I’m nearly a year free from addiction

first time in like forever I’m not 

in survival mode

And It’s all because

Earlier this year I moved into mums home

I’m 29

As a child I was labeled gifted 

Spent my youth proving it 

performing, praise my first addiction 

Classic overachiever turned 

chronic burnout disillusionment timeline

spiralled out of three degrees

I always got perfect scores 

It was everything else 

My body rejected all the medications

I couldn’t sleep for years

Hated so many therapists 

before I found Narrative Therapy

I’m convinced CBT can be like 

Empire mind control

Oh dear, you are mal-adaptive

Quit focusing on the conditions 

It’s your faulty cogs 

For me

diagnosis never felt good 

What’s a normal reaction

To this world

It isn’t trendy to talk about family patterns

addiction, abandonment, spiritual psychosis 

How do you define Emotional abuse?

Well I know one truth

It didn’t start with you 

And also 

we are all being abused by inflation

glorification of full-time submission

now it barely pays the bills

Frogs in boiling water yet again 

Normalised only two days

free time 

nervous systems fried

minds taught to suppress

just get on with it

Caregivers collapsing 

as soon as they get home

Inherited coping mechanisms

passed down like recipes

Addiction 

isn’t evil

it’s the body attempting to regulate

the only way it knows how 

it’s the body

trying

to stay alive

꩜

My favourite reads on this subject below 💜

Empire’s core spell is convincing us that systemic wounds are personal failures.

We are all surviving, adapting, attempting to feel better.

I’m obsessed with critical psychology literature and with narrative and somatic lenses that look at generational patterns, hold a wide, webbed lens of the self within dominant narratives, and honour the body’s pain as communication and intelligence. This is purely my lived experience. Many people love CBT, many do not. CBT can sometimes pathologise normal reactions to oppressive conditions. What gets called “maladaptive” is often survival or difference, and much of our suffering is shaped by society, context, and the body’s adaptations, not personal failure. For me, understanding family patterns, ancestral history, social environments, class, nervous system responses, and survival adaptations feels far more compassionate, far more real. I don’t resonate with therapeutic models that separate the mind from the body or the self from society.

This poem is for past me and for anyone struggling inside mainstream treatment, anyone who feels their story is bigger than a diagnosis. Of course many people benefit. Many are also like me, questioning how our species is understood in the context of late capitalism and the colonial inheritance of what’s deemed normal, moral, and expected. I feel human suffering cannot be understood without context, power, history and the body 💜

📖 Outline of Theoretical Psychology: Critical Investigations 🌟 Thomas Teo

📖 The Critique of Psychology: From Kant to Postcolonial Theory 💫 Thomas Teo

📖 Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology ☄️ Editor Thomas Teo

📖 CBF: Cognitive Behavioral Fallacies (2021) ❤️‍🔥 Farhad Dalal

📖 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason 😦 Michel Foucault

📖 Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends 🌀 Michael White & David Epston

📖 Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto 🌙 Tricia Hersey