Flourishing After Addiction with Carl Erik Fisher
Addiction psychiatrist and bioethicist Carl Erik Fisher explores addiction and recovery from the widest possible diversity of perspectives: from science to spirituality, from philosophy to politics, and everything in between. He interviews leading experts in areas such as psychology, neurobiology, history, sociology, and more--as well as policy makers, advocates, and people with lived experience.
A core commitment of the show is we need more than medicine to truly understand addiction and recovery. The challenges and mysteries of this field run up against some of the central challenges of human life, like: what makes a life worth living, what are the limits of self control, and how can people and societies change for the better? These are enormous questions, and they need to be approached with humility, but there are also promising ways forward offered by refreshingly unexpected sources.
There are many paths to recovery, and there is tremendous hope for changing the narrative, injecting more nuance into these discussions, and making flourishing in recovery possible for all.
Please check out https://www.carlerikfisher.com to join the newsletter and stay in touch.
Flourishing After Addiction with Carl Erik Fisher
Healthy relationships in recovery, with Dr. Bevin Campbell
Taking care of our relationships is a crucial way we take care of ourselves and the wider world. Some of the most common questions I get in my clinical practice and from listeners are questions about how to navigate relationships in addiction and recovery: couples, parents and kids, or otherwise. So I wanted to have a clinically focused episode about this important issue, and it was my great pleasure to talk with my good friend and wise colleague, Dr. Bevin Campbell, a psychotherapist who focuses on relationships, addiction, and recovery.
Bevin has particular expertise in and passion for working with couples, but as you’ll hear, we cover issues that are important for all human relationships, in families, at work, and beyond. We discuss the tricky distinction between seeing addiction as “caused” by relationship problems versus stepping back and getting perspective on the bigger cycles--i.e., situating the addiction as part of a system. We explore other, everyday addictions and how they affect relationships, such as compulsive internet use, working, gaming, or otherwise. She gives some extremely useful tips about anger and avoidance, grief and trauma, and power and coercion. And we reflect on that vexing question that, for better or for worse, so many people have in these situations: “how do I get my loved one to change?”
Bevin Campbell, Psy.D., is a psychologist interested in all things related to love and attachment, from the challenges of staying emotionally connected to a partner to the pain of grief and loss. She sees couples in her Brooklyn-based practice, and is also a consultant to New York City agencies and community based organizations on understanding grief and loss and supporting bereaved community members. In addition to her clinical and consulting work she supervises and teaches psychologists in training. Follow her on Twitter or see her clinical website here.
In this episode:
- Attachment: An Essential Guide for Science-Based Practice (partially free online)
- There is a "sweet spot" for maternal responsiveness, and responding perfectly to our child's needs isn't best for optimal development: “Maternal responsiveness and sensitivity reconsidered: Some is more”
- CRAFT (Community Reinforcement and Family Training) therapy, developed by Robert Meyers
- ...which draws on the Community Reinforcement Approach
- Salvador Mnuchin
- Michael Zentman
- Beatrice Beebe
- Donald Winnicott
- A good article in The Atlantic about several of these topics.
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