On this Christmas evening, I am reflecting a bit on the church. Anyone who’s read much of anything I’ve written may now sigh at the inevitable forthcoming gloom, surly observations, vexation etc. But no! It is Christmas, and this is more cheerful.

My last article was about the roles and nature of the pastor and the psychotherapist. It occurs to me that while the two are in many ways similar, which I highlighted, there are key pieces I said nothing about. First, the church body, the congregation! This togetherness is a probably a much more powerful healing agent than the pastor sitting in an office across from a troubled congregant. Much of the point of being a pastor is in the facilitation of a collective. This is not so much the case with the psychotherapist. With the exception of group work, the psychotherapist does not have a congregational context within which to view and work with the individual. The pastor does. A second important difference is the length of the relationship. Most counseling clients are seen for something like 6 -20 sessions. I’ve known some of my childhood pastors for 15 years.

It is remarkable that a group of more or less likeminded folk gathers together in the same place each week to sing, be taught, speak with, see one another, and perform various other rituals such as communion, confession, and prayer. I would like to name and reflect some of the key ways I’ve experienced joy and healing through the gathered church.

*The church pictured above I attended until age 10, and the one below from then until I got married.

The Singing

I grew up in a conservative Mennonite church, and congregational singing was always a part of our services. This way of singing emphasizes harmony. So each person who is able is expected to sing one of four parts (bass, tenor, alto, soprano – or in my case just the lead melody since harmony never really clicked for me). This singing gets almost every person in the room on their feet and using their body to perform a joint expression of song. It’s very interactive and not much like the contemporary worship service which is more a listening exercise in which you cannot hear anyone except those on stage. And in which case you may not even be able to see those next to you.

In our church the lights stayed up, and the volume was an expression of the congregants. So you heard, seen, felt, and joined the whole group there in the room. I still cannot sing harmony parts except for a few random songs, but the singing was a good, collective experience of expression.

The Eating

My church only practiced communion taking a few times a year, technically. But for many years, we ate a meal together once a month on Sunday evening. Looking back, this eating in the gym seems more like the Lord’s supper than the somber sipping of grape juice we did in the fellowship hall. It was always a lovely time. Every family brought something – meatballs, salads, sandwiches, roll-up pinwheels, more sandwiches, deviled eggs, lasagna. Usually the first letter of your last name dictated whether you brought a main or a dessert. You never knew you you might sit across from or whose afternoon creation you’d find on your styrofoam plate. It was a sacred time set apart to share a meal, talk, laugh, and generally shake off the seriousness of our often melancholy spirituality. This eating together was a great joy for me.

The Playing

In my childhood, Sunday was the definitive social day. Everyone was there, and we went to church twice most Sundays. Not until late in high school did I have a significant amount of non-church friends. There would be a sermon and Sunday school to get through, but then we would get what we came for. I have core memories of playing after church. Football in the gym, on a concrete floor and using a volleyball. Prisoner’s base. Knockout. And one rather strange game called Runaway. In this game everyone grouped under the carport while one kid would flee into the darkness (evening services only). Then the group would go wandering through the parking lot, field, and woods to find them. Once found, the round had only begun, and it wasn’t over until they were physically dragged back to the carport. Bigger kids could sometimes break free and fend off the inevitable dragging for quite some time.

We did all kinds of stuff – I wonder if kids still do these things. We threw sticks at each other in the dark, spied on people, kicked field goals through the hoop’s roof supports, and just generally got sweaty until we had to go home. I loved the play I got to do at church.

The Teaching

When I took Bible classes in college, I was a bit surprised to notice that very rarely was a scripture read or cited that I didn’t recognize. I think there were two reasons. First, my dad read us stories before bed from a large, red Bible. Second, our church never had child care. From the time I could discern spoken words I was hearing sermons on scriptures every Sunday. The value here, I think, was largely in the vocabulary and repetition of the content. I learned the names of Bible characters, theological terms, scriptural storylines, and the order of the books of the Bible. On Sunday mornings Sunday school was geared more to our age level and was more interactive.

Through sermons I was shown a distinct way of hearing and applying scripture taught fairly consistently through hundreds of sermons. I’m pretty confident that at age 14 I could tell you where the church stood on any major theological issue. It’s a way I would (and continue to) come to grapple with and question, but this helped me understand how scripture could be used to form and perpetuate a way of life. I have benefited from the teaching in church.

The Serving

The church context where I grew up presented a unique opportunity to serve. Pretty much everything in a Mennonite church is done in-house. From members literally building the building, grading the parking lot, setting up A/V, cutting the grass, cleaning the sanctuary, running the church library, to even choosing from the congregation someone to be the pastor(s). Everything was done in house. And this means there is always a way to serve, at least there way for me as a young man.

I ran the microphone to raised hands for testimony, set up tables and chairs, showed up on work days (some of them anyway), swept the gym, learned how to run the sound board, and even led singing a few times. There were Sunday school skits performed for the congregation and Christmas plays to participate in. One of the great honors of my high school experience was being asked to share a paper I’d written for a class on a Sunday morning and being affirmed as a writer. I’ve since the re-read the paper, and it wasn’t particularly stunning, but they sure made me feel good. Figuring out what you’re gifted in and what you’re terrible at is one of the hardest parts of being a teenager. I’m thankful to have been able to navigate that in a place that encouraged me to service of many kinds.

Conclusion

There is probably no thing in my life which I have more mixed feelings about than the church where I grew up. There is so much I’m going to great lengths to make sure my daughter never experiences. And there is so much that I’ll be saddened if she misses out on. What I’ve described are just a fraction of the joy, good times, and blessing that came through my church family growing up. It’s where I found a solid mentor, my best friend, and my wife.

As a psychotherapist in training, I look back and see so much of what our society is starving for that was overflowing in my church: shared movement, eating together, free and safe play, instruction in a way of life, and a connection point where you could show up, plug in, and serve.

These are things therapists can encourage and promote or point out when they’re missing. But it’s pastors with their congregations who can make the space for people to experience a gathered community as a healing encounter. I’ve written at length, and will continue to, about where the church is unhelpful, incoherent, and damaging. And I do so (hopefully) out of the conviction that the church is an essential part of a healthy, meaningful existence for so many people. I’m deeply grateful for the gifts imparted to me through the local church – gifts we need now more than ever.

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Introduction

One night, near the end of our class time, the professor had a pastor speak to us about bereavement and end of life care. After she signed off, the class discussed the roles of mental health counselors in conjunctions with and opposed to pastors in providing care.

My classmate remarked that the church is becoming more aware of the limits of its abilities and is now more open to the fact that some situations require a mental health professional. Here, I agree. I think the church and society as a whole is becoming more aware of the benefit which can be provided by clinically trained counselors.

Yet it seems much of the mental health field is of the persuasion that the church treats one kind of problem, the spiritual one, while the therapist treats another sort of problem, a psychological one. I am at least very open to the idea that we are all working at the same problems, though we see, understand, and label them differently. It wasn’t very long ago that church folks went solely to pastors with the problems they needed to talk about. Today, it seems that’s changing and that a gap is has emerged.

The Gap

I think the present and growing need for the psychotherapist may fill the gap in a society where the religion has lost its healing power. When Evangelicalism has become a business model and a right wing voting block, the gap starts to widen. When the thrust is on converting people to avoid hell and the markers of who‘s in and who’s out are a matter of dressing a certain way, then identity becomes about who we’re not, where we won’t spend eternity, and who isn’t one of us. I think this produces a culture of anxiety and fear, and the sort of leaders who emerge and whom we choose have very little ability to sit with people in a healing manner. If those leaders perpetuate a culture of anxiety and fear, teach a theology of anxiety and fear, and serve a people of anxiety and fear, it doesn’t seem likely they’ll also be very helpful to folks trying to heal from the wounds they’ve gathered. It is perhaps only a therapist who will provide the care the person needs to heal.

If you have a disturbed client and give me a really good therapist and a really good pastor (assuming the client is of faith), I think in many cases the person might be genuinely helped be either. However, I think there is a gap created by theologies which promote fear and anxiety and which render the church powerless, and this is what I’d like to explore here in three examples.

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Example 1: Parsing Greek

A few weeks ago, I was tabling for GCU at a missions conference. I met a somewhat well-known evangelical writer and theologian. He was interesting to speak with, and so we talked for quite a while. He mentioned that only in the last few years had he become an egalitarian, and I asked what had prompted the change.

For him, he said, the whole thing – whether or not half the population (women) could serve in church leadership – came down to one word in one verse in Paul’s letter to Timothy. The translation of that verse was what everything hinged on. I asked him if he was at all bothered by that, that such huge implications hinged on one Greek infinitive only accessible to PhD scholars. He said that he was not, and that he expected it would have to be that way. For him, this issue was decidedly based on rendering one word in one ancient letter. It didn’t have anything to do with contemporary discernment or the outcomes produced by one position or the other. Simply put, if he could be convinced intellectually that something was scriptural, then he would support it. A few days later he Tweeted the post below:

Example 2: We Won’t Be Formed By Feelings

About a year prior to the mission conference, I’m on a church music team, and we’re playing songs at a jam session. We played “Christ Be Magnified” which is a beautiful song except for one line in the bridge.

“I won’t be formed by feelings, I’ll hold fast to what is true.”

I made a comment in the session about loving the song except for this line and said that I don’t even know what it would mean to “not be formed by feelings.” How would one just annihilate the primary means which God has given us to interact with our environment? My fellow music team mostly disagreed with me and spoke in defense of the lyric which pits “truth” and “feelings” against each other. It’s a bit like asking a pilot to fly a plane using only a flight manual and none of the aircraft’s instruments instruments which take readings on altitude, direction, pressure, time, and speed. These are the primary means of knowing what’s happening – feelings are condensed information gathered from a person’s environment. Why would you not want that to be a key part of your formation and orientation?

There’s a great word for the state of being where you are not formed by feelings: numbness. And not coincidentally, this sort of posture, ignoring feelings and simply following ideology, produces exactly that: numbness. Years of burying emotion produces a disconnection from feeling and even bodily sensation to the point where authentic connection becomes almost impossible.

Example 3: Incongruent Theologies

Before Aleisha and I became part of the church community where we worship now, we visited several churches. There was one which was pretty great, but every Sunday I was there the sermon seemed to have the same theme – you are a vile, wretched sinner who deserves death and destruction. And God was so angry about how bad you are that he decided to kill Jesus instead of you, so you can live with him forever. Ta da! It wasn’t really good news, and that isn’t really the kind of God I’d like to spend eternity with. It’s a good example of incongruent theology which I think produces a ton of anxiety in those who come to believe it. It paints God as angry and out of control and people as vile and awful – yet somehow it still tries to teach that God is love and that people are in God’s image and made very good. It’s not the sort of mixed messaging I want my daughter growing up with, or myself.

Some theologies which I find incongruent are:

Preaching that each person is created in God’s image, with infinite value from conception > while also teaching that everyone is born a corrupted sinner who is wretched and depraved.

Telling women they are valuable, capable, and more than just warm bodies > while also telling them they may never teach a man since they are less trustworthy and that their place is at home.

Speaking of Christ’s passion as a beautiful love story > while also teaching that God was so angry with humankind that he needed to kill someone to calm himself down and that he killed Jesus to satisfy his wrath.

Telling each person that they are fearfully and wonderfully made > and then condemning gay people for the way they are made and ostracizing them from our communities.

This list could go on.

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I give these examples, they guy at the conference, the jam session, and incongruent theologies as instances of the paradigm I’m seeing. There are not an abundance of people, leadership included, who know how to sit with someone and help them heal. Instead, so much pastoral guidance is far removed from promoting awareness in the person, awareness of their feelings, emotions, bodily sensation, pain, stress, and distress. When the focus is on intellectual understanding of Greek infinitives as the final word, on pursuing “truth” at the cost of honoring the body’s intended function, and on teaching theology which claims to speak about God’s love but which is fundamentally anxiety producing, there is an almost total inability to help a hurting person and to be with them in a compassionate way.

And so here is the wide wide space which the psychotherapist is being asked to fill. And they are, and many being are being greatly helped. But my point is the work of therapists is not (or should not be) so different from the work of pastors. What I think our religious cultural moment cries out for is clergy and lay servants who are able to sit with people and help them reconnect, explore, release, and heal. It is a great spiritual task, and it’s one that will continue to be outsourced to clinicians and psychologists so long as the church remains dogmatic about issues such as keeping women subordinated, keeping feelings at odd with their conception of truth, and keeping incongruent theology flowing from the pulpit. Those who speak from these orientations may speak about love and healing, but they hold to their antithesis in posture and practice.

I suspect my generation and the ones coming after (who are leaving the church en masse) have been and will continue to key in on this theme. The church is slowly realizing we cannot inhabit a theology of oppression and come through unscathed. The science is crystal clear on this – living under stress and anxiety and burying rage and uncertainty will kill you, quite literally. And it presents in all manner of unexplained symptoms, pain, stomach and gut issues, ringing in the ears, depression, chronic illness, etc.

I think the mantra of this generation is “I may not be able to read Greek or do incredible exegetical work, but I can feel pain in my body.” Perhaps unlike previous generations, we no longer fear hell enough to tolerate outcomes of oppressive theologies – outcomes which will make us numb if we endure them long enough.

I’m really thankful to attend a church where I don’t have to stifle the anxiety of these sort of incongruent messages. And I am hopeful about some of the recent changes I’m seeing. Yet for many people these sorts of incongruencies (hearing one thing and living in a reality where it’s untrue) are everyday life. When and where this is true, it will be only the psychotherapist, who is trained to withhold judgement and give unconditional positive regard, rather than the pastor, who will be ready to facilitate healing and able to meet the great spiritual task described by Jung which is now as present as ever.

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*the use of the cover art for this piece was generously permitted by John Kennedy: www jedika.com

A Funny Scene

There’s a funny scene I imagine sometimes in which I get to the afterlife and meet God after a life on earth.

And God tells me, “Sorry pal, you were wrong. I’m actually not quite as good as you thought I was. I’m a bit less merciful than you came to believe. And those folks who said I was a tad fussy were actually right. You overestimated me.”

That’s a funny little scene, but it’s one I’ve begun to try and come to terms with. Any god who turns out to be worse than I imagined is not a being I want to worship or spend eternity with. In the words of Brennan Manning,

“We make God in our own image and he winds up being as fussy, and rude, and narrow minded, judgmental and legalistic, and unloving and unforgiving as we are.”

Brennan Manning

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A Sunday School

About seven years ago, I was part of a traveling group, and we played music in prisons. On Sundays we played at churches to raise support. One Sunday morning, I sat through a Sunday school class which made God out to be really petty and awful. After getting home from the trip, I spent thirty something dollars to mail a teaching series of CDs to the Sunday school superintendent which I felt would help correct the blaspheming – which is pretty hilarious when I think back to it. But right after that service was over, I wrote something which I’ll share part of – because I think I may have been wrong.

I will love and trust and you either way,
But I hope to heaven you’re not the God
They spoke of yesterday,
A God to be appeased,
Who died to save us from himself,
There has to be a God whose love is untold fathoms,
And more than all your graven dragons

Me, circa 2017

My instinct there was to “love and trust” either way – even if God turned out to be super petty and anal and looking like a pagan god who just wanted sacrifices. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, because I have become more and more convinced that any conception which leaves me feeling hollow, which portrays God as annoying, ornery, and legalistic just isn’t worth any of our time.

A Film

There’s a scene in the film Women Talking where a group of women are deciding whether to stay in their extremely abusive conservative community or to leave. They are trying to figure out how it can be that God is good and also requiring of them the things the men of the church have commanded.

The monologue given by Salome (below) is a radical proclamation, and it reminds me of Daniel and his friends choosing to be burned alive rather than worship an idol. She is saying I will burn before I bow down to this idol they have given me and called God.

If God is a loving God then He will forgive us himself. If God is a vengeful God then He has created us in His image. If God is omnipotent, then why has He not protected the women and girls of this colony? I will destroy any living thing that harms my child. I will tear it limb from limb. I will desecrate its body and I will bury it alive. I will challenge God on the spot to strike me dead if I have sinned by protecting my child from evil, and by destroying that evil that it may not harm another! I will lie, I will hunt, I will kill. I will dance on graves and I will burn forever in hell before I allow another man to satisfy his violent urges with the body of my four-year-old child!

Salome: Women talking (film) adapted from novel by Miriam Toews

A Courage

There is a certain courage required to doubt in this way – it is to doubt one thing because you have faith there must be something better. A few months ago in a conversation with a friend, the question came up: is it better to believe in or to totally reject a version of God which is false? I think we must reject it – to doubt it with everything we have as it stands as a barrier to real communion with God. There is no amount of doubting which is too much when it comes to false gods. It is impossible to doubt too strongly that which is not true. When we are given pictures of God which make God out to be petty and legalistic – we must have the courage to doubt them.

I think this is what’s embedded into much of the current trend of deconstruction among my generation. We are faced with the dilemma of being handed a small, pathetic, petty god who is made in the image of those who are misogynistic [against women], racist [discriminating], reactive [unthoughtful], xenophobic [against immigrants] , homophobic [against gay folks], disregarders of the interests of the poor…) and who are people who claim to speak on God’s behalf from the front of many churches. So we choose between trying to stay in these places, where God is painted in these ways, and we either have a little sketchbook on the side where we try to quietly paint something a bit better, or we leave. And I, for one, have a lot of compassion for those who leave.

A lot of conversations I hear about deconstruction say something like yeah well you need to calm down. You just need to weed out some bad facts and then carry on from there – it’s unhelpful to go too far. Certainly it won’t look the same for everyone, but again I have a lot of empathy for those who find that the threads of a small God are woven through everything, and they have to pull it until it comes out. I think of the Israelites who constantly encountered (and worshipped) idols and who were never commanded to just take off the top layer and build back on top. It was always more a razing to the ground situation (2 Kings 23; Deut. 12:2-3, 7:5; Isaiah 2:17-18).

A Grasping or a Communion

A few months ago I wrote about the opposed ways in which our right and left brain view knowing: “The left hemisphere wants to gain knowledge by grasping it, that is, by holding it tightly and obtaining it. This is the kind of ‘knowing’ in which we memorize facts and hold them as though that were the truth itself. The right hemisphere way of knowing the truth is to draw near to it, almost as if we were sitting near to a wise person and experiencing wisdom through proximity to it.”

“Grasping things…won’t get us as far as we would like, because the most important things in life refuse to be grasped.”

McGilchrist, 2019

In Luke 10, a expert in the law comes to Jesus and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life. The answer, which he correctly gives, is to love God and love neighbor. Then he asks, who is my neighbor? And Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan which culminates in a question:

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replies, “The one who had mercy on him.”

And so I ask, in light of the discussion above, when we meet two people: one a Christian who is misogynistic, racist, reactive, xenophobic, homophobic, who disregards the interests of the poor – and a second person who has heard of this sort of God and rejected it altogether (an atheist or agnostic) who meets women and minorities and immigrants and LGBTQ folks and the poor and all their neighbors with kindness and compassion.

Who is neighborly? Who would Jesus commend today as he did the Samaritan? Who is a better picture of the good news? Who communes with Jesus? I don’t think it’s a hard question. It’s the one who has mercy, says Jesus.

The African bishop, St. Augustine, said,

“Si comprehendis non est Deus”

[If you understand God, what you understand is not God] or [If you think you have grasped him, it is not God you have grasped].

A Divorce

I believe there is power in the gospel of Jesus and that his people have the capacity to heal the world in a real sense. And in my next piece I want to explore this further and ask what negates and compromises that power. One way I’m convinced the power of the church and the Christian is compromised is described by Hans Boersma who writes how “divine decisions” (what is right and wrong) has been divorced from “eternal truth” as the modern conception of God departed from the sacramental one.

When this happens, we lose our connection to the truth in a way that causes us to mistrust our bodies, our intuition, and our own sense of the world in a terrible way. It makes so that we may see Christians treating LGBTQ people terribly, and we have to wonder well that seems terrible and all, but isn’t this what the pastor told us the Bible said? Or we hear an elder laying down the straight and narrow telling us what to wear and how to speak and what to drive and who’s in and who’s out and it seems ridiculous, but maybe I can’t trust myself and he somehow knows. This modern divorce of the eternal truth, which is something we are built to intuit as people in God’s image, and the will of God, which we’ve been told is only interpreted through reading scripture and because God has said so, is a tragic divorce indeed.

Boersma writes, “For Aquinas…divine decisions had always been in line with eternal truth. For example, when God condemned adultery, this was not an arbitrary divine decision, but it was in line with divine rationality…in line with the very truth of God’s character. [The modern approach] proffered a radical disjunction between goodness and truth…The consequences were close at hand: if something is good strictly because God wills it to be good, then couldn’t God declare anything, even the most horrible act, to be good?”

Nature, now separate from reason, became fundamentally unintelligible.

Hans Boersma, 2011, p. 79

A Funny Scene

In conclusion, I return to the funny scene in which I get to the afterlife and God turns out to be a bit of a disappointment. I really think that for my generation we are conflicted by the God we’ve been told about who is often constructed through certain narrow readings of scripture and thinly veiled attempts at gaining cultural power. And we are told this God can be grasped through an objective set of facts, propositions about ultimate truth, and certain interpretations of scripture. And we’ve felt in our bodies, in our soul, in our experience, in our watching, in our listening, that much of this is just an idol – a small God we’d be pretty bummed out to come face to face with in the great beyond. I fully expect to be shocked by God. God is without a doubt different than my conceptions. But God is better – always better.

It is my firm belief that I will not meet a God who is disappointing, and that as I meet God each day, he is not small or petty. And it is my commitment to doubt those small images of him wherever they appear and to do the work of deconstructing them. This is I think the work of my generation and of all who want to lay hold of the power of the gospel. If this seems too much, then perhaps you would at least be sympathetic and heed the words of St. Jude to “have mercy on those who doubt.”

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It seems that increasingly the church is accepting and even promoting the idea of therapy. And it also seems the counseling field is quite open to the good which may take place for a person in church. While the two respect one another, I don’t get the sense they have good explanations of what is going on when the person leaves their own room – the church sanctuary or the therapy office. Here I would like to suggest a psychological explanation of the evangelical encounter typically termed “getting saved.” That is, what does clinician think is happening in the church sanctuary. This is not to suggest a psychological account of that encounter has any more merit than a theological explanation, but I find it helpful.

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Carl Rodgers

There are many views in the world of psychology on what happens to create change and benefit the client in therapy. I will be using here the person-centered perspective of Carl Rodgers as a frame, It is one I very much like and recently have been reading. For Rodgers, the main point of therapy is to set the client up to experience being “received” that is accepted. Rodgers lists three key conditions which need to be present for positive change.

1. The therapist must be genuine (sincere) and congruent (not saying one thing while feeling another).
2. The therapist must accept the client and have a warm, positive attitude towards them.
3. The therapist must demonstrate empathetic understanding – this means the client’s feelings and personal meanings are perceived by the therapist

When these conditions are present, Rodgers says, change will certainly happen. He writes,

“As he finds someone else listening acceptingly to his feelings, he little by little becomes able to listen to himself…[and] becomes more acceptant of himself. As he expresses more and more of the hidden and awful aspects of himself he finds the therapist showing a consistent and unconditional positive regard for him and his feelings. Slowly he moves toward taking the same attitude toward himself, accepting himself as he is, and therefore ready to move forward in the process of becoming.

Carl Rodgers (on Becoming a person, 1961)

So the change depends on encountering someone, a therapist in this case, who is willing to engage and accept the person just the way they are. Though Rodgers points out this kind of relationship certainly happens between friends, spouses, and many other places than just in a therapist’s office. The acceptance is a catalyst for the person’s own acceptance of themself. This acceptance allows them to acknowledge and deal with previously buried parts of themself which they were afraid or unable to acknowledge. Opening this communication with the self and accepting the self is what causes healing. There is not a high emphasis on the person’s past – the crucial point is the relationship the counselor and client can establish from which healing can result.

Goals of Therapy

This is the person-centered perspective of Carl Rodgers, but most of the field seems to have a similar end in mind – even if very different ways of arriving there. Freud and the psychoanalysts work to raise the subconscious to the conscious level of awareness. Similarly Jung and those in his tradition work to get the person in touch with the repressed parts of the psyche, often this is through examining dream content – the goal in integration. Much of trauma therapy is about revisiting events which caused the person to become stuck, disintegrated, and out of touch with themself. The internal family systems perspective of Richard Schwartz works to help the person know and accept various parts of themself which they’ve locked away or repressed. Usually, across therapy models, the goal is to help the person care compassionately for themself and the parts of them which are hidden away. Rodgers states this can only happen if the person first experiences a love and acceptance from outside, from someone else.

And this sounds a whole lot like John 4:19 – we love because we were first loved.

Getting Saved

Getting saved in the evangelical sense is often characterized as “asking Jesus into your heart,” a phrase which I have not liked very much. Though recently, I’ve begun to wonder if this is just about the best way of saying it after all – more on that later. For me, there was a very distinct moment in time when I “got saved.” Kneeling beside my parents bed and praying the sinners’ prayer through sobs – it was a very charged and meaningful moment. Then about five years later my faith became awakened in a new way.

This awakening happened while reading a book called The Ragamuffin Gospel which is all about the idea that God loves and accepts us exactly for who we are, not for who we should be – portrayed nicely in this movie scene. I began to not only believe but also experience the reality that God loved me, and liked me, for the first time. The night I prayed the sinners’ prayer, I was terrified of hell. When I read The Ragamuffin Gospel, I was moved by the reality that I was ok, and loved, and accepted without changing at all – that I was first loved. That realization indeed sparked change in me.

With these observations as a preface, I will describe, psychologically, what I think is going on when someone “gets saved.” I will here reiterate this is not a better or more correct explanation that the theological one offered in church. It is a different frame.

The Process

There are some key tenets involved in getting saved in an evangelical sense. First, you must believe in your heart (the most sincere and important place) that Jesus is Lord. I see this as an explicit statement that the person who is being encountered is the single most powerful in existence. Second, you must confess that you are a sinner who needs salvation. And I see this as a statement of inner poverty – the person knows they are not being saved due to their own merit or worthiness. And finally, you must put your faith, the full force of your conscious power, into believing that your prayer for salvation is heard and your request granted.

So what is committed through these things, in my view, are as follows. The person is in peril, a bad state. God is acknowledged as the most able, powerful, and perfect being to exist. And it is none other than this God who delights to enter in and love and accept the person just they way they are. This means that if the most holy being to exist is able to accept the person and live there inside them with everything that makes the person in peril and in need of being made clean, then perhaps the person can begin to view themself in this same accepting manner. If God almighty can accept and love you, it’s not a huge leap to you being able to accept and love you. and this acceptance of the self and willingness to examine (through a confession of sin) what was before repressed, denied, and hidden is the catalyst for positive change. Pyschologically speaking, the therapist and the higher power play similar roles. If they can receive the person in a non-judgmental fashion, then the person can begin to see themself in a new light, and from there they can change and grow.

There are countless stories of incredible change happening in the lives of those who have this spiritual experience of surrendering to Christ. Things like addictions disappearing or a cloud of depression lifting or a sense of purpose and meaning given. And very similar things are reported by clinicians who sit with people who begin to receive love and who experience these things.

Conclusion

Two more points. Asking Jesus into your heart is an expression which has become cliché. Still, what more succinctly sums it up? The person is appealing to the greatest good to come and dwell with their inner peril and accept them as they are in their desperation. That is no small thing. Secondly, I think many Christians would be disturbed at this account and deem a psychological account (such as I have written) to be dismissive of the encounter with God. I disagree. The mind must be part of the conversion process; Jehovah is not taking a literal hammer and chisel and carving flesh and brain matter. So change of perception and sense of self are occurring. This is an attempt to ponder what might be happening from a psychological perspective when a very theologically oriented event takes place. Both theology and psychology are but feeble attempts to understand ourselves and the divine – and so we grasp.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a real distaste for people who are arrogant and overly self-confident, or whom I perceive that way. It’s partly because I dislike and fear bullies and partly because most of my life I’ve felt quite the opposite: self-doubt, insecurity, a bit shy and afraid of looking dumb.

It’s also because in my church and middle school environment we were taught that bragging, boasting, and being arrogant were really bad. As my best friend and I liked to joke, “I am extremely proud of my humility!” So the combination of a subculture and personality bent toward disliking arrogance means I’m always suspicious of people who seem a bit too big, too sure, too cocky. And I doubt this will change for me anytime soon, but I think it’s really fascinating how we talk about these people.

I’ve said so many times – that guy has a big ego. So many times I’ve heard someone described as needing an ego-check. That person thinks too much of themself – someone needs to take them down a peg. While relatable, I think it’s the wrong way to think about it. What if the opposite is actually the case? That person who has a “big ego” and needs attention and affirmation and is always taking center stage to be impressive – do they actually have a big ego? Maybe it’s actually the case they have a very small, underdeveloped ego and they’re compensating.

Sigmund Freud came up with the idea of the id, ego, and superego. It’s one of his most enduring contributions to psychology. Freud gets a really bad rap inside and outside the classroom which is unfortunate in my opinion. He did his work in the mid and late 1800s. He got a lot wrong, but he got a heck of lot right too which is now taken for granted as common knowledge.

According to Simply Psychology,

“According to Freudians, some abnormal upbringing…can result in a weak and fragile ego, whose ability to contain the id’s desires is limited” (ibid.). Folks with a healthy ego, who have a strong sense of who they are, folks who aren’t disconnected from themselves, don’t require the extra affirmation and constant adulation needed by a small ego. So maybe the saying should go the other way around: wow, that person must have small view of himself to seek so much external love. Viewed this way, it is a lack, rather than a surplus, of self love which leads to the behavior.

I’ve also been reading Chuck DeGroat’s book When Narcissim Comes to Church.

DeGroat does some work on re-shaping our conception of the story of Narcissus from which we derive the term narcissism. He points out that while this story is often told to make an example of the danger of love of self, it’s actually quite the opposite. “While often told as a tale of excessive self-love, it is precisely self-love Narcissus was lacking” (ibid., p. 28). It’s a subtle but crucially important point, one that many brought up like I was to run from any talk of self-love/care/affection will likely bristle at. It is the image of himself ( a false sense of who he was) which was reflected in the pool and held his gaze. For people who love and care for themselves well, this image does not hold tantalizing power. DeGroat quotes Terrence Real

People often think of Narcissus as the symbol of excessive self-regard, but in fact, he exemplifies the opposite…Narcissus did not suffer from an overabundance of self-love, but rather from its deficiency…if Narcissus had possessed real self-love, he would have been able to leave his fascination. The curse of Narcissus is immobilization, not out of love for himself, but out of dependency upon his image.

Terrance Real as cited in When Narcissism comes to Church (DeGroat, 2020)

This is such a critical insight. It is one which I believe most evangelicals are trained to overlook. I have a friend who likes to jokingly quote Dave Ramsey when you ask him how he’s doing: better than I deserve – I deserve death! This idea that we are bad, depraved, morally bankrupt people who are only valuable once we pray a prayer to Jesus who THEN makes us something else is powerful, and harmful. It leads to little tropes like the JOY song: joy must be, Jesus first, myself last, and others in-between. DeGroat writes, “Healthy self-love would have motivated him to befriend every wounded part of himself. Self-contempt motivated him to search in vain for what he thought he needed to live, only to die from a neglect of what he really needed” (ibid., p. 29).

When I began coursework for the counseling program I’m in, we had assignments in which we had to detail plans for caring for ourselves as therapists to avoid burning out. As I did those assignments and listened to my classmates talk about the importance of caring for oneself, I realized how foreign the concept was to me. It’s a task in which I have so far to go and much work to do. In part two I want to explore how our concept of God may either reinforce or rebut this notion of our badness and the importance of self-love and self-care.

It is time to reconsider what it means to receive the love of God and the goodness of God’s image at our core.

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This is a condensed version of a piece I wrote one year ago yesterday. It was the conclusion of the 28 comic strips I posted in February of 2022 called “Fundamentals” which can be read here.

(1.) Women must be allowed to worship in freedom

Women are gifted by God (and who would say otherwise?!) But they must be allowed to fully exercise those gifts. As it stands in many church communities, only women with certain gifts are able to use them to worship freely. We should work toward an environment where women (married or not) are empowered to work, think, teach, lead, and follow as God has so called them. We should leave behind the days where women with the gifting to lead and teach are faced with the choice of stifling their calling or walking away from their local church family.

Some men will likely feel uncomfortable and threatened (pissed off even). In the Greco-Roman world where Jesus grew up, women were seen as impure, deformed males. Yet even here, a New Testament church emerges where women host church their homes, contribute from their businesses, teach, and prophecy. If this kind of freedom could exist among an oppressive and deeply sexist culture such as first century Rome, we in 21st century America have no excuse for operating as a church family in ways that keep women afraid of fulfilling their calling. I agree that some New Testament texts about women and their roles are difficult, and I don’t know what is meant at all places. Still, I don’t think there is any excuse for a church culture where women are afraid of fulfilling their potential because it will upset men of the church.

Many will agree with me here, but they will balk at action. They’ll take the stance of those who said in hushed tones that all people were equal but opposed integration because everyone else isn’t ready for it yet. I guess I’m tired of that kind of balking. I’m tired of women having to be afraid of upsetting men, of hesitantly asking permission to teach Sunday school or to say a few words between songs lest they step out of line.

(2.) We must share the load and the reward

I demonstrated at length in a piece how in conservative church communities there is often the desire to remain separate from secular culture in visible ways (like clothing). If a church sees this as a good goal, men and women must share in this together. What often happens is that men put this responsibility solely on women. While women wear clothes that distinguish them from “the world,” such as dresses, skirts, head coverings, etc., men enjoy the comfort of blending in. Men are permitted to dress exactly like those outside the church while women alone bear the responsibility of maintaining the difference. Either the goal of dressing to separate is abolished, or men must participate. In this way, I think the Amish community holds a better standard – men and women share the task. Men wear suspenders and straw hats so they too are separate from the world. I think the reason why we separate this task and give it to women is because of point number three below.

(3.) We must resist the sexualization of women’s bodies

The primary resistance to my position above will undoubtedly be “modesty.” In the name of modesty, women are asked to hide their bodies. Cape dresses are designed to de-form the female body. Why? So that it doesn’t serve as a temptation to men. It is because we have so sexualized the bodies of our sisters that we require them to design special clothes to hide their form. I am not an expert in this area, but I could go on. Perhaps it’s sufficient to say we should learn from what we’ve done: by requiring women to go above and beyond to hide their bodies (never wear hair down, never wear legged pants, never show belly/back even when swimming), we have created the reality where these things are “sexy.”

Men of conservative churches often sexualize women’s bodies (and are taught to do so from a young age). Women are described as temptations to male purity and the satisfaction to men’s lust. Ironically, conservative Christianity often sexualizes women’s bodies even in ways secular culture does not. I have attended exactly three college/universities, and trust me when I say no one is blushing over seeing someone’s knees. Seeing a girl’s kneecaps or, God forbid, stomach is only perceived as “immodest” or “sexy” if we’ve created an environment where it’s forbidden. Hypermodesty creates the sexualization of women’s bodies. To get beyond this would require recognizing the female form as God-given and something that neither men nor women need to be ashamed of. The requirements imposed by so many churches have no scriptural basis, but they have huge implications about how boys are taught to view girls, and how women are told to view themselves.

(4.) Women must be invited into decision making spaces

While it may be argued from some scriptures that women are not permitted to serve as a lead pastor, there is no legitimate scriptural precedent for excluding women from committees, boards, or other gatherings of decision making. In churches where decisions are made by casting votes, women must be invited to participate in day to day decisions. Similarly, in deciding church will require, women must be part of the conversation. It is simply inexcusable that in many churches decisions about what women will do/wear do not even include women! The result is not husbands leading their wives in a familial setting. The result is men being more important than women. In conversations about finances, the vision of the church, ministry strategies, mission boards, church policy, teaching plans, etc., women must be invited to lend their gifts.

We must work toward what Katie Funk-Weibe calls an engendered story. I’m reminded of the words of the Psalmist,

Listen, daughter and pay careful attention: Forget your people and your father’s house. Let the king be enthralled by your beauty; honor him, for he is your Lord. (Psalm 45: 10-11).

(5.) Women must be allowed to live as to the Lord and not to men.

For too long, to be faithful has meant to live up to the measuring rod laid out by men of the church. Women must be allowed to set their eyes higher, on pleasing their Lord. Their worth, their bodies, their gifts, their place – these do not belong to the men of the church. They are holy and to be offered to their true, good king.

Conclusion

After reading, some may say: He has a point, but I’m not ready to step on any toes.

It’s is an important issue, but we’ve got to go slow – we’ve got to avoid upsetting people.

This just isn’t a hill I’m willing to die on.

On the other hand, maybe you agree with me – this is a hill worth dying on. This is half the church we’re talking about. This is about who our sisters and daughters and mothers are told they’re supposed to be. For a long time, I was too afraid to say anything. I figured if this is the way things are, there must be a good reason. Or even if it isn’t ideal, it isn’t so bad. Or if it is bad, it isn’t that bad for me.

I guess I’m done with all those answers. This is not a tertiary issue. I’d say it’s a fundamental.

etiology – the study of causation or origination

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This paper was written as coursework for GCU’s CNL-527: Principles of Psychopharmacology

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Etiology of Addiction

This paper will explore the etiology of addiction and provide insight into different models which explain addiction development. The interplay between nature and nurture which often presents as genetics vs. environment is noteworthy in this discussion. Relevant research related to the disease and psychosocial models will be discussed. Ultimately, the environment in which the brain develops and the psychosocial model of addiction have been undervalued – a finding which this paper will present as a hopeful conclusion.

History and Evolution of Addiction Theory

The concept of addiction has been long observed, but the definition is debated. The word addiction was altogether removed from four consecutive editions the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from 1980 to 2000. With so many and varying meanings, “it was considered a layman’s rather than a scientific term, pejorative, stigmatizing, and too difficult to define” (Rosenthal & Faris, 2019, p. 437). The debate about the etiology of addiction has often been centered on whether addictive behavior is a voluntary choice) or an involuntary disease and whether the addicted person is a criminal or a patient with an illness (ibid.). This unfortunate dichotomy misses the importance of how these components interplay, and more importantly, neglects the importance of the nurturing environment.

Evolution of the Term

Around the 300 BCE, the Roman term addictus referred to the person who is given a judgement by the official in charge, the praetor urbanus. This pronouncement was a “binding spell…thought to embody the power of Jupiter” (ibid., p. 439). Moving into the 1600s, many Christian writers used the term addict “to discuss the danger of misguided attachments” such as witchcraft and magic (ibid., p. 443). Here, addiction itself is not a negative thing; the term was generally used in a positive manner, unless the object of attachment is misguided. One might addict herself to poetry reading in the sense of a habit or pursuit.

Early Modern Psychology Period

In 1804, the paradigm began to shift. Thomas Trotter published An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness and Its Effects on the Human Body, and it became “generally accepted that heavy and persistent alcohol consumption was itself a disease in its own right, or at least a key symptom of some underlying disease” (Porter, 1988 as cited in Haldipur, 2018). In 1965, the American Medical Association “recognized alcoholism as a disease and declared it to be a medical disorder” (Bhatt, 2023). During this time, addiction was thought to stem from a personality disorder (ibid.).

Contemporary Views

More recently, change in definition over an eight-year span by the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) demonstrates some of the new insight researchers are gaining into the importance of environment on the development of addiction. In 2011, ASAM’s definition of addiction declared it “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations…. (ibid.)” However, the 2019 definition reads, “Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences… (ibid.).” According to Bhatt, “It is clear that the 8-year gap in these definitions left room for experts to more thoroughly recognize the impact that environment and a person’s life experiences has on addiction” (ibid.).

Current Trends and Debates in Research

The War on Drugs, started by Richard Nixon and then championed by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, has cemented a victim-blaming mentality into the American psyche. The clinical world is moving further and further away from that paradigm. Movement away from moralistic judgement is overdue, however there is real risk of oversimplification if a purely disease model becomes primary (Gerra, et al., 2021). According to Hall et al., “Considerable scientific value exists in the research into the neurobiology and genetics of addiction, but this research does not justify the simplified [disease model] that dominates discourse about addiction in the USA and, increasingly, elsewhere” (Hall et al., 2015).

In the wake of the just say no campaign, the fields of psychotherapy and medicine are dominated by two overarching explanations for the development of addiction: the disease model of addiction and the psychosocial model. In 2020, a study surveying 1438 treatment providers found that American providers supported a disease model significantly more than their UK and Australian counterparts. It was also noted that personal experience with addiction and involvement with 12-step programs was linked to a support for the disease model as was older age (Barnett, et al., 2020).

Overview of Disease Model

According to the disease model, genetic and biological factors play the largest role in determining whether addiction will develop. The National Institute on Drug Abuse claims “genetic vulnerability accounts for about half of an individual’s risk for developing a SUD, which makes individuals 10 times more likely to develop a SUD if they have a first degree relative with a SUD” (Green et al., 2021 p. 1097). Vulnerability is said to be linked to neurochemistry as well as dopamine receptor density. “Individuals with fewer dopamine receptors are likely to experience the physiological rewards of a substance more strongly than those with sufficient dopamine receptor” (ibid.).

The National Institute on Drug Abuse has championed the disease model since 1997 when director Alan Leshner published a report arguing addiction was a “chronic, relapsing, brain disease” (Hall et al., 2015). Genetic research involving twins as well as animal studies in which drugs are self-administered are also cited as evidence for the disease model. Alcoholics Anonymous is an organization with lay-led recovery groups around the world which also champions the disease model and view addiction as a disease which can only be held at bay, never recovered from.

Overview of Psychosocial Model

In contrast with the disease model, the psychosocial model places a much stronger emphasis on the nurturing environment in which the developing brain’s reward pathways are developed as well as the environment in which the individual finds themselves when they use drugs. Brains which develop in chaotic environments are neurologically different in important ways than those nurtured in safe, secure environments. The psychosocial model views genetics as basic organizers which set the schedule of development (Maté, 2010, p. 189). “The expression of genetic potential is, for the most part, contingent on the environment” writes Gabor Maté, and this view is supported by the work of Dr. Jaak Panksepp author of the landmark work Affective Neuroscience.

Circuitry in Very Young Brains

Opiate circuitry development in young brains as well as the infant’s attachment to caregiver are both fundamental to understanding how and why addiction develops (Maté, 2010; Gerra 2021). The infant brain has billions of neurons in excess of what will be required by the child, so pruning has to happen as a part of what has been called neural Darwinism (Maté, 2010). The key factor in the development of key circuits (opioid circuitry of attachment reward, regulatory centers, dopamine circuitry) is the emotional environment (ibid.). And the dominant factor in this critical aspect of development is the nurturing adults, the caregivers. This is why attachment and the emotional experience of the infant are so tightly connected to the neurochemistry of the brain. This is the same brain which will later be at a much greater or much lesser risk for addiction depending on the environment in which it was nurtured.

Studies show links between a person having close relatives who abuse drugs and the likelihood that they will do the same. However, what is often not discussed is the environment in which the person was nurtured. It turns out that persons whose caregivers had substance use disorders may not be as likely to develop secure attachments. The three environmental conditions needed for optimal development are “nutrition, physical security, and consistent emotional nurturing” (ibid., p. 193). A study done at the University of Washington compared the brain wave patterns of infants whose mothers were suffering from post-partum depression with those whose mothers were in good spirits. Distinct differences were noted in the infants’ frontal lobes which is where the “centers for self-regulation and emotion are located” (Dawson & Fischer, n.d. as cited in ibid., p. 195).

Vietnam War Remission Rates

If the disease and genetic models alone could account for addiction, one would expect exposure to a drug to lead to addiction. This was one of the driving narratives of the War on Drugs (ibid.). In the Vietnam War (1960s and 1970s), many American soldiers became heavy users of barbiturates and/or amphetamines along with heroin. 20 percent of those returning “met the criteria for the diagnoses of addiction while they were in Southeast Asia, whereas before they were shipped overseas fewer than 1 percent had been opiate addicts” (ibid., p. 142). However, after returning home, the remission rate was an incredible 95 percent. This does not seem to support a model suggesting once an addict, always an addict, and instead seems to support the importance of environment in the development of addiction.

Early Major Traumas Correlated to Addiction

Potentially traumatic life events are “negative situations that have the potential to cause an extraordinary amount of stress to an individual, overwhelming their ability to cope and leaving them in fear of death annihilation, or insanity” (Levin, 2021). In a study of 4,025 people who had experienced direct exposure to potentially traumatic events, “direct exposure was most highly associated with SUDs and behavioral addictions, being two times more prevalent among those exposed compared to the nonexposed” (ibid., p. 118). Those who experience sexual assault were 2.1 times as likely to have a substance use disorder. (ibid.).

Connection as the Healing Answer

It could be that substance abuse is an attempt to fill the users void of social connections. Bruce Alexander conducted a famous experiment termed Rat Park in which he raised the important question about the environment in which laboratory animals were being studied. He found that when placed in a larger, more comfortable, scenic, and socially connected environment, “morphine held little attraction…even after these rats were forced to consume morphine for weeks, to the point where they would develop distressing physical withdrawal symptoms if they didn’t use it” (Maté, 2010, p. 145-146). Alexander noted, “Nothing that we tried instilled a strong appetite for morphine” for the rats in this environment (ibid.). That the prerequisite for addiction may be a void of social connection often filled with substance abuse is a promising line of inquiry. Author Johann Hari sums up his research into addiction by saying “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety…it’s connection” (TED, 2015).

Conclusions and Implications for the Counseling Profession

While there is still much debate, the psychosocial model is the most compelling model of addiction development. With this etiology in view, the work of clinical counseling is paramount in recovery. Rather than being treated medically as specimens with diseases, clients should be viewed as wounded persons who are starving for the connection and nurture they never received. Clinicians should practice empathy, give support, and seek to help their clients understand how to reconnect with themselves and their surroundings in order to heal. This is not only a more compelling explanation etiologically, it is also a much more hopeful message for those with addiction. Rather than beset by a disease or cursed with faulty genetics, people can heal if they are nurtured and placed in environments where they can connect to themselves and others.

This paper has explored the etiology of addiction through the lens of two dominant theoretical frameworks: the disease model and the psychosocial model. The clinical field has moved away from a moral failure view and perhaps too far in the direction of a disease model. Current trends in research suggest a psychosocial model of addiction development is the best supported view. Future research should investigate treatment protocols operating from this more hopeful paradigm in which social connection and attention to the nurturing environment are explored and prioritized.

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References

Barnett, A., O’Brien, K., Hall, W., & Carter, A. (2020). Support for the psychosocial, disease and brain disease models of addiction: A survey of treatment providers’ attitudes in Australia, the UK, and U.S. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 115. https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edselp&AN=S0740547219305616&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s8333196&groupid=main&profile=eds1

Bhatt, A. (2023, February 10). Definitions of addiction: Historical views versus today’s views. Addiction Center. https://www.addictioncenter.com/community/definitions-addiction-historical-views-versus-todays-views/

Gerra, M. L., Gerra, M. C., Tadonio, L., Pellegrini, P., Marchesi, C., Mattfeld, E., Gerra, G., & Ossola, P. (2021). Early parent-child interactions and substance use disorder: An attachment perspective on a biopsychosocial entanglement. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 131, 560–580. https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edselp&AN=S0149763421004401&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s8333196&groupid=main&profile=eds1

Green, K. E., Blue, J. R., & Natal, S. N. (2021). An Integrated Model of Nature and Nurture Factors that Contribute to Addiction and Recovery. Substance Use & Misuse, 56(8), 1095–1107. https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=150888473&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s8333196&groupid=main&profile=eds1

Haldipur, C. (2018). Addiction: A brief history of an idea. Psychological Medicine, 48(8), 1395-1396. doi:10.1017/S0033291718000314

Hall, W., Carter, A., & Forlini, C. (2015). The brain disease model of addiction: is it supported by the evidence and has it delivered on its promises? Lancet Psychiatry. 2 105-10. 10.1016/S2215-0366(14)00126-6  

Levin, Y., Lev Bar-Or, R., Forer, R., Vaserman, M., Kor, A., & Lev-Ran, S. (2021). The association between type of trauma, level of exposure and addiction. Addictive Behaviors, 118. https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=2021-33253-001&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s8333196&groupid=main&profile=eds1

Maté, G. (2010). In the realm of hungry ghosts: Close encounters with addiction. North Atlantic Books.

Rosenthal, R. J., & Faris, S. B. (2019). The etymology and early history of ‘addiction.’ Addiction Research & Theory, 27(5), 437–449. https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/16066359.2018.1543412

TED. (2015, July 9). Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong | Johann Hari [Video]. YouTube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9DcIMGxMs