Farah Therapy Centre: Our Take On Addiction
Learn about addiction at Farah Therapy Centre
When was the last time you felt truly at home?
When did you last experience a sense of real belonging?
When were you last able to say, with real conviction, ‘this is my place, and these are my people’?
If you are anything like us – and by us we mean the team behind Farah Therapy Centre – you may not have been able to remember such experiences until recent years.
Or possibly these questions may still cut straight to the bone for you.
You may have spent a long time feeling out of place, like an outsider, or feeling as if you have no intrinsic link to the people or culture around you. Further along the experiential chain, you may have become isolated and lonely, or been ostracized socially or from your family, without being clear why.
Feeling alienated in today’s society is commonplace.
And like the original alien ET – you want to get home, but you can’t figure out how.
You need help, from true allies, to begin your journey.
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At Farah Therapy Centre we focus on a dimension of the human experience that we believe is increasingly universal: dislocation.
As stated on the home page of our website, in just a few centuries mankind has moved from being native to being nomadic. Even tribes who have been used to being on the move for centuries, have been forced into conventional lifestyles – and as such displaced.
Fuelled by the rise of free market economics, human beings no longer live in the tribes, communities and family constellations in which they have existed for thousands of years. Driven by opportunity, necessity and the demands of society, in parallel with the possibilities of globalization and modern transport, we have spread out across the planet with unprecedented speed.
It’s now commonplace for people to live thousands of miles away from where they grew up, and for children to grow up in families who are thousand of miles away from where they traditionally had roots.
As such there is undeniable evidence that we are more dislocated than ever from the cultural influences that held our families and communities together for so long… and made us feel secure, valued and well as human beings.
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So given the widespread nature of our alienation, how are we coping?
How is Homo Sapiens adjusting to no longer feeling at home?
The answer is we have adapted very quickly to the situation, and developed immediate solutions and habits which deal directly with the shock of no longer being at one with our surroundings.
The problem is that we have become dependent on these solutions and habits… and we no longer know what it is like to live without them.
And in many cases, although successful in numbing the pain of dislocation, there are unfortunate, and sometimes tragic and terminal, side effects.
The vast majority of us know at least one of these short-term solutions.
But in truth, most of us know many of them.
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Addiction these days is simply a way of adapting to the fact that we no longer feel at home.
The absence of community, driven by the rise of free market thinking and living, has plunged our society into a crisis of attention, co-dependency, individual competition and distraction. We are anaesthetized to our emotional state to an unprecedented level, and the ways we have of numbing our pain are too innumerable to mention. In Bruce Alexander’s book ‘The Globalization of Addiction’, it says addiction today is running at an all-time high - having been an uncommon phenomenon until 250 years ago, when the momentum of the industrial revolution began gathering pace and human beings began to move around the planet en masse for the first time.
Suffice to say that as this movement has grown, addiction is no longer just a drugs and alcohol thing.
Prescription medication, shopping, debt, gambling, video games, under eating or over eating, under earning or over earning, workaholism, sex, love and relationships are now all addictions within themselves, and they are all simply ways of us finding a replacement for the belonging we used to feel in the communities, tribes and cultures we were a part of for so long.
And because so many of us have been displaced, many of us now find ourselves in need of ways to adapt to our dislocation.
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The team at FTC know that dislocation is real because we have all experienced it.
We know what it is like to ‘not feel at home’. And we know that other factors – race, sexuality, gender and class – can all contribute to such an experience. However our work together is to bring consciousness to the phenomenon that shape us, and geographical displacement is as hidden from view as it is widespread, in our society.
Whether growing up in many different countries, moving from familiar to unfamiliar surroundings in our own country, or simply being taken out of one context and placed into another without explanation, the team at FTC know dislocation at the experiential level, and have seen it to be fundamental in our understanding of ourselves and what causes us to function in particular ways.
We have found in our work, as well as in our own lives, that the restoration of this sense of relational community can alleviate and cure addictions of all kinds. With community comes psycho-social integration – a sense of being at home and belonging, through which a person can grow, contribute to society, and explore life.
Our dream is to rebuild the connections in our newly forming world that we lost when the old ways collapsed. Without changing, denying or resisting the benefits of modern society, we want to bring back the benefits of our previously enjoyed traditional cultures.
So that we and our whole community can feel at home again, and among our people… wherever we are in the world.
Contact one of our team now:
info@farahtherapycentre.co.uk
+44(0)7732 740 503