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| Social Interaction - A module of treatment for Drug Misusers Élaine Kennedy facilitates social interaction with recovering drug users. |
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‘Human beings are speaking animals – for us to be alive is to be in communication’ Timothy Radcliffe O.P. In all my years of teaching, I have never been quite so stimulated into new avenues of thought than since I have been working with the people recovering from drug addiction who are on our rehab programme. I meet such a diversity of experiences, such a wealth of potential, often hitherto unrecognised – every session is an eye-opening and fulfilling event, but also evidence of the marginalizing effects of poor knowledge and use of poor language. Language is an integral part of our entire being and an essential component for a fulfilled life. It is our first encounter with life and will be our last. Although I try never to club problems into groups because each individual owns his own unique tapestry of life, I have nevertheless become aware of a thread which runs through most of our lives, which is how we stifle our own creative intelligence by our limited awareness of our all important language, thus we are creatively challenged! Years ago when we took in just two clients at a time, before our rehab unit had really taken off, we had a lad who needed a few days away, so we sent him to stay with a friend of T.H.O.M.A.S. in Scotland. They got on well, yet the lad became restless and when he saw an opportunity to shop-lift in order to purchase drugs, he took it but was caught and put through the usual legal processes. Eventually we got him back and we all started over again. I asked him how he had felt about the entire experience, each question being carefully thought out to bring out different emotions and feelings. All of his responses were identical, banal and not quoted in any Oxford dictionary! This unprintable response of his did nothing at all to help him identify his emotions and therefore his chances of seeing clearly and moving forward were minimal. However, a revelation occurred! I gave him two large sheets of paper on which I had written all the different emotions etc. he had experienced. I left him to try and think of other words and phrases he could have used to express himself in the first place. I returned and to my astonishment, I found the pages filled with an impressive diversity of language. This proved three major points to me. 1. That much is heard and stored by the brain even if it never surfaces. 2. That no one’s intelligence and potential must ever be written off on the evidence of poor verbal communication skills. We all have natural resources, some of us are monosyllabic and some are eloquent, the difference lies in stimulus or lack of it. 3. That seemingly mindless bad behaviour and violence may very well be the result of the huge frustration caused by the inability to articulate fundamental truths about oneself. Listening to especially younger people, how often one hears the expression ‘it’s doing my head in’. This can be used to cover anything at all, ranging from shoe-laces that don’t stay done up, to some awful family circumstance which threatens to change an entire life’s structures. How can one possibly identify the true nature and the scale of diversity of two situations when expressing their effect on you with the same phrase? How does one differentiate between the importance of, or lack of importance of one’s responses to the situations? Thus annoyance at a small happening is equated with the anger felt at a huge happening and so there is no balance, no scale of judgement of how to react. We need the diversity of language in our daily communications with ourselves as well as other people, that matches the diversity of events life throws at us. We are the beings on this planet who function through communication by language. We cannot resolve our continuous inner conflicts, be they untied shoe-laces or life-altering events, other than by competent use of language which conveys adequately how we truly feel and how we deal and cope with those emotions and situations. Just out of interest, try to notice in a day, how often you hear or say the word ‘Okay’? How many times did it mean the same thing twice? How many times was it a truly explicit, satisfying response? How often did you analyse what it was meant to convey? So very much of the quality of our lives, or lack of it, rests on how well we are taught to use language and on how we continue to expand our learning, understanding and use of it, not to sound clever or obnoxious, but to understand ourselves then to fathom out everybody else. From language flows analytical skills and from those skills come the expansion of thought processes and the constant stimulus of our creative intelligence which is the life-enhancing potential given to each human being. It is never too late to develop this priceless asset, as I discover constantly during my sessions. My huge gratification comes from seeing the proof of this time and time again. The more I prove it to others, the more I prove it to myself. Herbert McCabe wrote – ‘…….. there is an appearance of communication concealing a failure to express oneself, to give and realize oneself. If I am right in saying that life is constituted by communication then such behaviour diminishes life or diminishes my existence’. Air and water keep all animals living – communication through language keeps the human animal |
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