Christina Dent started on one end of the classroom and went down each row, giving every grad student a chance to share their thoughts on the presentation she had just given.
One student said something that she would never forget.
As the student shared what she had learned about the root causes of addiction and why incarceration tends to make it worse, she said, “It’s kind of like a child is holding a teddy bear and we’re beating them over the head for it.” Addictions of all kinds provide a way to feel better, even if it’s just for a few minutes.
What that student was doing is something humans are desperate to do: connect something unfamiliar with something familiar.
As much as we might want to be open-minded, all of us tend to struggle with embracing new ideas.
Christina’s friend Lura Forcum has a Ph.D. in Consumer Psychology and writes a fantastic Substack called How to Human about why people think the way they do. Her most recent piece explains that the easier something is to understand, the more likely people are to believe it.
But addiction and recovery are complex, so we have to push past “simple” and look for “effective,” even if it means new and different.
It’s possible that the human tendency to resist new ideas is at the heart of why so few of us have heard of Neuro-Electric Therapy for addiction treatment. That’s why End It For Good chose to do a 4-part podcast series on it, interviewing:
- Pattie Vargas, who crossed the country to find help for her daughter.
- Jeff Lott, who works for NET Recovery.
- Mark LaPalme, who brought NET into Isaiah House, the network of Christian treatment centers he founded in Kentucky.
- Rebekah Mutch, Pattie’s daughter, who found sobriety through NET.
If you only have time for one, listen to Rebekah tell her story of new life. It’s incredibly inspiring.
The challenge is that NET is unfamiliar. And humans tend to resist unfamiliar things.
So, what do we do when we encounter unfamiliar ideas to overcome our natural tendency to discard them? Lura has some great next steps:
- Spend some time thinking about whether it seems factually inaccurate versus unfamiliar.
- Suspend judgment and spend some time getting familiar without making a ruling on good/bad, true/untrue, pleasing/displeasing.
- Try to get some mental distance from the idea, for example, by imagining yourself looking back on it in a few years’ time (research shows this can make us less critical).
Sometimes we can link a new idea to something we’re already familiar with, like the way a teddy bear comforts a child. And sometimes we have to put in a little extra mental work and create new categories in our minds.
Additionally, you can check out more of Lura’s work at How to Human, share innovations in addiction treatment through this opinion piece by Christina Dent that was just published in The Clarion Ledger, or spend a little time listening to the 4-part series on NET on our podcast.
The only path to new ideas becoming mainstream is for more of us to push through the discomfort of the unfamiliar and:
- Become familiar
- Invite others to become familiar