Back home: somatic education and drug addiction

Abstract

Nowadays, the phenomenon of drug addiction is approached by different angles: the biological, the psychological, the sociological, economical and cultural. Nevertheless, the somatic experience of the drug addicted is poorly considered - “somatic” meaning the point of view of the person’s body. The objective of this study is to understand the somatic experience of the drug addicted (participants), as he-she describes it, in the context of the somatic education classes offered within a rehabilitation center treatment. We also focused on verifying if the somatic experiences that emerged in the classes had any influence on the treatment. Somatic education is a theoretic and practical field that focuses on the relations between human mobility, consciousness and the learning process. The change of paradigm brought forward by post-Positivism and the epistemological revolution announced by Phenomenology entails that the human experience and subjectivity be recognized as valuable source of knowledge. Through the results we obtained, we could classify two main trends of somatic experiences the participants had in class: (1) being more conscious of the relations between sensation, emotion, thought and identity; (2) experiencing self-regulation without the use of drugs. We arrive to the conclusion that the experience the participants had in the somatic education classes helped the process of self-knowledge, which is considered to be fundamental in the rehabilitation from drug addiction. Also, the somatic education classes allowed the participants to satisfy their physical and psychological needs without the use of drugs.