Postive Anchors from Life Experiences - (part 7)
Such a state could be created by bringing together a series of positive life experiences. By anchoring the felt sense of those experiences, and stacking those anchors together into a single (anchored) resource, there would emerge a single, positive affect representing the deepest and most positive aspects of the individual. If the exemplars for the anchors were correctly chosen, they would provide a sense of growth into the center of personal potential that would serve to awaken a meaningful life direction. Because the Jungian dynamic of archetypes and complexes (the intellectual source of this structure) exists at the level of inchoate, felt experiences, an anchoring procedure was deemed to be the perfect means for creating the state and making it available (Jung, 1979, 1984; Gray, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005).
The program finally came to take on the following characteristics: After a brief introduction to the nature of addiction and the hierarchy of salience; drugs, addiction and problem behaviors were never formally mentioned again during the entire 16-week program.
In general, the program sought to teach the art of ecstasy and its use for transcendence. It was continually presented as a refuge from the cares of the world; two hours a week where you could “always leave feeling better than you did when you came in”. It was a place where no one was preached at, demeaned or questioned; and it all happened at the Probation Department.
In the context of creating states designed to establish, or re-establish a values hierarchy in order to ‘outframe’ addictive behaviors, there are two technical insights that proceed directly from experience in the Brooklyn Program and accord well with cognitive neuroscience.
