Addicted to Love?

Posted 2016-02-15

R E V U E

I put off posting this Revue for much longer than intended, hoping to share the impact of my recent travels exploring the world of self-directed education. But more than a week after my return home, the most I’m ready to say is that I have been profoundly impacted... and I’m still unpacking the experience. (More to come...)

In the meantime, I want to recommend you give yourself 15 minutes to watch (or read) something I’ve been sharing with a lot of my friends and clients. You may have already seen the presentation — Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong, by Johann Hari — or his article based on the same material:

Watch the TED talk
...or...
Read the article

To me, the value of Hari’s presentation is not so much the rethinking of addiction as the illumination of its source — the chronic lack of human connection that has become “normal” in modern society — which also happens to underlie most of the problems I help parents address in coaching sessions.

I would encourage you to consider the caged rat experiments Hari describes, and then ask yourself, “What are the (metaphorical) cages in my life, or in my child’s life, that prevent us from meeting our needs for real human connection?”