Arising somewhere between 100 million and 150 million years ago, monotremes demonstrate the beginnings of the departure from a reptilian way of life.… - Thomas Lewis

Will lectures on the evils of chemical dependency deter teenagers from a life of substance dependence? Don’t believe it. While their end is worthy, such talk targets the neocortical brain, not the limbic one. Pain is too potent a motivator for facts to undo. Pretending otherwise is a threadbare illusion convincing only to those who already feel basically well.

Emotions are humanity's motivator and its omnipresent guide. (36)

"A therapist who fears dependence will tell his patient, sometimes openly, that the urge to rely is pathologic. In doing so he denigrates a cardinal tool. A parent who rejects a child's desire to depend raises a fragile person. Those children, grown to adulthood, are frequently among those who come for help. Shall we tell them again that no one can find an art to lean on, that each alone must work to ease a private sorrow? Then we shall repeat and experiment already conducted; many know its result only too well. If patient and therapist are to proceed together down a curative path, they must allow limbic regulation and its companion moon, dependence, to make the revolutionary magic. Many therapists believe that reliance fosters a detrimental dependency. Instead, they say, patients should be directed to "do it for themselves" - as if they possess everything but the wit to throw that switch and get on with their lives. But people do not learn emotional modulation as they do geometry or the names of state capitals. They absorb the skill from living in the presence of an adept external modulator, and they learn it implicitly. Knowledge leaps the gap from one mind to the other, but the learner does not experience the transferred information as an explicit strategy. Instead, a spontaneous capacity germinates and becomes a natural part of the self, like knowing how to ride a bike or tie one's shoes. The effortful beginnings fade and disappear from memory. (171)"