Kidnykid's Full Review: Charlotte Davis Kasl - Many Roads, One Journey: Mo...
When Charlotte Kasl, PhD, was working on her doctorate in clinical psychology, she had to take courses on the treatment of drug and alcohol addicts. Although she and I differ radically in philosophical orientations, she asked the same questions I might - why on earth must everyone do 12-step therapy for addiction? Aren't there alternatives?
What she was told at the time was that addicts were to be referred initially to 12-step groups as a part of their "aftercare," or follow-up, programs, but that if it were proven not to work in individual cases, they'd grudgingly refer clients out to non-12-step methods of recovery. Note the attitude with which they'd make the referral: grudgingly, rather than in the same spirit that physicians prescribe tetracycline to patients allergic to penicillin.
Dr. Kasl certainly noted it as a graduate student, and MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY is the result. In MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY, Dr. Kasl presents a number of alternatives to the notion that the only road to recovery is the use of the 12 Steps originally developed by Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, MD, in the mid-1930s. She discusses, among other things, those recovery programs advocated by Secular Organizations for Sobriety (known as SOS) and Women For Sobriety.
She also develops, and explains in this volume, her own sixteen-step program for recovery, which she hopes to see women use as but one alternative to AA's 12 Steps.
I was more displeased with MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY than I was with Dr. Kasl's prior volume, WOMEN, SEX AND ADDICTION. My reasoning is simple: I feel strongly that the New Age approach she advocates is presented as preferable in all circumstances. If you are more of a traditional bent - if, say, you are a believer in traditional religious approaches, and disagree strongly with the entire philosophical basis of most treatment centers because they're not traditionally religious enough - Dr. Kasl will seem as pushy and offensive to you in pursuit of her New Age philosophy as the most money-grubbing conservative evangelist would seem to her. I feel that the similarity is utterly lost on her.
Similarly, the contrast between her own philosophy and that of James Christopher, the founder of SOS, is utterly lost on her. Christopher is what used to be known as a freethinker - an atheist or agnostic who strongly resents the influence of organized religion on modern society and acts accordingly. For that matter, that's why he developed SOS in the first place: to provide a non-religious, unabashedly secularized approach to treatment as an alternative to AA and its overt mention of God in seemingly every step.
To hear Dr. Kasl glowingly talk about SOS and Christopher, the reader might be led to believe that she herself is a freethinker who believes in the scientific approach to recovery embodied in the principles of SOS. However, she isn't; she speaks glowingly of SOS in one breath and in the next, sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool New Ager practicing the latest form of fad spirituality. In fact, the very title - MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY - expresses a New Age philosophy intended to be as all-inclusive as possible (as long as you don't insist upon one way of doing things).
That's the part that was so frustrating - the concept that there are many ways to take the same journey. There are times, though, when there is only one road to where you are going. Granted, when one is addicted, that is slightly different in the sense that there are indeed many ways to recover from an addiction, but my point is that the idea that there are "many roads to take when one is making the one journey" is not as universally accurate as Dr. Kasl might herself believe (and wish to pontificate upon in this book). There are problems which only have one or maybe two solutions, rather than maybe ten ways to arrive at the same solution (which is what "many roads, one journey" implies in the first place). (I can think of one almost immediately - once one gets to a certain stage of kidney failure, determined by a physician in one's own individual case, there are only two options: dialysis and kidney transplantation, depending on your age and other factors. There are only two roads to take on that journey, rather than many.)
Dr. Kasl again called it right when she stated that our whole society needs to change. Addictions treatment is far too focused on individual change for my taste; like it or not, we have to face a deeply-flawed, highly dysfunctional real world that sorely needs change if potential addicts are not to become addicted. Put another way, it is not for nothing that drug and alcohol addicts often come from very dire economic circumstances, nor is it unusual to see liquor ads run rampant in neighborhoods which have bad economic times hit them. One very rarely sees liquor or tobacco pitched to people living in rich neighborhoods; they know the medical dangers of things like driving while drunk and being addicted to nicotine, and they are wealthy enough to find other ways to escape their troubles. We need to change a society which offers only drunken binges and the opportunity to smoke like chimneys to the poor, while giving the wealthy healthier opportunities for distraction.
However, agreeing that our society needs to change isn't the same as agreeing on how that society needs to change, and this is where Dr. Kasl's material is deficient, in my opinion. While it is true that there are differing opinions as to how to solve our problems, it is also true that the New Age solution is not the only solution, but it is the only one presented by Dr. Kasl. It is also not the only way to straighten out whatever problems contribute specifically to addiction. To read some of the chapters in which she describes what she sees as some of society's problems (and, implicitly, some of their solutions), one would think that we are back in the 1960s talking to a group of what were then considered radicals.
There is another important item I must point out. At one point in the book, Dr. Kasl does manage to weave dietary interventions into the discussion, as there is such a thing as food addiction, with its associated problems (ranging from obesity to all the problems resulting from anorexia). I happen to agree with her about hospital food; she had the experience of being served one of the highest-fat, most dietetically horrible of breakfasts while hospitalized for breast cancer. (One would think that hospital-based dietetic programs, of all places, would avoid serving heavily-buttered toast and bacon in a day and age when we are all trying to decrease fat consumption unless we are on Dr. Atkins' diet, but those are examples of some of the items Dr. Kasl was offered while in the hospital.) However, Dr. Kasl offers suggestions on diet which sound as if they come from a New Age guru with a degree in dialysis nutrition!
She considers such staples of the Midwestern diet as red meat to be "extreme" foods, and implicitly recommends that people eliminate these "extreme" foods entirely. In reviewing the chapter on diet and physical problems, particularly the chart she includes, I also got the impression that she would like to rid the world of substance such as prescription medication and beverage alcohol. Dr. Kasl tends to prefer macrobiotic-style cookery, involving several levels of strictness; people tended to get into nutritional trouble on the types of diets Dr. Kasl seems to want to recommend (her idea of "short-term professional guidance" being getting help from those who also prefer and are trained to recommend macrobiotic diets), and so the diets she preferred were largely out of fashion by the time she published MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY. I would recommend caution in accepting Dr. Kasl's dietary recommendations for that reason.
She also buried one dietary recommendation deep within her chapter on taking care of the body. It struck this reviewer as rather odd that she would advise eating only those foods that can be easily grown locally - for example, it makes little sense to her to have pineapples shipped to Minnesota (her adoptive home as of the writing of MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY). Apart from the obvious fact that we have become increasingly accustomed to having the cuisines of a wide variety of countries available to us (especially in urban areas like Chicago and New York), there is also the problem of a lack of balance in this recommendation.
Let's return again to the pineapples-in-Minnesota example. In a climate like that of Minnesota, it is virtually impossible to grow certain fruits, meaning that if one is to have a balanced diet with some degree of variety (essential in avoiding boredom, if nothing else), one has to see to it that certain foods are imported into Minnesota from other areas of the country, if not the world. If this is true of Minnesota, think of what it must be like in Japan, a country in which the population at large is, well, so large and takes up so much of that small country that virtually all food must be imported. They are eating foods in Japan which, according to Dr. Kasl, their bodies were not designed to digest properly, because (according to her theory) foods grown locally are grown to suit local digestive tracts and are thus more digestible and easily assimilated by locals than imported foods. Because her degree is in clinical psychology, she is not scientifically qualified or trained to make such a judgment; were she, say, a nutritional anthropologist, or even a physician with a special interest in nutrition, I'd say her recommendations would carry more weight, but she is a clinical psychologist.
She also recommends - implicitly, in a "please follow my example" way - that people try to eat lightly-spiced foods whenever possible. This is one of those things that actually does vary from culture to culture, and it's all in the preparation, not in where the items going into a recipe are grown. Mexican food, for example, tends to be spicier than the foods eaten by my Norwegian ancestors, largely for climatic reasons. Spicier recipes tend to be prepared in Latin American and other southern countries, because they have a hotter climate, and the spices in the recipes make them sweat. The sweating cools people down, making them more comfortable. Keep in mind that I have been taught this simply by observing and listening to cooks expert in preparing these cuisines, something I wish Dr. Kasl would have done. I also wish she would have brushed up on the facts herself, as she is not enamored of experts.
Since the topic has been touched upon, it merits further discussion. Dr. Kasl not only distrusts the concept of experts, she says we have given up far too much power over to them. Like many New Agers, she subscribes to the theory that you are your own best expert, although she does not use this language specifically. If one is to continue what I call the "personality evolution" theory she uses earlier, and apply it to developmental psychology, she herself is still stuck at something of an adolescent level of evolution. If you are the parent of an adolescent, you need no opinion more expert than your own to know what kinds of arguments you hear on a daily basis, and because I am the parent of a late adolescent myself, I can quote you these same arguments verbatim. They all boil down to something which sounds remarkably similar to the "you are your own best expert" theory promulgated in MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY. She sounds, through most sections of the book, as if she were a 1960s radical attending one of the more radical colleges. She also sounds as if she is stuck at age 19-21, developmentally, and I am basing this observation on the tone with which she writes about experts and the attitudes she would like us to develop toward them.
It is with profound regret, therefore, that I must advise most readers to skip MANY ROADS, ONE JOURNEY. There just isn't enough substantive material in it to recommend it.
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