New Habitude program at Turning Point!

Writing with complete transparency, Rubie has courageously walked through healing and by turns offers readers to do the same by reflecting through his poetry.

ONTARIO, Canada (PRWEB) April 26, 2012

On his dedication page, poet Gary Rubie writes, “to every alcoholic and addict that suffered, recovered and still suffers, I hope for serenity, courage and wisdom.” The same serenity, courage and wisdom can be found in the interstices of Out On A Cliff, an intricately-weaved anthology of lyrical prose which takes readers into an intense journey into Rubie’s mind, providing a glimpse into his soul’s darkest hole.

Rubie’s journey to writing poetry began just over seven years ago as a method of journaling. With no formal training he found solace in rhyme. It was a therapeutic way of putting his feelings on paper about the struggles and challenges he faced during his policing career and in dealing with severe job related trauma (P.T.S.D.) and his addictions.

Each metrical piece in Out On A Cliff are based on Rubie’s real life experiences –. From growing up, suffering abuse, to his 25-year career as a city cop, surviving deep depression, suicidal thoughts and attempts at his own life and then managing crippling job related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This all lead him through his own Dante’s Inferno, the darkest hole imaginable of addictions, his own incarceration and his eventual victorious recovery. Rubie asked his father two years ago if he would consider drawing images to go with each poem. Confident in his son’s adroitness in poetry, Henk Rubie agreed to do a collaboration between father and son.

Rubie further wrote, “If one poem touches one person and stops that one person from ending their life, or gives one person hope, or keeps one person sober for one day, then all the hard work, honesty, and hours of painful soul-searching that went into creating this book was worth it.”

As Cornwall Chief of Police Daniel C. Parkinson puts it, Rubie has taken the lid off the Pandora’s Box of policing and allows readers to peek into its harrowing side. Writing with complete transparency, Rubie has courageously walked through self-healing and by turns offers readers to do the same by reflecting through this candid volume.

For more information on this book, interested parties may log on to http://www.Xlibris.com.

About the Author
Gary Rubie was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in 1962. He joined the Peel Regional Police Department in 1984 where he served for 25 years on a variety of front line and plain cloths units. He enjoyed many successes in his career being recognized 64 times with letters of appreciation from the public, police commendations and awards. He continued his studies taking 33 job related courses over his career. In 2008 in his 25th year of policing he was diagnosed with job related career ending Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was placed on permanent disability.

Henk Rubie was born in the Netherlands in 1931 where he was educated and joined the air force for 2 years. He worked as a toolmaker until he married his wife of 53 years Antonia Rubie. Together they immigrated to Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in 1959 where they raised three children. Henk worked as a skilled machinist for years in the RMS Machinery Division, at the Uniroyal tire manufacturing facility in Kitchener. He retired in 1991. A hobby boat builder and artist he further honed his artistic skills and began oil painting, creating intarsia wood crafts and continued building scaled model sail boats.

Out On A Cliff* by Gary Rubie and Henk Rubie

Publication Date: April 17, 2012
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For more information, contact Xlibris at (888) 795-4274 or on the web at http://www.Xlibris.com.

The Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (ACWS) has just published the results of a Leger Marketing poll of 1000 men age 18 and over on their views of domestic violence.

According to the survey, most men think it is never acceptable to physically assault a woman. More than 90% of men responding to questions of what is “acceptable behaviour towards women” considered “physical assault” “never” acceptable when: “she refuses to have sex,” “she admits to having sex with another man,” “she does something to make him angry,” and so forth. To me, that isn’t bad news, epidemiologically at least.

Interestingly, though, media reports on the survey turned this fairly upbeat news on its head. Almost unanimously they focused on variations of the headline used by the CBC: “OK to hit women if angry, 8% of Alberta men say.

Whoa, now it’s not upbeat at all! It’s very alarming! At least the CBC got the figure correct; CTV and others rounded the figure up to “one in ten”.

On an issue of such importance, honesty and accuracy are critical. But I find this survey superficial. What, for example, does “she does something to make him angry” mean? The survey doesn’t break it down, or give any indication of a spectrum of incitements to anger. Is the provocation to anger burning his toast, or hitting him over the head with a frying pan? There is a qualitative difference between the two.

There have been surveys that did ask specific questions with regard to when violence against a woman might be acceptable in a man’s mind. In 2001, for example, there was a U.S. survey (Simon et al) covering a far more numerous and more nationally representative sample than the ACWS one. It polled 5,238 men and women, equally divided by numbers.

Of the men polled, 9.8% said it was okay to hit a woman if she hits him first.” Only 2% said it was okay to hit a woman as a means of controlling her. Interestingly, of the women polled, 7.8% agreed that it was okay for a man to hit a woman if she hit him first.

I believe my scepticism is especially justified because this survey is so one-sided. Domestic violence happens by and to both men and women. We need both views, as in the U.S. survey above, to form an opinion.

In the ACWS survey, we have the troubling finding that only 39% of respondents agree that a parent slapping a child’s face should be considered family violence. Jan Reimer, provincial co-ordinator for the ACWS, said she found it “quite concerning,” for example, that so many men don’t consider slapping a child’s face to be a form of domestic violence. But what if the survey had asked the same question of women? If the figure were the same or even higher amongst women, would her concern be mitigated? Would Ms Reimer’s condemnation shift to a less indignant register?

From the Alberta survey, one takes away the impression that only males have a problem with physical aggression, which is demonstrably not the case. When one looks at surveys where both sexes are polled, one sees that anger management issues are a problem for a fraction of less than 10% of the population of both sexes in intimate partnerships — similar to the figure in the Alberta survey, but one that applies to both sexes. Yes, a problem, but a community problem, not a gender one.

This survey is about men’s “views.” But what is more important? Views or actual behaviour? From U.S. and Canadian government reports, as well as many peer-reviewed studies – not marketing company surveys – we know that in terms of actual behaviour between intimate partners, women are as likely – or more likely in younger cohorts – to initiate mild to moderate physical aggression than men (up to and including knifing). They are also more likely to be physically abusive to children.

So I am left to wonder what purpose this survey has served. We have a clue in Ms Reimer’s linking of the negative male views to the feminist mantra: “centuries of control and male privilege.” If women had been polled and their views lined up with the male views, it would put paid to that simplistic conclusion.

My own conclusion is that the goal of the exercise was to further entrench the already well-established myth that only men perpetrate domestic violence and only men are a danger to their children. It has doubtless succeeded in that goal. But as original, valuable and objective insight on a thorny social issue to the Canadian public (as it should have been), I’d say it was money down the drain.

National Post

by Gabor Maté

A hit of compassion could keep drugs from becoming a crime problem.

All drug addicts, even (or perhaps especially) the abject and marginalized street user, seek in their habit the same paradise de Quincey rhapsodized: a sense of comfort, vitality, and freedom from pain. It’s a doomed search that puts in peril their health, societal position, dignity, and freedom. “I’m not afraid of death,” another patient told me. “I’m more afraid of life.” What kind of despair could lead someone to value short-term pain relief over life itself? And what might be the source of such despair?

Not Choice or Genes

In North America, two assumptions inform social attitudes toward addiction. First is the notion that addiction is a result of individual choice, of personal failure, a view that underlies the legal approach toward substance dependence. If the behavior is a matter of choice, then it makes sense to punish or deter it by means of legal sanctions, including incarceration for mere possession. The second perspective is the medical model that sees addiction as an inherited disease of the brain. This view at least has the virtue of not blaming the afflicted person—after all, people cannot help what genes they inherit—and it also offers the possibility of compassionate treatment.

What the choice and heredity hypo­theses share in common is that they take society off the hook. Neither compels us to consider how a person’s experience and social position contribute to a predisposition for addiction. If oppressed or marginalized populations suffer a disproportionate share of addiction’s burden—as they do, here and elsewhere—it must be due to their faulty decision-making or to their flawed genes. The heredity and choice-based models also spare us, conveniently, from looking at how our social environment supports, or does not support, the parents of young children, and at how social attitudes and policies burden, stress, and exclude certain segments of the population and thereby increase their propensity for addiction.

Another, starker view emerges when we listen to the life histories of substance abusers and look at the ample research data.

Addictions always originate in unhappiness, even if hidden. They are emotional anesthetics; they numb pain. The first question—always—is not “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” The answer was summed up with crude eloquence, scrawled on the wall of my patient Anna’s room: “Any place I went to, I wasn’t wanted. And that bites large.”

“A Warm, Soft Hug”

For 12 years I was staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a nonprofit, harm-reduction facility in the Downtown Eastside, an area with an addict population of 3,000 to 5,000. Most of the Portland’s clients are addicted to cocaine, crystal meth, alcohol, opiates like heroin, or tranquilizers—or to any combination of these things.

“The first time I did heroin,” one of my patients, a 27-year-old sex-trade worker, once told me, “it felt like a warm, soft hug.” In a phrase, she summed up the deep psychological and chemical cravings that make some people vulnerable to substance dependence.

Contrary to popular myth, no drug is inherently addictive. Only a small percentage of people who try alcohol or cocaine or even crystal meth go on to addictive use. What makes those people vulnerable? According to current brain research and developmental psychology, chemical and emotional vulnerability are the products not of genetic programming but of life experience. Most of the human brain’s growth occurs after birth, and so physical and emotional interactions determine much of our neurological development—which brain areas will develop and how well, which patterns will be encoded, and so on. As such, each brain’s circuitry and chemistry reflect individual life experiences as much as inherited tendencies.

 

Drugs affect the brain by binding to receptors on nerve cells. Opiates work on our built-in receptors for endorphins—the body’s own, natural opiate-like substances that participate in many functions, including regulation of pain and mood. Similarly, tranquilizers of the benzodiazepine class, such as Valium, exert their effect at the brain’s natural benzodiazepine receptors. Other brain chemicals, including dopamine and serotonin, affect such diverse functions as mood, incentive- and reward-seeking behavior, and self-regulation. These, too, bind to specific, specialized receptors on neurons.

But the number of receptors and level of brain chemicals are not set at birth. Infant rats who get less grooming from their mothers end up with fewer natural “benzo” receptors in the part of the brain that controls anxiety. Brains of infant monkeys separated from their mothers for only a few days are measurably deficient in dopamine.

It is the same with human beings. Endorphins are released in the infant’s brain when there are warm, non-stressed, calm interactions with the parenting figures. Endorphins, in turn, promote the growth of receptors and nerve cells, and the discharge of other important brain chemicals. The fewer endorphin-enhancing experiences in infancy and early childhood, the greater the need for external sources. Hence, a greater vulnerability to addictions.

Chronicles of Pain

What sets skid row addicts apart is the extreme degree of stress they had to endure early in life. Almost all women now inhabiting “Canada’s addiction capital”—as the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver has been called—suffered sexual assaults in childhood, as did many of the males. Childhood memories of serial abandonment or severe physical and psychological abuse are common. My patients’ histories are chronicles of pain upon pain.

Carl, a 36-year-old Native man, was banished from one foster home after another, had dishwashing liquid poured down his throat for using foul language at age 5, and was tied to a chair in a dark room to control his hyperactivity. When angry at himself he gouges his foot with a knife as punishment.

But what of families where there was not abuse, but love; where parents did their best to provide their children with a secure, nurturing home? After all, addictions also arise in such families. The unseen factor here is the stress the parents themselves lived under, even if they did not recognize it. That stress could come from relationship problems or from outside circumstances such as economic pressure or political disruption.

The most frequent source of hidden stress is the parents’ own childhood histories that saddle them with emotional baggage they are not conscious of. What we are not aware of in ourselves, we pass on to our children. Stressed, anxious, or depressed parents have great difficulty initiating enough of those emotionally rewarding, endorphin-liberating interactions with their children. Later in life such children may experience a hit of heroin as the “warm, soft hug” my patient described: What they didn’t get enough of before, they can now give themselves through a needle.

Unconditional Love

The U.S.-based Adverse Childhood Experiences studies have demonstrated beyond doubt that childhood stresses, including factors such as abuse, addiction in the family, a rancorous divorce, and so on, provide the template for addictions later in life. It doesn’t follow, of course, that all addicts were abused or that all abused children become addicts, but the correlations are inescapable.

If we look closely, we’ll see that addictive patterns characterize the behaviors of many members of society, including high-functioning and respectable citizens. As a workaholic doctor, I’ve had my own non-substance addictions to feverish professional activity and also to shopping. In my case, I can trace that back to emotional losses I suffered as a ­Jewish infant in Nazi-occupied Hungary during the last years of World War II. My children, in turn, were subjected to the stresses of a family headed by a workaholic father who was physically present but emotionally absent.

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Feeling alone, the sense that there has never been anyone with whom to share their deepest emotions, is universal among drug addicts. That is what Anna had lamented on her wall. No matter how much love a parent has, the child does not experience being wanted unless he or she is made absolutely safe to express exactly how unhappy, or angry, or hate-filled he or she may at times feel. The sense of unconditional love, of being fully accepted even when most ornery, is what no addict ever experienced in childhood­—not because the parents did not have it to give, but simply because they were too stressed, or overworked, or beset by their own demons, or simply did not know how to transmit it to the child.

Addicts rarely make the connection between troubled childhood experiences and self-harming habits. They blame themselves—and that is the greatest wound of all, being cut off from their natural self-compassion. “I was hit a lot,” 40-year-old Wayne told me, “but I asked for it. Then I made some stupid decisions.” And would he hit a child, no matter how much that child “asked for it,” or blame that child for “stupid decisions”? “I don’t want to talk about that crap,”said this tough man, who has worked on oil rigs and construction sites and served 15 years in jail for robbery. He looked away and wiped a tear from his eyes.

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Gabor Maté adapted this article for Beyond Prisons, the Summer 2011 issue of YES! Magazine, from his book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. Gabor is a Vancouver physician