Kermit Interview

Kermit’s Background

Kermit worked at Windhorse, and upscale live-in recovery centered for youth with mental disorders and addictions. Windhorse outsourced their addiction treatment to Narcotics Anonymous, and this move away from mindfulness based recovery strategies was one of the driving factors for Kermit to leave the program. Kermit’s concerns with NA are similar to his concerns with Dove. Both the device and the program are conceptually moving the user’s control of addiction outside of themselves. If NA suggests that there is a higher power, then the user does not have ownership of that addiction, similarly, if a user used a device to support control over the addiction, then the user is giving control to the device.

Mindfulness Based Recovery

Kermit told an interesting story. He was working with a client who said that they were gone. This language comes from NA, meaning if someone uses, they aren’t there anymore, they are /gone/. Kermit’s response was to ask the client who was speaking. The client was speaking, so by definition, the client wasn’t /gone/ but /here/.

Kermit believes success is based around power over addiction and connection with the self. By understanding the contexts of us, and by being aware of the bodily changes around those contexts, users can willingly move themselves away from urges and towards more positive behaviors.

Follow-Ups

Kermit mentioned Jon Kabat-Zinn as one of the founding thinkers of this practice, with UMass continuing to use mindfulness practices to treat many physical conditions. He recommended looking into the University of Washington Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention Center.

He was concerned about a /slippery slope/ phenomenon with the device acting as a /seatbelt/ of sorts, but recent research has suggested that this phenomenon is a theoretical risk that has little basis in reality.

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