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First person |
Review
24 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| March 2013
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
I was too young to sit in the pub so all I could do was watch
through the window. I’d spy the men drinking and smoking. I
desperately wanted to be in the pub. I wanted to sit and laugh
and chat. I wanted to watch and listen to my dad while he
made them laugh.
Everyone was a heavy drinker in sixties Glasgow. It was how they washed
away the slog of the week – they drank to forget the cold poverty, the falling
jobs, and the grey tenement buildings we all lived in. Except my dad always got
into trouble when he drank; stealing cars and skipping work. When he tried to
stop drinking it was just as bad – he would see snakes, spiders and dead
grandma. He had the DTs, mum would say – I knew what that was before I
kissed a girl. Mum said it was why dad was sicking and sweating and could see
things that weren’t there. She said not to tell anybody. So I didn’t.
I hid from home by playing with friends. Most of the time I got myself into
trouble without knowing how. I just got so angry and jealous. I wanted to fight
people to make them like me or be my friend. I felt a rush when I had fights. The
same rush I got from jumping between the bins, clearing four-foot drops, and
the same rush from the first time I had sex with Theresa, when I was just ten.
The rush didn’t last long – I had to fight more and more to get it.
Not long after my first sips of my dad’s Special Brew, at the age of thirteen,
I had my first proper drink in the pub. I was selling the evening newspaper and
ran into a gang of eighteen-year-olds who took me under their wing and
showed me how to down half a pint of beer and a whiskey. The feeling was like
nothing I had ever experienced before – I was full of confidence and bravado; I
could talk to anybody about anything. I wanted to do this as much as possible.
I saw how the gang acted like they didn’t care what anybody thought – they
were cool and they drank alcohol.
After that it was a spiral; I didn’t do well at school because I was too busy
with drinking, fighting, girls – then someone showed me how to smoke hash. I
had learnt what I needed frommy childhood. I learnt that I never needed to feel
shit about anything if I was high. I didn’t realise I had crossed a line. I had
crossed it with no warning, no worry, no prophecy of some future locked up in
jail or needles sticking out of my arm, dying. But that’s where I was heading,
and there was nothing I could do about it.
I was dead already; I just didn’t know it.
Mark Dempster is author of
Nothing to Declare: Confessions of an Unsuccessful
Drug Smuggler, Dealer and Addict
, available now on Amazon.
Next issue: Mark sets off to London to become a big time drug dealer
FIRST PERSON
NOTHING
TO DECLARE
Over the next six issues,
Mark Dempster
shares
his uncompromising story
of drug dealing and addiction.
Growing up in Glasgow, the
young Mark already starts
to push the boundaries
DVD TRAINING– MOTIVATIONAL
INTERVIEWING STEP BY STEP
WITH CATHY COLE, PSYCHOTHERAPIST
Reviewed by Elaine Rose
This training package comprises four DVDs, each over two hours in length. The
training covers, in helpful detail, the key aspects of motivational interviewing –
core concepts, resolving ambivalence, increasing importance and building
confidence. Each DVD can also be purchased separately.
I rate these training DVDs highly. Cathy Cole, a counsellor and psychotherapist,
takes the trainee through each stage of this style of working using case studies
and live interviews, all set against a theoretical backdrop. The DVDs provide
trainees with an opportunity to understand core concepts of motivational
interviewing and to practise its foundational skills.
The style and delivery is ideally paced, with common sense, normal language,
helpful explanation and demonstration of putting motivational interviewing into
practice in a variety of settings with all age groups. The benefits of training by
DVD is that trainees can pause, replay and practise skills, and the use of live case
studies is invaluable to practitioners of all levels and range of experience.
The first DVD,
Core Concepts of Motivational Interviewing
, shows how this style of
working differs from other approaches, while the second DVD,
Increasing Importance
in Motivational Interviewing
, is central to working with addictions and those who are
reluctant to accept the need to change. The next DVD,
Resolving Ambivalence in
Motivational Interviewing
, explores the key issue of an individual’s ambivalence
towards change and sets out how to help a person develop an action plan and aid the
client to move this on. The fourth DVD,
Building Confidence in Motivational
Interviewing
, demonstrates how best to work with people who come up with
roadblocks to effecting and sustaining change. Many people lack self-esteem and
need particular techniques to boost them along the way, such as identifying past
success and their personal strengths and core values.
In a nutshell, motivational interviewing is a counselling approach that has a very
specific goal, which is to allow the client to explore their own ambivalence in
changing a particular target behaviour. The counsellor’s job is to get the client to talk
about their own particular reasons for change and, more importantly, to help them
talk about how they might strengthen a motivation for change and in what way
making that change will work for them.
There is much person-centred therapy ideology within motivational
interviewing, where the client is the expert in relation to their difficulties. However,
motivational interviewing goes much further and there is far more expected of the
therapist’s understanding of the drivers involved and how they can be harnessed.
The reframing of denial to ‘sustain talk’ is but one example of motivational
interviewing at the coal face.
I recommend these DVDs to all psychotherapists and counsellors working in
the field of addiction or with individuals who have been unable to make sustained
change. The training is high quality and a good investment.
Cost on application to www.psychotherapydvds.com
Two CPD points awarded per DVD purchased, on application.
Elaine Rose is a UKPC registered psychotherapist, elainerose@f2s.com