Deconstructing addiction:

This resource has been initiated by Anthony Corballis in conjunction with Dulwich Centre Publications. You'll find here a range of writings about addiction and ways of responding to alcohol and other drug use.

Apart from creating this web-based resource, the Deconstructing Addiction League is a multi-faceted network for persons who wish to be engaged in practices that undermine addiction and support community.

At the level of community, the Deconstructing Addiction League is developing a resource that will assist persons in making a migration from alcohol and other drugs. Using the maps from narrative practice, this resource will offer support groups that meet regularly and encourage each other to resist the powerful influence of addiction. These groups will be led by non-professionals who have been through their own experience of addiction. Professional knowledge is welcome, but is not a requirement or something that is necessary to sustain the groups. Maps from narrative practice will include externalizing conversations, re-membering conversations, ‘failure exercises’, definitional ceremony, outsider-witnessing, spiritualities of the surface and personal ethics, the rite of passage metaphor, migration of identity maps, and other therapeutic documents. These are a few of the possibilities.

The League will also be seeking ways of responding to a health care system that is often unjust and unfair to so called addicts/alcoholics and their families. The broader political context as it relates to addiction will also be addressed, such as the cultural practices of incarceration, and relations of domination (i.e. adult privilege, gender, race, sexual preference, and so on).

The Deconstructing Addiction League also hopes to provide support for narrative therapists who wish to work in the field of addiction treatment. Oftentimes, narrative therapists and their ideas are disqualified in treatment contexts. Furthermore, the League will hopefully provide a better understanding of how narrative therapists can work with so-called 'addicts' in private practice. This is critical, as many persons who seek the consultation of narrative therapists around the topic of addiction are refused. This refusal  is unfortunate but somewhat understandable, and one of the working assumptions of the League is that individual therapeutic responses are rarely enough to address the powerful influence of addiction, hence the need for a community-based resource informed by narrative practice. It is our hope that the League can contribute to a situation in which narrative therapists will not have to turn away anyone who is seeking to address issues of  'addiction'.

The linking of lives around shared themes and the ethic of community is central to the League’s development. Networking and sharing knowledge with regard to fun, good times, and pleasure within the context of self-care is vitally important. Entire families and communities can participate in challenging the culture of consumption.