Foreword This is a book about marijuana. And relationships. And consciousness. It may be a book about you. This is a book for people who are using marijuana who question whether they use it too much, too often. It’s not anti-marijuana by any means. It’s meant to assist people who are exploring their relationship with cannabis.
Chapter One Manipulating Consciousness
How do we change our minds? Biochemically? Or consciously? How do we make decisions? And how do people change? What is consciousness? How does marijuana affect consciousness? And what is our relationship to marijuana, to ourselves, our minds, our decisions? It’s trippy to think about.
You either have a problem or you don’t. You’re either sober or you’re not. It’s as if there was a sharp distinction between addiction and not. Once in a diagnostic category it seemed hard to escape. Labels were applied. This approach elicited resistance and shame and, in my opinion, was counterproductive. It supplanted delving and understanding with categorization. Life holds mystery and complexity. Life transcends labels.
SO, WHAT’S YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MARIJUANA? STRANGER (0-5 points) CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE (6-9 points) DISTANT FRIEND (10-12 points) INSIDE CIRCLE (13-16 points) BEST FRIEND (17-20 points) LOVER (over 21 points) If marijuana is becoming a more important relationship to you, you might be getting hooked. Chances are you are beginning to alter the course of your life as a result of this relationship. You may be giving up friends or goals or a chance at the happiness that might be within reach. You may want to seriously reconsider this relationship with marijuana.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who was President Obama’s first choice for Surgeon General, famously came out and apologized for his opposition toward marijuana. But he still maintains that 9-10% of those who use marijuana will become addicted. And we know that cannabis is especially harmful for teens. 9-10% addicted? That’s nearly 2 million marijuana addicts in the United States.
THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A DEEPER LOOK “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” ~ Blaise Pascal
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus felt that change was the basic nature of reality and that it was impossible to step into the same river twice. If that’s true, why do we need to alter anything? It’s always altered already. Yet so many people perceive their surroundings to be in a sort of unbearable stasis, to the extent that they need to change where they are, what they are doing, and with whom.
Buddhists speak of “The Hungry Ghost,” a being with a distended belly and a thin neck, always hungry and never satisfied. It’s a metaphor for addictions as well as other compulsive behavior or obsessive thought. Consider the Ghost: for one thing, forever haunted. Hanging around in a place that once held some special meaning that has now shifted, even though the Ghost is still searching. The Ghost hungers. Due to its thin neck, it cannot even receive that which it hungers for. And the stomach cannot digest it.
Do you remember being in love? How would you describe that feeling to someone who had never experienced love? It transcends language, yet encompasses the realms that are sensual, emotional and psychological. It feels like magic. I think most marijuanics are searching for magic. They hunger for it … and more … and more.
In the end, marijuana dulled my senses. I used to feel like I was putting on what I called my “stupid helmet” every time I smoked. I could feel my IQ dropping. I couldn’t remember the page I’d just read, couldn’t remember what I’d just said, couldn’t remember why I had come into a room.
I was a hungry ghost. No matter how much I used, I always wanted more. “My drug of choice is more,” said my first sponsor. That insatiable hunger is what we are talking about. That’s what we’re up against. And the defense of the need to feed that hunger is one of the things we must become very skilled in working with. Not against. With. That word is very deliberate. It’s a dance, not a confrontation. And we must learn to invite the ghost to dance with us. If we don’t meet the ghost, we’re doomed to fail.
THE THERAPIST’S DILEMMA Here’s a dilemma that many marijuana users express: “What’s the harm?” As subtle as the drug is, there exists a nearly unconscious collusion with the Hungry Ghost. Again, I’m not suggesting that all marijuana use is bad, but allow yourself to explore the relationship your client has with the substance and notice the pull or resistance against doing so. That relationship is likely to be strongly protected.
CHAPTER TWO WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD … “When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing at The Super Bowl”
And then, disappointment. After all that build up, I was just high again. I’d have the thought, “I don’t know what I was looking for, but this isn’t it.” I hadn’t learned yet the distinction between craving and using. I’ve heard we desire our partner most when they aren’t present. This was true of my relationship with marijuana. I most longed for it when it was gone.
Addiction is the condition of desire, standing in the presence of absence that leads to the absence of presence. It is the condition of craving. Dopamine is associated with learning, learning to associate pleasure with use of the substance. The learning, it turns out, is important. Addiction can and is learned and habituated. We can reduce the thing to bubbles and atoms and molecules and electrical impulses, but then where is the poetry? The sheer experience of sensuality while using? The smell of the flower top being broken up, how it clings to you like the funk of sex, the aroma clinging to your fingers. Light the match and the quick hit of sulfur on the nostrils. Lucifer’s doorbell. The space the smoke takes in your lungs, and more, how it feels to expand once there, chasing the hit with a little more oxygen to hold it down, letting it flood blood vessels, feeling the hit take and give, the lung’s reluctant exhale, the smoke tainted brown with what tolls internal passages have to pay. The light fuzziness of the high itself, the shift in senses and cognition, things brought in and out of focus at once. To me this recollection can still conjure a light craving, remembering my distant lover. Like I said, often when I’d take that first hit after an absence there was a feeling of disappointment. The craving was the thing, not the thing itself. Isn’t that interesting?
At times I thought I needed to tape-record myself, imploring myself to get help because I knew the daytime guy would ignore the 1 a.m. guy who needed so much help. Like Jekyll and Hyde. But I never did. Eventually, I did get help. And here is how it happened.
I knew, during that first meeting, I wasn’t just breaking up with alcohol. This wasn’t a trial separation. This was a divorce. I wanted alcohol out of my life for good. Marijuana? I wasn’t as sure. I’d kept a couple of joints rolled up in a little wooden stash box (another of the many pieces of paraphernalia I had collected.) The box might as well have been labeled, OPEN IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.
Frank handed me a grocery bag. “Thanks for all the help you’ve given me over the past few years,” he said. “I finally processed this batch right. You’ll be pleased.” The bag was full of marijuana. The most I’d ever had. I thanked him, then, in a kind of panic, stashed the bag in the trunk of my car. That’s where I kept it for the next week, not telling anyone. The bag might as well have held a decapitated human head for all the anxiety it caused me. The following weekend, after an uplifting meeting, I drove back to his place and gave the bag back to him, explaining my new intention to remain clean and sober.
The idea that I was wearing a mask resonated with me, and eventually I could share my true self, but the removal of the mask would be painful. And the idea of paradox, that two truths that are seemingly incongruent could exist in the same moment, indicated the realm of spirituality.
The opposite also is true. Some things evaporate if you put the light on them. And I’ve come to share this with my clients, reassuring them that they don’t need to stop using if they don’t want to or don’t feel that they can. But if they can be honest and openly share how they are using … when and where and how much … with whom and why — if they can do that, eventually they’ll change their relationship with their substance. Eventually they’ll start making better decisions about their use. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll decide to stop. Most of the people I work with come to that decision.
CANNABIS AND THE BRAIN Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the ingredient in marijuana that gives it its psychoactive effect. Meaning, THC is what gets you high. Most often it’s inhaled, through smoke or vapor, but sometimes digested via edibles or tea. It enters the bloodstream through these various organs (lungs or stomach) and travels throughout the body, into other organs, including the brain. There are brain receptors, kind of loading docks, that manage what chemistry is used by the brain. Cannabinoid Receptors (CBR) are found in areas of the brain that affect memory, coordination, sensation, pleasure and even the perception of time. THC artificially stimulates these areas of the brain, which results in disruption of normal or natural functioning of these areas. THC will attach to brain receptors and will modify nerve action. For instance, the shift in consciousness a marijuana user experiences (as well as shifts in perception and memory) can be attributed to the effect cannabis has on the cerebral cortex. Munchies? That’s a result of the effect on the hypothalamus, which handles metabolism and appetite.
Alan Watts writes in “The Wisdom of Insecurity”: “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.” In Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art,” he explores the seeming paradox of resistance that seems inevitably to appear once you consider undertaking some creative endeavor. Once you’ve come to a decision, it’s time to prepare.
Why? If you’ve made a list of what you don’t like about marijuana, and you’ve also made a list of the benefits of quitting, you have your why. I encourage you to dig deeper. For instance, in the examples listed above, I gave my imaginary client a motivation to be healthier. WHY is it important to be healthier? Is it to improve self-esteem? Longer life? Have you been around people in poor health or who have had lung issues and you want to avoid that? Be as specific and as deep as you possibly can. Another example was to be more productive. WHY is that important? I wanted to stop initially because it would help me to get through graduate school. WHY? I wanted to be a therapist. WHY? I saw this as a career where I could both help people and make a living. WHY? I want to make a difference. Keep asking the WHY question until you run out of answers, or you reach some profound truth that seems to emotionally resonate with you.
In fact, it’s probably the primary reason why marijuana is so bad for young people: It interferes with the process of developing long-term thinking, delaying gratification and linking actions to consequences.
CHAPTER FIVE GHOST DANCING (Working with Resistance)
Yet, if the Hungry Ghost is like a spirit who has taken possession of a body, attempts at exorcisms may make the Ghost combative or angry. Or flat out disrespected.
It’s not a fight that will win the day, but a Dance. The elements of dance anticipate an acknowledgment of how your partner moves and understanding the shape and gravity of your partner, an appreciation of aspects both fluid and rigid.
If you want to read a whole book devoted to this dynamic, I’d recommend Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art.” From Freud’s description of “resistance” to the Greek’s mythology of Eros and Thanatos, the pull towards entropy and self-sabotage seems as old as time itself. Watch for the counterbalance pull once you make a commitment to change your marijuana use: the feeling that you need to buy a quantity just to prove you can resist it or postponing your decision to quit by setting a date weeks or months away.
So many of the people I’ve worked with, for instance, have told me that if they do stop smoking weed, they’ll no longer have any fun in their lives. They will no longer be creative. They’ll lose all their friends. Who would ever stop smoking pot if that’s what they thought they had to look forward to?
REFRAMING If you think about what you are losing, you will feel like you’re losing. Focus on what you are gaining, and you’ll see it from a different perspective.
You need to decide for yourself, if you’re ready to change, are you experiencing a breakdown or a breakthrough?
I believe that most of our suffering comes from trauma or toxicity, and the ability to recover is connected to our ability to address these emotional states and memories, heal our bodies and minds and encounter the false beliefs we’ve formed as a result. Once I stopped using marijuana and alcohol, my brain started to heal. Synapses started firing again. I felt, at times, wonderful, and at other times horrible. I was a mess. Early recovery is so difficult because: You’ve blocked yourself from one of your primary coping mechanisms. You have to face all the consequences from your using. For some, the consequences are legal or financial. Mine were more emotional, psychological and relational.
The point is the alcoholic (or the addict) shifts from an egocentric existence to one where they discover their own shadow, clean up the messes they’ve made in relationship with others, and devote themselves to helping one another. The use of ego is significantly shifted when done correctly.
Reality Testing – How well do you perceive what’s real? Addiction = Reality becomes distorted. Attitudes and thoughts are formulated to protect the relationship with the substance and to reinforce the need for the substance. Recovery = Honesty is valued. The elements of denial are exposed. A natural suspicion of your own thinking becomes normalized, and reality testing via contact with others in recovery is encouraged. For instance, I used to believe that my marijuana use and heavy alcohol use were fine, since no one was affected but me. That wasn’t true. My use had an impact on my ability to be present to my wife and young daughter. It had an impact on finances, my profession, my sense of myself. In recovery I had to address dealing with life on life’s terms.
Judgment – Similar to reality testing, how well are you assessing and judging both rewards and consequences? Addiction = Judgment becomes compromised in order to justify continued use and mitigate against negative consequences associated with use. There is a disconnect between negative consequences and the use of marijuana. Recovery = A cognitive restructuring takes place via the narrative community of 12 Step groups; denial is normalized and pierced in such an environment. One’s own judgment is viewed with suspicion, and you gradually trust your intuition more often as you progress in recovery.
Ego Defense Mechanisms – Projection, repression, denial, sublimation, all intended to protect the “self” from fears and anxiety. Addiction = In service of the process of addiction. Projection, for instance. Rather than owning your own dishonesty you say that others can’t be trusted. This is also where minimizing and rationalizing use could be categorized. These defenses kick in only to serve the addiction or an impoverished sense of the self. Recovery = Ego defenses are named “defects of character” or shortcomings; when the defenses are practiced, it is strongly recommended to make amends. People are encouraged to “tell on themselves” when engaging in their defects if they have harmed others. Or themselves.
WORKSHEETS FOR EVERY STAGE OF CHANGE Precontemplation At this stage, you don’t believe you need to change your relationship with marijuana. Answering the following questions or doing the activities described here might be worth considering:
Here’s an example of what your list might look like: I loved the feeling (What is the feeling? Does it relax you or stimulate you?) I loved the ritual of it – cleaning pot, rolling the joint I loved how it relaxed me I loved that it was a social drug I loved that it put me to sleep I loved that it was something to do when I was bored What I’d like you to do is to create a menu of activities that you can try on for each and every function that cannabis supplied for you. Here’s an example of what the list of replacement activities might look like when you think about how you loved that feeling that’s hard to describe (the body buzz): Go to the gym Go swimming
Take a hot shower Take a long bath Sex Go on a bike ride Go on a roller coaster Go for a drive Start hang gliding Try snorkeling or scuba diving Kickboxing