Why experience of addiction doesn’t make you an expert

Thinking about expertise and experience, it’s easy to assume they go hand in hand. But let’s have a real look what’s going on.

While experience is undeniably personal and significant, it doesn’t automatically make us an expert in a broader field, especially when considering the complex nature of subjective realities, and awareness.

When we experience something, that experience is ours alone – filtered through our personal lens of beliefs, background, and emotion. It’s subjective, unique, and deeply personal. This perspective is what makes each person’s journey through life so rich and varied, but it’s also why our personal experience doesn’t universally translate into expertise.

Claiming expertise based on our own experiences is like viewing the world through a keyhole and assuming we’ve seen the whole room. It disregards the vast spectrum of how others perceive and interact with a similar experience.

Each person’s understanding is shaped by an intricate blend of personal history, culture, and individual psychology, creating as many versions of “truth” as there are people ie 8 Billion+

True expertise requires acknowledging and deeply understanding consciousness and multifaceted subjective realities. It involves continuously seeking out and understanding diverse experiences and perspectives, not just our own, if you want to be an expert in something, and you want to help others, make not knowing anything your top priority.

It’s about recognising that while our personal journey is profoundly informative, it’s just one narrative in a world full of them.

In essence, our experiences make us experts on our own lives, and no one else’s. In fact while you think your own experience is like anyone else’s as a source to help them, you will take them further away from healing. Silence can do a better job.

Our role is simply to help someone uncover their own inner guide, and to be present and witness their transformation, via their own direct experience. Anything else is dogma, an indoctrination to a new belief system, and as humans we’re susceptible to falling in love with the next new shiny thing, including spiritual belief systems, concepts and theories of recovery.

As always, I ask you don’t take my word for it, the information shared here is only valuable while you question yourself with it as a guide, my job is asking you to consider, is it true? could there be another way? could there? … maybe?