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The Dangers Of Self-Medication
Why that little something to get you through is causing you harm
In an earlier article I wrote about how unfortunate it is that we get so little education regarding how to function adequately in relationships. People suffer a great deal of unhappiness as they flounder and flail, lacking even basic relationship skills and thereby unable to constructively deal with the problems that inevitably arise when two or more people live together for any meaningful period of time.
In this article, I want to write about how we have an equal lack of education about how to perform adequate self-administration. Instead, we all too often self-medicate in order to run away from uncomfortable feelings that frequently arise due to our lack of basic self care. Our alternative, self-medication, while easy and often beguiling, has very unfortunate consequences.
Among my very earliest memories as a child are far too many incidents where I saw my parents intoxicated and incapable of functioning. Back then, there was a pervasive culture of alcoholism among petroleum engineers and those stationed out in developing nations tended to take things to extremes. These were very unhappy people in very unhappy marriages, lost and alone and without any psychological or emotional resources to draw on. So instead of confronting their…
