Part 3. How to Get Beyond the People-Pleasing Syndrome
It's certainly understandable that when people-pleasers grow up, they do so with a fully crystallized program that to be good enough they must comply with the wishes and demands of others. . . .

We hit bottom when we stop digging.  Everyone's bottom is different, but I've found it often comes when the motivation for avoidance (anxiety, depression, trauma, fear, etc.) is no longer more compelling than the consequences of continuing with the compulsion or addiction that is fed by that avoidance.

People-pleasers are proficient at pleasing everyone . . . but themselves. They are master accommodators, intuiting what is wanted of them and--in both word and deed--bestowing on others the attentiveness and care they’ll typically deny themselves.

Drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, these are heavy baggage, sin-related substances and activities. Curing them may be doing the Lord’s work ... But what of modern day, technology-inspired addictions? Are divine forces operating here too?

Perhaps more than anything else, our mental and emotional well-being depends on our willingness to confront obstacles in life. The all-too-common alternative, of course, is simply to retreat from them. If, however, we're genuinely to progress and feel good about ourselves, we need to resist the ever-present temptation to withdraw from whatever we'd prefer not having to deal with.

Are there some groups for which the Internet is not a world to escape to, to become addicted to, but one to embrace in order to live life more fully? Are you one of them?

If you take even a quick look at the newspaper, you can see that there are massive public policy efforts aimed to curb smoking. States are raising their cigarette taxes. Cities around the world are banning smoking in restaurants. Even Holland (where it seems like almost every vice is legal) will no longer allow cigarette smoking in restaurants and public places. What makes it so hard to quit smoking?

The New York Times reports that " One in five adults in Europe have used marijuana or related drugs like hashish, the European Union’s drug agency said." As per their usual ignorant fear-mongering, recent reports from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy warning of the new, stronger strains of marijuana being produced get things not just wrong, but 180-degrees wrong.

For several years now I have been doing a psycho-educational dialogue with the families and significant others of addicts. It's always gone over quite well and, when you have 150 people in a room and they suddenly discover that they are not alone in their experience, it goes a long way toward consciousness raising, the development of compassion, and the quelling of resentment. Yesterday, I found myself doing the thumbnail version with a client struggling with a family member, and it prompted me to think about writing it all down and presenting it in this forum, as some folks might find something useful in it.

I appeared on ABC World News last night, where my small voice was drowned out by a chorus of government and media ones shouting - "Don't ever, ever let your kid drink."

I guess that email about drug use at one of my kids' middle schools affected me more than I thought. While on an airplane this week, I grabbed a couple of journals from the stack of recent arrivals to read on the plane. In the most recent issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, there is a nice research dialogue on the influence of asking questions on future behavior.

The middle-school where one of my kids goes finally sent around the dreaded email that every parent fears. A couple of kids had been caught with drugs at school and the appropriate authorities had been notified. I much preferred the notifications we got when the kids were in elementary school telling us that a child had lice or strep.

Cocaine, methamphetamines, and heroin killed fewer that 1,000 of Florida's 15 million adults in 2007 - less than a third the number killed by tranquilizers and painkillers. Throwing alcohol in with the illicit substances, their death toll was still less than half that from mood medications. Addiction and dangerous drug use are not about illicit substances - they are at the heart of the American experience.

Anti-drug hawk John McCain's wife, Cindy, stole drugs, about which she has never come clean.

It’s something like making a pact with the Devil. When we self-indulge, we obtain the object of our desire up front . . .

This spring, I have had a chance to observe alcohol consumption in three very distinctive cultural settings - First Nation (Canada), Irish, and Iberian (Portugal/Spain). Alcohol use - and consequences - could not have been more different in these three places.

The June 4 NY Times was one argument after another for drinking - clearly, alcohol interests control America's greatest newspaper!

America's drug policy resembles Europe's approach to the Black Plague.

Reporting from the road about the Irish and alcohol.