context.

31:53So yes, to say it's their fault is just like an easy out. And I'm not surprised that that's the cultural narrative, but it is unfortunately one of the ones that keep the situation as it is. I think unless we can develop more widespread societal empathy toward folks dealing with addiction, like we will never allow their voices to be a major part of, you know, how treatment should be done, what they need, and how we deal with addiction as a society. It will always be like a top-down model of like, we know what's best for them, it's their fault, and like they just are going to be processed through that system.

32:33So tell me a little bit about this, because I'm thinking about the war on drugs and its failure and the impact that has had and has on individuals versus some of what I'm seeing happening in some other countries where they're decriminalizing drug use and opening up places for help or support and how those two things collide. especially I'm looking in the in the United States on that that piece but I'm wondering about that in how those come together yeah I think if we take seriously the idea that the cultural set and setting that someone exists within will shape their outcomes of drug use a very simple example of that is literally criminalization like if you consume a drug that is illegal you immediately have the risk of, say, arrest, jail time, all the employment consequences that come from that.

33:33That's a feature of set and setting that impacts how a drug can be experienced by an individual. If we take seriously that that's a real factor, then I think you would have to move toward a model of harm reduction, whereas you can see in some of these European countries and in a more limited way in Canada, what we have is the notion that if you can support someone in their drug use in a way that attends to their environment, not just to like their personal responsibility or like, I don't know, morality in that matter, then you can create a much safer society for people who use drugs. It's the idea that the state should have some responsibility in shaping the conditions that make it possible for folks to use drugs without experiencing harm.

34:20And in turn, it helps everybody. I think so. It's like if you don't want to be confronted with someone using a drug in the street, then maybe you might want there to be a safe consumption site in your neighborhood, which of course people really push back on. But there's a tension between these two things. You know, it's like you can't have it both ways. You can't both want this problem to disappear and not impact you and then not support the kinds of policies that make it possible. for you to coexist with someone who's using a drug in a way that is socially tenable and, you know, felicitous, frankly.

34:55Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I want to switch gears a little bit here because you're also a writer and you write novels about these issues. And so I would love to talk a little bit about that because I think that's important in our previous conversation when we tried to do this. You talked a lot about using your novels as a way of research to really contemplate these complex social issues to be able to understand it better and to think about it in different ways. Yeah, you know, we started talking about the power of story at the beginning of this. And I think for me, fiction and narrative more broadly is a way to explore these issues that doesn't require me to make like a policy argument, which I'm happy to do, but you know, can be a very limited way of going about it, or doesn't require me to have like a thesis statement as you would in like an academic paper, for example.

35:57It's a way that nuance can come into these stories where you don't have to have a solid yes or no answer or like know the solution necessarily. As you said earlier, you know, there are not agreed upon solutions. Mileage may vary. What works for one person might not work for another. There's something about fiction and about narrative and story that allows you to focus on that complexity and that individual experience in a way that, you know, an aggregated study wouldn't allow you to, or a way that a policy paper wouldn't allow you to. There's something to be said for the power of narrative to show us that not only do I think this way in my head and I have my own thoughts, feelings, desires, experiences, but other people also think exactly like I do.

36:45We all have that inner voice. We all have struggles. We all have feelings. There's something about fiction that doesn't let empathy escape in the same way that some of these more firm, like objective arguments or facts might allow that to slip through the cracks. In philosophy, there's this question of, can we ever know what it's like to be a bat? What does it feel like to be a bat? A bat being like a totally different organism than we are. And it'd be very difficult to say how a bat experiences the world. But I mentioned earlier, the kind of lack of empathy we have toward folks who are dealing with addiction.

37:19It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that it's just as hard for someone who's never encountered that in any sense to understand what that's like versus understanding what a bat is like. It's like equally difficult. But when we open a story where there's, you know, someone speaking from their experience and going about their life and again, thinking, feeling, desiring, suffering the same way that we all do, perhaps I would hope that there's an empathy that can be had there that allows us to make that imaginative leap and to do it in good faith. Absolutely. I mean, you look at all of literature and so much of literature is about sharing story that helps us understand a perspective that we did not have until we read it through the eyes of these characters and understand it.

38:10I mean, I think story is about building empathy, literature. Look at some of the, you know, all these, some of the classic works, right? A changed social perspective because we could hear a story from a place that we could never imagine until we're there, until we painted that picture. I mean, I think that's the power of this. It has the ability to shift us and it has the ability to play a big role in building empathy for others. Once we understand their perspective and we put ourselves there, I also think that fuels compassion and kindness and understanding and the ability to support others. Yeah, it becomes much more difficult to discount a perspective when you've spent, say, 200 pages in somebody else's shoes.

39:02There's something about walking in someone's shoes, metaphorically speaking, that might make you more open to contemplating how and why they act the way they do and how they've come to this place in their life and maybe make you engage with that with a little more empathy, curiosity, and nuance. The writer William Burroughs, who was a lifelong heroin user, and at some points in his life in a way that was perhaps detrimental and some parts of his life in a way that was very much part of his well-being and his integration into his community, he had this question to the reader that was like, wouldn't you?

39:42Wouldn't you be this way or act in this way if you had lived through what I have lived? And I think that's a great way of thinking about the power of literature when it comes to this specific subject matter is like, yeah, to the reader as a pointed question, an ethical question, what is the difference between you and this person? Wouldn't you as well? And yes, to put yourself in someone's shoes is exactly that power of story, I think. So Maria, name your novels. Yeah, so I have two novels. One is called Cam and Bow, which is a story about love and drugs and takes much more of this, I guess, harm reduction perspective of like drugs not necessarily being a negative thing in someone's life, but rather something that spurs one's ability to engage creatively and generously with the world and come to know oneself differently.

40:29It's a love story. It's a fun book. That's like the A side. The B side to that is Middlemen, which is my current novel that's about to come out on October 15th. and it explores what happens when one moves from the nice part of the spectrum to perhaps the more problematic or detrimental part of the spectrum and things get out of hand. So to middle is to sell a substance to support one's own habit, which is exactly what one of the characters in that book is doing, and asks a lot of questions about personal responsibility, what responsibility we have to one another in a community, what we owe to each other.

41:07And it tries to get us to think a little more carefully about where folks are coming from and the many complex factors that might lead them to a specific life circumstance. That's awesome. I'm so glad you're putting that work out there. I think that is so important. So we're getting on our time here. So before we wrap up, I always like to ask every guest one question, and that's, if somebody out there is struggling, what's the story you want them to know? What do you want them to see? That's such a beautiful question, Duane. I think I would want to tell them, you can do it and it gets better. That's something that I, the epigraph of my novel is such that I dedicated it to my past self, who I said did their best.

41:58And I wish I could tell that person that it gets better. But by the time they hear that, they won't need to hear it anymore. So instead, I will share it with folks on your show, which is that like, it's rough out there, but it can be better. Oh, awesome, Maria. Thank you so much for coming on, sharing your wisdom, your knowledge with everybody listening. I just really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dwayne. It's been my pleasure.

42:27Thank you so much to Maria for coming on the show and sharing all of this. What stays with me from this conversation is that question Maria brought in from William Burroughs. Wouldn't you if you'd live through what I've lived? It's such a hard, honest question. It's so much easier to say it's their will. It's their fault. It has nothing to do with me. But like Maria said, it really has to do with all of us, the world we built together. Every brain is inside a person. Every person is inside of life. And I loved how Maria ended it, talking about dedicating a novel to a past self who did their best.

43:09If you're in the thick of it right now, I want you to hear what Maria said. It's rough out there, but it can be better. so you can find all the links to Maria's work at theaddictedmind.com. Check them out in the show notes. And if this episode meant something to you, a rating and review on Apple Podcasts really does help other people find these conversations. So I really appreciate that. And maybe you need more than a podcast. Maybe you're struggling with addiction, compulsive behavior, or betrayal, trauma, or you love someone who is, please check out Novus Mindful Life, the group practice I founded.

43:46We're in person in Southern California with telehealth in California, Virginia, Florida, Idaho, and Texas. That's novismindfullife.com. And if you've broken your partner's trust and you want to become someone who can repair it, Shame to Resilience is my program for people ready to do the work after betrayal trauma. That's shame to resilience.com. All right, everybody, please take care of yourselves remember you're not alone in this and I'll talk to you on the next episode