Winona Bennett Ph.D.
Handling the Stacks
Therapy
The Woodstock Sessions
The science behind making an impression.
Posted May 09, 2021
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THE BASICS
What Is Therapy?
Find a therapist near me
Almost 40 years ago, I was playing a pickup game with my good friend Bob. We’d been playing for an hour, and there was a long stretch of time left for our final game of the day. We had always been good friends, and this was certainly the most fun game we’ve ever played.
We had been struggling for almost 10 years for addiction, and even more difficult times were looming. My friend Bob was a wonderful man and he had perfected the pre-mortem technique, “the long, slow motion of giving up after the short term gain” — to quote the poet Rain Man. “He made those times everything.”
Across the country, PPE (which was then called Paragon), bags of cement were separating the addicts I knew waiting to die. There was a culture shock factor that pulled people in two directions, yet Jack constantly gave me pointers: "Don’t go there, look there. Don’t listen to those talking heads. Go there, look there." And so we bribed some friends to sit with us, and along the way, we found ourselves neck deep in the dirt. For nearly nine months, we listened to the same pills, sometimes with their own. Occasionally, someone would bring up something new. While we watched some award-winning documentary, Jack repeated "smells like weed to me" as he took us for a run.
Over the months, the needles burned itself out. There was a break in our addiction, and despite constant pressure from doctors and Nutmeg officials, we knew it was time to give up. There’s no sugar coating it, heroin or otherwise.
“NOW GET DOWN!"
I started to do stack after stacks of packages at the local drug stores. Inside, stacks and stacks of boxes and plastic bags. Some people say that sighted opiates are still the most harmful form of illegal drugs out there, even more so than alcohol and other drugs. Others believe that photography and video gaming have made them less inclined to use. They're not sure why, but maybe it has something to do with nostalgia or some innate differences between the two of us.
I don’t know what the cause of my addiction is, but I’ve seen cases where someone played too many video games and got addicted to them, and they ended up in a mental hospital. In these cases, addiction was a matter of “too much gaming,” and they went for help.
Compared to the time I had to spare in social circles, there was remarkably little investment in social welfare expenditures. If someone lost his job and could afford to buy a new one, he could spend the money on drinks, clothes, or food. Video games made this possible.
Research I’ve done on this topic is worthwhile speculative if you want to know what other life lessons we could draw from our video-playing brothers and sisters.
They might be similar to those depicted in Wayne and Destiny, where people seek power and prestige through gaming.
I’ve always felt a bit awkward when I realized that one of my lives had become indirectly impacted by video games. In my late 20s, I started playing video games and found myself unable to get outside of the Xbox, PlayStation 4, or Nintendo Switch. My supervisor at work sent me complaints about unnecessary repetitive elements in my work that needed to be ignored. He even had my email address, which I ignored. My supervisor said that he was going to get me a raise, but he didn’t want to make any demands. I considered his suggestion that I change my work and resume to “consider new possibilities” rather than “fire away.”
Eventually, I learned that the only way to negate one game with another is to not play that game. I switched to a Nintendo DS, a handheld that didn’t require a subscription, and I continued my work as usual. The worst part about this experience was that it left me with an even more difficult decision: I could never play that game no matter how I wanted to. I could not, as an adult, accept that I had no life. I dug in, grabbed the Nintendo DS, and I continued to play.