BY MARY COOK, M.A., R.A.S. — The year that will go down in history as 2011 was marked by yet another parade of news stories about public figures whose lives ended due to addiction — from Amy Winehouse to Alice in Chains musician Mike Starr. What these stories have in common is this: while everyone from economists to motivational gurus like Tony Robbins advocate constant change, change itself means constant stress.

That even goes for positive changes — like getting married or buying your first house.

Stress of any kind can trigger addictive behaviors. Addictions redirect our attention from what we fear or dislike to things that we feel that we can control — or that bring a temporary sense of comfort, pleasure, power, or excitement.

But understanding how addiction works, and the power of the recovery process, can help us see all kinds of change as opportunities for growth.

What is “triggered”? A beast within

When a particular change brings up unhealed issues from the past, it can stimulate unconscious and defensive coping mechanisms, painful emotions, and outdated belief systems. These, in turn, can trigger addictive behaviors.

Addictions are defined as chronic, repetitive actions that are extremely difficult to disrupt in spite of escalating negative consequences. They actually change the way the brain works:

• Base urges dominate — like survival, hunger, thirst, lust, fear and flight, anger and aggression, pleasure-seeking and avoidance of pain
• The body adapts to high levels of stress, adrenalin and depression
• Emotions that stimulate addictive behavior are intensified and prolonged
• Feelings that threaten to diminish or extinguish the addiction become diluted and fleeting
• Conscious awareness of spirit is reduced — and commensurately, receptivity, trust, and faith

Addictive conduct creates the illusion of gratifying one’s needs. But in fact it undermines the very essence of health and fulfillment.

In practicing addictions we are refusing to grow, refusing to see ourselves as capable individuals, and refusing to see the support and resources that are available around us now.

Even a reluctant willingness to change is enough to start the recovery process.

What do we recover in “recovery”?

Learning to distinguish past trauma from current circumstances is critical in recovery. As recovering addicts see how honest, deep sharing can be met with compassion, sensitivity, hope and healing, the higher brain becomes more dominant and psychological maturity can take root.

Building trust in recovery gives recovering addicts the courage to express emotions that make them feel vulnerable, healing trauma and emotional pain. Intentionally experiencing positive feelings like joy, gratitude, serenity, and acceptance strengthens them. Self-soothing to calm fear when there is no real, imminent danger brings resilience, similar to a healthy parent’s response to a child with a nightmare.

Physical healing requires self care and relaxation, including appropriate amounts of rest, sleep and exercise, healthy eating, normalizing energy levels, and conscious reconnection with and appreciation of the physical body.

Opening to a positive relationship with spirit and identifying how spirit communicates is a key component of change in recovery. This bond can be strengthened through prayer, meditation, recognizing blessings and miracles, altruistic giving and spiritual love for all. Accepting the present moment and relying upon spiritual principles to meet changes create alignment with the greatest good.

Mary Cook is the author of Grace Lost and Found: From Addictions and Compulsions to Satisfaction and Serenity. She has 35 years of clinical practice and 29 years of university teaching experience. Mary speaks on addiction issues across the country and has a private practice in San Pedro, CA.

BY SOUL’S CODE — Brooke Mueller is the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen who called 911 a couple of Christmas holidays ago in Aspen claiming that the Two and a Half Men star he was threatening her with a knife (listen to the tape here). Since then, they have both done revolving doors through rehab — and Mueller’s latest attempts and failures at sobriety are a highlight reel on Paris Hilton’s new reality TV show on the Oxygen network.

Mueller’s latest stab at AA-style 12 Steps has apparently failed again, and the gossip site TMZ reports that she made plans to fly to Cancun to undergo Ibogaine therapy.

Ibogaine is intense. It strips one bare of psychological defenses. It is also illegal in the U.S., which is why American addicts fly to places like Mexico, Colombia and Brazil for treatment.

Does Brooke have the psychic resilience and self-awareness to take a deep-dive into an Ibogaine trance, or will she shut down and have a bad trip? Will putting Ibogaine in this woman be the equivalent of filling a VW Beetle with jet fuel?

UPDATE: TMZ reported that Charlie Sheen retrieved his ex Brooke from Mexico in a private jet because he thought Ibogaine treatment was so dangerous she might die. Note, the issue isn’t Ibogaine itself but Brooke Mueller’s emotional depth and resilience.

Perhaps the first time that Ibogaine (or “Iboga”) was put out there in American popular culture was in Rolling Stone magazine writer Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

Thompson satirically suggested that a Brazilian doctor had gotten the Democratic front-runner for president that year hooked on the drug. “It is entirely conceivable — given the known effects of Ibogaine — that (Edmund) Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.”

While Ibogaine is indeed a hallucinogen, Thompson got one thing wrong: it is not addictive. In fact, recovery circles across North America are now using it on the sly as a cure for addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The cutting-edge prescription for addiction currently promoted by the medical establishment is Topiramate, an anti-convulsion medication with questionable efficacy.

But Iboga is not approved by the U.S government.  It’s a free-growing plant that has been used in West Africa as a sacramental substance, and cannot be patented like a synthetic drug. No wonder it’s illegal.  “Ibogaine has really become notorious because it didn’t originate in a lab, but in the counterculture,” Stanley Glick, the director of the Center for Neuropharmacology and Neuroscience at Albany Medical College, told the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration classifies Ibogaine alongside drugs like ecstasy and LSD with “high potential for abuse” and “no known medical value.” There are also reports that patients in Europe, where Ibogaine therapy is legal, died because it aggravated their heart conditions.

Both of those factors make it difficult for psycho-pharmacologists to win research grants. But a privately-funded research organization in Massachusetts, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research, is currently conducting a long-term study of the effect of Iboga on heroin addicts.

Hunter S. Thompson got yet another thing tangled about Iboga: It’s from Africa not Brazil. In fact, it is processed into a brown powder from the bark of a root grown in Gabon (population: 1.5 million).

It has been used for centuries as a healing plant and in religious rites by the Bwiti people.  In 1962, Howard Lotsof, a heroin addict, got some Ibogaine from a chemist friend of his for a psychedelic trip.  He woke up from the Ibogaine miraculously devoid of any desire to use heroin.  His brain was apparently reset, and he reported no withdrawal symptoms.

The most popular proselytizer of Iboga in the West today — four decades after Thompson introduced it to a mass audience — is a British documentary filmmaker named David Graham Scott, whose “Detox or Die” is  YouTube viral phenom.

Hardcore scientists speculate that Ibogaine binds with the brain’s opiate receptors to pre-empt cravings.

But users argue that the underlying magic of the substance is spiritual: “Ibogaine allows one to ‘die’ of our former selves and be reborn clean and addiction-free,” one San Francisco Bay Area woman with a psychology degree who has tried Iboga told Soul’s Code.

How much does it cost? Has it worked for you?

The motto for this site is everyone’s a guru. We mean that Soul’s Code is a community platform where people can share their personal solutions for self-growth and peak experiences. As we have virtually no in-house experience with Ibogaine, we invite you to share yours below — and unlike on Facebook, you can Comment anonymously:

1. 9th Company, the Russian side of “Charlie Wilson’s War”

Hulu.com, the website where you can play TV and movies for free, finally has a foreign flick worth watching. (Actually, make that any flick).

Hulu just posted 9th Company, “9 Рота” in the original Russian — the first time that a mass American audience has been exposed to the best movie we’ve ever seen from the post-Soviet Union (and in that spirit, it’s a co-production with Finland and the Ukraine).

Yes, the movie does has subtitles. But think of it as the Rus version of Platoon with the nitty-gritty psychological naturalism of Stanley Kubrick’s Natural Born Killers. But it’s actually based on a true story.

Dateline, 1988: The Red Army’s boot-camp for paratroopers, which makes Navy SEAL 6 look like a Disney Jamboree. The squad deploys to Afghanistan for the end-game of the Soviet occupation of the stone-age Muslim state. As we’re drawn into this experience, we identify and sympathize with the characters — and then it dawns: Oh shit, this is our war. As in the Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts vehicle written by Aaron Sorkin, Charlie Wilson’s War. Meaning, the U.S. and its allies are supplying the other side.

Second level of awareness: These humble Russian peasant soldiers from Siberian cities like Krasnoyarsk are actually  fighting our war, Act I  — that is, Obama’s current war in Afghanistan. In the movie, the mujahedin are not politicized, 9/11-wise. It’s left to us to realize who they are: 9th Company was fighting Bin Ladn and the Taliban 13 years before the World Trade Center.

2. Addiction: Stoned (as in Rolling Stones)

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards founded the Rolling Stones. Right?

Actually, the original leader of the group and most photogenic member, was Brian Jones. But by the mid-1960′s, he’d failed to record new music as fast as Jagger-Richards, and he abused his girlfriend — the German version of Catherine Deneuve, Anita Pallenberg. Jagger took over the band, Richards periodically took over Jones’ girlfriend Anita — and what happened to the real golden boy of the Rolling Stones is documented in cinema for the first time in the slyly-titled bio-pic, Stoned.

It’s a Tarentino-stylized  piece of cinema that serves an investigative journalistic purpose: Empirically answers — without the help of courts and police, who were conned in this case — the question of who killed Brian Jones. The founder of the most famous band on earth.

What’s new about this ? If the movie had been about an America singer-songwriter (Johnny Cash), and produced by a Hollywood studio (Fox), it would have been as big as Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix). You can now watch Stoned for free on American TV (Showtime).

3. Social psychology: Gods [dioces]

Surprise, Peru actually has wealthy people instead of the shanty-towns we are always shown in the media. And they’re as hot as Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. But they are also parasitically perched at the top of a supply-chain of wealth-creation that looks like this: Peru produces the coca base; Colombia is the CEO; Mexico, out-sourced transportation; and America is the end-market, the most addicted people on the planet.

Gods, the movie, shows how a person can coast to the top of Maslow’s famous pyramid showing the human hierarchy of needs with not much more than luck and beauty.

Reminiscent of Vitti’s movies from the 1960s, a bourgeois Lima family is living la dolce vita like Italians on the Amallfi coast: the maid marries the patriarch, and then has an Aha realizationl after she buys into — and then sees through — the narcissistic obsessions of the trophy wives who are her new best friends.

It’s not a new film but it’s new to us in North America. Best place to screen it: Virgin America, which just put Gods in the foreign film section of its on-board, movies-on-demand.

4. Peak experiences: Discover the Gift

Released on June 14, 2011, this spiritual travelogue is by a Hollywood director but is decidedly not a Hollywood film. Demian Lichtenstein, who made 3,000 Miles to Graceland, does his own version of the 1979 film, Meetings with Remarkable Men, with some of the flavor of The Secret. In fact, Secret star Michael Beckwith is not only in Lichentstein’s Gift: he hosted a special screening at his L.A. church. But the film goes beyond prosperity preaching and also features the Dalai Lama, Ravi Shankar and Marianne Williamson’s work on A Course in Miracles. The theme is closer to that of a famous book that happens to have a similar name to this site, The Soul’s Code — psychologist James Hillman’s meditation on how to access the essence of your individual role in Being.

5. Ecology: If a tree falls

The newest release on our list is also the only thriller. If a tree falls takes its name from an existential koan: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to here it, does it make a sound? But the subject is eco-terrorism, not metaphysics. Based on a true story, the Earth Liberation Front is a modern-day version of the Weather Underground: it burns and blows up anti-green targets like timber companies, SUV dealerships, wild horse slaughterhouses, and a ski lodge at Vail, Colorado. The arsonists are captured in a post-9/11 crackdown by the FBI, which calls them “America’s number one domestic terrorism threat.”

BY MARY COOK, M.A., R.A.S. — Read TMZ.com any night about the most privileged people on the planet. Nic Cage is arrested for spousal abuse and public inebriation. Days later Cage’s son attacks his personal trainer. Meanwhile, Charlie Sheen is acting out again.

When our primary needs or desires in childhood are insufficiently gratified, we experience a deep and lasting sense of fear, incompleteness and inferiority.

Because it is difficult to contain fully conscious awareness of these feelings, defense mechanisms arise to dull, block or defensively glorify them.

We might adopt narcissistic or avoidant behaviors, or dangerous thrill-seeking practices, in order to distract ourselves from original fears.

Externalizing, projection and displacement are common defenses that deflect our original pain and problems onto people, places and things outside of us.

What you externalize with projections will be internalized as compulsions

Because fear interferes with our ability to feel internally comfortable and positive, we might attempt to artificially produce these emotions through food, drugs, sex, shopping and other compulsive activities.

(The video, by the way, is from Charlie Sheen’s own YouTube channel).

This is also our attempt to compensate for previous lack of gratification. When family or friends in our adult life confront our compulsions, a sense of anger and entitlement arises in us, and we complain that they don’t understand us. These feelings are from childhood and don’t usually fit adult circumstances at all.

The law of addictive attraction

The energies of past pain and problems attract new similar experiences. And our defenses reinforce the themes of what we are defending. These energies are maintained, because in childhood we internalize deprivation and mistreatment into our sense of self, and feel unlovable, undeserving and unworthy.

When we do not have a healthy dependency period, we do not mature into a healthy interdependent state. Thus when we experience childhood themes in our adult life, we lack a mature adult framework from which to understand and resolve them.

In order for us to heal, we must recognize not only the similarities of past and present circumstances, but also the differences between now and way-back then.

5 easy pieces

Are you older and wiser?

Do you have more resources, support, options and courage?

Even if the current event carries the same theme, does it contain the same level of danger or mistreatment?

Do you  have other experiences with successful positive change in thinking, feeling and actions?

Do you have people in your life today that model healthy behaviors and positive growth?

And now about spiritual beliefs that afford us faith, trust and guidance in new endeavors.

Discovering the roots of unhealthy thinking and behaviors diminishes their power over us. Underneath narcissistic attitudes, lie significant past failures in empathy, sensitivity and understanding. Perhaps in childhood we lacked a sense of being seen, heard, felt, touched and understood for who we truly were. Self-absorption, and feigned grandiosity and arrogance are attempts to compensate for this. Ironically these defenses pass on empathic failures to others, and reinforce the theme of distrust and hurtful relating.

Avoiding situations that stimulate original fears has limited effectiveness.

Can we we make our conditioning conscious?

When we do not address and heal our fears, fear enlarges and the elements that stimulate fear increase. We also continue to attract situations that reflect what is unhealed within us. When we romanticize fear through recklessness and dangerous actions, we focus on how outwardly courageous we are. We hope this will undo the internal effects of earlier trauma, but it only reinforces the original fear.

Externalizing, projection and displacement are defenses that give us temporary illusions that our problems and pain are not internal, but lie in outward circumstances and other people. So now we blame and attempt to control what we cannot control. Even if those we blame do change according to our wishes, we quickly find new circumstances or new people upon which to project our inner problems.

Compulsive activities can dull our conscious awareness of what feels painful and threatening, and provide temporary artificial euphoria. Because we associate the compulsions with positive feelings, this further undermines our chances for healthy esteem. And because compulsions cannot replace primary needs and desires, they involve us in an endless, futile struggle for satisfaction.

Our healing journey involves recognizing that we have a child and an adult sense of self. We can develop compassionate understanding, and ultimately loving guidance for our child self. We can view our adult self as equal to, rather than inferior or superior to others, and we can exhibit humanitarian and spiritual values.

We can identify and appreciate the differences between past and present stress, and increasingly relinquish defense mechanisms in favor of deeper awareness and corresponding integrity. We can remember that as adults, we hold the keys to healthy self-care, and we teach others how to treat us through this example. We can thankfully demonstrate responsibility for our safety, serenity, health, happiness and fulfillment, and experience a deep and lasting sense of wholeness and goodness.

Mary Cook is the author of “Grace Lost and Found: From Addictions and Compulsions to Satisfaction and Serenity”, available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com and through her own website. Mary has 35 years of clinical practice and three decades of university teaching experience. Based  in San Pedro, CA. Mary is available for telephone and office counseling, guided meditation, speaking engagements and in-service training. Her e-mail: MaryCookMA@att.net

BY MARY COOK — The next Pulitzer Prize winning novelist might be living next door to you but, for whatever reason, has yet to write a novel.

Your best friend might want to quit smoking but is on the porch having a smoke right this minute. Why?

What psychologists call associations.

Perhaps the non-writing writer associates hard work with her overbearing parents, and the smoker associates cigarettes with self-affirmation or self-pampering.

We’ve all had these associations that make healthy choices seem impossible or success unattainable. Connections in our brains link the past to the present in stubborn, sticky ways. Thankfully, neural pathways are made to be broken. But first we need to understand those associations.

The sticky past

When we fail to achieve our goals, it is usually for one of these reasons:

Aversion to discipline

Personal growth requires discipline, yet many of us have negative associations to limits, rules and structure. Sometimes resistance or rebellion against discipline stems from past painful reactions to abusive or hypocritical role models of discipline.

In other cases, it can come from positive or loving associations to someone who was overly permissive and enabling with us.

If we are perfectionistic in our discipline, faltering can be fatal to our goal. Even as adults who are able to intellectually understand how reasonable compliance of rules and structure leads to freedom, opportunities and achievements, success eludes us.

Coddling our wounded self-esteem

Let’s say our goal is to exercise, eat healthy and/or quit smoking, in order to lose weight and overcome disease.  If we have internalized negative associations about our body from past abuse, endangerment or neglect, a deep feeling of unworthiness may well sabotage our efforts for greater health.  Occasionally, childhood sexual abuse leads to compulsive overeating and obesity.

The subconscious mind perceives the weight as a necessary buffer between us and others who might hurt us, and also as a barrier against unwanted sexual attention.  Or perhaps we failed to receive enough positive attention in childhood, and developed a pattern of overeating in an attempt to compensate.  Cake and ice cream can’t love us, but our minds may associate foods with comfort, reward and pleasure, and associate healthy eating with deprivation.

A sense of entitlement from past pain

If people and things hurt us in the past, we feel entitled to compensation from people and things now. That’s the sort of inner logic we use each time we refuse to take healthy personal responsibility; we think it should be someone else’s job.  This belief keeps us in a childhood dependent state.

Decoding Codependency: A Soul’s Code Slideshow

Codependents, who voluntarily assume excessive responsibility for others, find that dependent adults refuse to improve and often worsen, despite their assistance. As for the dependent adults who use that “entitlement” defense, they are ultimately hostile toward their caretakers.  Entitlement only strengthens feelings of anger, hurt, helplessness and envy and prevents resolution and recovery.

Avoiding the whole truth

Failure to achieve goals can also be due to avoidant behaviors.  We may be unable to relinquish workaholism, for instance, in spite of increasing stress, because we associate professional achievements with positive esteem, and have negative or fear based associations to personal and family closeness.  We may have lacked healthy role models not only for positive relationships with significant others, but also with ourselves, and therefore feel that we would fail at this.  If we somehow perceive a “positive” association with anger and intimidation — because they  help us avoid painful earlier feelings of being over-controlled, abused, or humiliated — we may not overcome our anger issues until we change that association. When we focus on how we think others should change, we are avoiding painful, personal vulnerability and awareness of our own faults and problems.

A clean slate

The hallmark of addictions, compulsions and other unhealthy patterns is denial. Denial tells us that our sick habits are acceptable, or that a future time is a better time to change than now.  Denial says that some magical solution requiring no effort or difficulty on our part will make our problems vanish.  It tells us that we can reach our goals without surrendering our personal faults and false beliefs. It even convinces us to relinquish healthy goals entirely, preferring apathy and passivity, or anger and blame, over personal growth.

If only we could deny ourselves that denial.

To truly grasp how to acquire positive esteem, joy and fulfillment we need look no further than our children. Healthy children have an innate, instinctive desire for learning, solving problems, overcoming obstacles and evolving continuously.  Living their way looks effortless, and it is. In contrast, holding ourselves hostage to fear and defenses takes a lot more energy than letting go and moving forward.

Mary Cook is the author of “Grace Lost andFound: From Addictions and Compulsions to Satisfaction and Serenity”, available from Barnes & Noble bookstores, Amazon.com, etc.  She has 35 years of clinical practice and 29 years of university teaching experience.  She is a national speaker and has a private practice in San Pedro, CA.

Mary is available for telephone and office counseling, guided meditation, speaking engagements and in-service training.  Contact her at MaryCookMA@att.net and see website for further information.