Every person is searching for the meaning of their life. People who don’t find meaning in their life may become anxious, think that their life is worthless, or fall into addiction.
In her masters' thesis, the author researched how ex-addicts experience the meaning of life and the role their family plays in shaping that.
In the theoretical section, we discussed drug addiction. Secondly we presented logotherapy, which says that for humans the meaning of life is very important. Humans main motivation is a desire to find meaning. This indicates that meaning is our primary motivation for living and acting, which encourages individuals to accomplish tasks along with values. If the individual does not have some sense of meaning, he can find himself in a living vacuum, which can lead him to addiction. Here, logotherapy helps an individual to understand, discover and realize his meaning of life.
In the empirical section research is presented in which eight ex-drug addict participants, took part. With the help of semi-structured interviews, we found that the decline of the meaning of life can lead to addiction and that is rediscovered and realized. The purpose was to understand the experience of the meaning of life of ex-addicts, and the goal was to research the particpants’ experience of meaning before and after treatment using a qualitative methodology and a phenomenological approach. In our research, we found that the meaning of life had changed for participants after treatment. The results showed that the meaning changed after having left the community as well as during the stay in the community. Before going to the community, former drug addicts may have said that they didn't even think about the meaning of life, that they didn't have one, or that their meaning was centered on material things. Meaning can change and relationships become important; it can change from material to spiritual, and God plays a factor too. However, ex-drug addicts' experiences helped them find the meaning of life was different. Some said that the community and relationships with people who shared the same goals helped them. Ex-addicts could be persuaded or even forced by the family to go to treatment. We found that ex-addicts’ experienced the community as those who helped them redefine the meaning of life. The meaning of life for them was found or changed depending on their community and the relationships they had with the people in it. We found that they positively experienced a change in the meaning of life after leaving the community and were able to find a meaning different from the one before. It can be because of family, or small moments that they were not aware of it before. We found that ex-addicts can come from different kinds of families. Some of them come from more or less dysfunctional families; they can come from families where the parents are divorced.
Despite all this, the findings of the research cannot be generalized because we used the phenomenological method. However, we did discover that other ex-addicts experienced the same thing as the participants in our research.
My research is only an appendix to this topic and will certainly serve in further research in this field. Lastly, it could be part of a more extensive research.
|
