Free from judgment: How the Living Room works

Free from judgment: How the Living Room works. The western world in the modern era has based itself on its ability to be critical, its societies have developed systems of mass education, health, welfare, science and economic might through critical thought. Applying a microscopic scrutiny over nature has yielded immense benefits to millions but also has pushed us to the brink of environmental and social catastrophe. This process of the Enlightenment has also been applied to examining the nature of the individual, when modern schooling, prisons, asylums and working life was created in the 19th Century, people were subjected to more examination and judgment than at any other time in human history. We still live with the values of the 19th Century, the ideas that shaped Victorian society were put in place because of the needs of the industrial revolution and an age of empire, and they were of course deeply toxic to the human condition. In the 21st Century the individual is criticised in the home, criticised at school, criticised at work, at the doctors and in the media. The logic that powers mass society is that this endless criticism and supervision of us as individuals makes us 'better people'; it may enable us to eventually achieve more in work, as economic agents in the economy but the damage that is done can often only be remedied by some form of self-medication. We live in an age of mass consumption, where we are criticised and judged for not being as beautiful and charismatic as the images we see on the television and so the values that mass culture hands down to us as a society encourage us to judge each other - inevitably we are all found wanting. How can a person live up to all of this? It is impossible to be the superman that the modern world requires us to be, but this salient truth is lost, or deliberately buried, keeping us all in a state of perpetual doubt and fear. Coming to a non-judgmental space like the Living Room, where one can be real and authentic and can stop trying to conform to the dysfunctional dictates of society is invaluable to the recovery of addicts. For many it is like the first gulp of air after decades of a strange type of asphyxia, and the discovery that not only is it OK to be imperfect, flawed and to make mistakes, but it's an aspect of all human beings. When criticisers criticise, it is rarely from a position of intended malice, invariably what they are trying to say is: "I know what is best, if you do what I say, you will improve as a person." What the individual, who often deep down knows what to do to be 'better', hears is: " You are no good, no one could love someone like you." At the Living Room criticism and judgment are lethal, we leave them at the door, few things are as dangerous to a recovery. Once we can see beyond the myths and fantasies that society presents us with and embrace our perfectly imperfect selves our recoveries and self-growth become energised and our own urge to self-judge and self criticise diminishes.