My name is Cub Lea, and I currently live in Western Canada. That's pretty much the only personal information I am willing to provide at this time, and I've offered a more complete explanation for that decision at the bottom of this page.

More important, I believe, than the story of the person behind the site, is the story behind its existence, a story which explains why, despite its appearance and construction, it isn't intended as a charitable or self-sacrificing venture. This site exists first and foremost for my benefit, since it may be my best possible means of gaining access to the kinds of treatments which are described elsewhere on this site from individuals at the cutting edge of this field.

Beginning in ignorance

In the late 1970s, the general public was just getting their first real exposure to the workings of the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The idea that addiction could be cured in any form was considered either the crackpot claim of snake-oil salesmen or the deluded fantasy of addicts who lacked the courage for recovery.

"In the late 1970s, the idea that addiction could be cured was considered either the crackpot claim of snake-oil salesmen or the deluded fantasy of addicts who lacked the courage for recovery."

It seemed unlikely to me at that time, when I first began to seriously investigate the phenomena of addiction and compulsion, that I'd ever live to see a significant change in that perspective. At best, I thought we might discover a better pill to ease the symptoms, or learn some nifty psychotherapy technique to block the cravings. Nothing I had witnessed, experienced or read had ever given me reason to believe that a better understanding of the condition was possible except through sheer blind luck.

I've ploughed a lot of fields in the intervening years. I've seen countless philosophies, miracles and major breakthroughs come and go. I've seen the best minds in the field fail again and again to bring any sense of finality to the mystery of addiction.

Over and over I've seen hopes raised and shattered. And today, a quarter-century later, curability for addiction is still looked upon by most as a sideshow hoax or a self-deluded fantasy.

Our perspectives haven't changed much in that time, but mine most certainly have.

Tracking the wild hunch

From almost the very beginning of my search for answers, I was haunted by the suspicion that there was far more to the picture than met the eyes of those who seemed to know more than I did. Over and over I was told that these suspicions were simply part of my own denial syndrome, and that I'd eventually have to set them aside if I was to have any hope of recovery.

But I couldn't do that. As badly as I wanted recovery, I couldn't let go of these suspicions. And as long as those suspicions persisted, so did my hopes that something better was possible than the grinding ordeal which still passes today as the only true road to recovery.

In 1985, I made my first serious attempt to try to solve this riddle on my own, using little more than my own rational mind and my own observations and experiences. If the grinding ordeal was the only way out, I wanted to convince myself of it. And if it wasn't, then I wanted to know what was behind that nagging voice that kept insisting that there was an alternative.

"Documenting and publicizing this model is a job that could only fall upon a martyr or someone with nothing left to lose."

Not long afterward, I arrived at a conclusion which put me completely at odds with mainstream thinking on addiction, and actually prompted one AA veteran to suggest that if I couldn't somehow find God, I was not long for this Earth.

It wasn't much of an answer, but it did suggest that more was going on here than the neurologists and addiction specialists of the day were letting on. As I examined the way addicts behaved and reacted, I became certain that addiction was somehow tied up with the human survival instinct. It was the only possible explanation for why addicts react and behave the way they do. I couldn't extend this conclusion any further...I couldn't trace it back toward anything resembling a soul without the logic breaking. And I couldn't extend it forward to anything less primal or primitive, either.

But that's where it stopped. If there was a solution to the mystery, I didn't see how we'd ever find it. I could just barely imagine that some day we'd be able to measure and analyze the survival instinct, and possibly figure out how it was linked to addiction. I had no clue that in less than twenty years, we would not only know what that link was, we would be able to describe how to measure it, and that I would very likely live to see it actually done.

Closing the book on hope

Three years later, my life took a hard turn. I had what addicts in recovery call a spiritual experience, what Christians call an encounter with the Holy Spirit, what some psychiatrists even today would label a psychotic break from reality. It was the first of several such experiences, and it - they - transformed my life, but not for the better.

"It wasn't self-will or denial which set me up for misfortune. It was ignorance."

When the smoke cleared, and it finally became clear to me that I wasn't getting any of the benefits promised from this experience. I had seen the promised land and been unceremoniously kicked back down into the valley...and kicked for good measure once I stopped falling.

It wasn't long before I had no choice but to accept that twelve-step recovery wasn't going to work for me, although I didn't quite know why at the time. Part of me wondered if I was one of those "men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves" that AA's so often refer to(1). But a more constant part of me realized that far from being redeemed by my experience, I had been scarred by it.

I soon learned that I was far from the first to have met this misfortune. Those experiences ripped from me my last shreds of hope for relief in twelve-step recovery. Something more was going on, and I'd been bitten badly by my inability to understand what it was. It wasn't my self-will or denial which had set me up for this. It was my ignorance.

And I realized that if I didn't figure out what it was that I didn't know, I would keep getting bitten unless I gave up on recovery altogether. For the first time since my teens, living with addiction was looking like a far better option than life without it, and that scared the hell out of me.

The first serious clues

In 1990, three years before the first dial-up Internet services, I spotted an odd little e-book on a computer bulletin board system by a fellow named Doyle Henderson. In it, he described some experiments he'd been conducting based on non-hypnotic regression, and describing truly remarkable results achieved against emotional and behavioral disorders which included, naturally enough, addiction.

This was the first real clue I'd found that this mystery had a solution...and not just a casual notion, but a cohesive answer which was beyond our understanding of addiction at the time, beyond anything I'd imagined just a few years earlier.

This book that convinced me beyond any doubt that not only was addiction understandable...it was curable. Henderson claimed that he'd already closed the book on the mystery, but I knew even then that there was still more to it.

With all respect for what he had achieved, Henderson didn't have the experience or background that I had. I had also been exploring new information relating to the how's and why's of emotional and behavioral disorders, and I knew that his solution, ground-breaking though it was for its time, still left many of the most most baffling questions about addiction unanswered.

For the next several years, this was all I had...Henderson's theoretical framework, clues to its flaws, and my own concerns about the questions it didn't address.

Paydirt

Starting in 1991, first on the CompuServe, GEnie and America OnLine services and later, on a rapidly-developing service called the World Wide Web, I began spending an evening or two every few months hunting down others on the same trail to see what new bits and pieces they might have found to fill the holes in this still-incomplete jigsaw puzzle.

For years I found almost nothing of interest. But in 1998, just as professional web pages were becoming as mandatory as business cards, I hit paydirt. It took several weeks, and a lot of creative keywording, but I finally found the remaining pieces of the puzzle...all of them.

"In 1998, I finally hit paydirt. It took several weeks, but I finally found the remaining pieces of the puzzle."

They were scattered across perhaps half a dozen websites, all operating on the same fundamental principles, each using different evidence to back up their claims and suggesting different implications and possibilities. Between them, these individuals and organizations had solved the mystery. But curiously, not one of these sites was specifically devoted to the subject of addiction.

Most satisfying of all, their conclusions indirectly confirmed my hunch about the survival instinct. Fairly recent research into shock as a psychological and biological phenomenon showed how an experience of life-or-death crisis could produce precisely the kinds of psychological and neurological effects which we see in addiction.

Most humbling of all, I discovered a pattern in these descriptions which suggested that Henderson had actually been right about several claims which I had never fully trusted, and one of them blew the lid off of the entire mystery.

Henderson had once told me in a private conversation that he never treated or experimented on an addict whose addiction couldn't be traced at least to early infancy. This was information which, to my knowledge, he never published. But if he hadn't told me this, I may never have paid attention to the link others had spotted between events in infancy and adult addiction and compulsion.

I soon realized that Henderson was wise to have been cautious with this information, because not all diagnoses of addiction could be directly tied to infant shock. Still, there was no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of cases had this crucial connection, and that shock seemed to underly addictions of all types.

Most troubling of all, every one of these groups and organizations had at least a whiff of cultism or snake-oil about them. In one case, it was a veritable stench. The information they presented always seemed to be tainted somehow. If they hadn't overreached their grasp in some way by downplaying some important phenomenon or minimizing the importance of a particular aspect of addiction, then they either overemphasized the importance of their personal findings, oversold the ease with which their models could be applied, or jargonized their writing to a degree that would turn off any trained professional. It's difficult to imagine how a classically-trained researcher could have taken any of this material seriously, given the credibility issues with these sites.

But setting aside these credibility issues, I knew I had the answer. And while I've had moments of doubt in the intervening years, not a season passes now when I don't find an ever-more-credible author presenting the exact same information in a different context, further validating the observations of this bizarre handful of rag-tag crackpots.

And as I keep discovering more supporting evidence, empirical and anecdotal, and see the same pieces of the same puzzle on more and more sites, I feel all but certain that many more will arrive at the same "accidental" conclusions that I reached in late 1998, and that there may already be competing models at this very moment which are virtually identical to the model presented on this site.

This is what the Internet makes possible.

Separating the message from the messengers

While I never went to the trouble to verify it, I would guess that if they were challenged, all but one of these six individuals and organizations would offer fundamentally the same explanation of addiction...how it happens, how it works...and three sites even offered very similar clues as to how it could be cured.

Yet to my knowledge, not one of them has ever made any claim of having a verifiable framework for complete cure, or has published a model specifically focused on addiction. Regular searches for claims of curability have turned up nothing of note since I made this discovery, not from these individuals, not from those who published later, not from anyone.

Two of these six sites actually went out of their way to assure visitors that they didn't promise cure, while a third boldly claimed that cure was so easy to achieve that all you needed was a few free evenings and a book or piece of software.

"I emerged from this adventure with a mixture of excitement and dread. I had found the answer. But what to do with it?"

Yet another claimed that addiction was only one of a host of items on the menu that might be curable using the techniques they derived from these principles, all using essentially the same methods.

I even asked a couple of friends to take a peek at the same sites to get their impressions of what was offered. I probably shouldn't have been surprised that none of them saw the pattern between them that I saw until I pointed it out, but to me it was so obvious that I couldn't understand how they missed it. All but one saw the same connections I had seen once they were pointed out.

In retrospect, perhaps the most fortunate aspect of this entire episode for me was finding all of these sites in such a short period of time. But if this was a stroke of pure luck, it was luck I still feel I was owed.

These rapid-fire discoveries gave me an opportunity to make a rational comparison of claims and findings and see flaws and overextensions of logic that I probably would have missed if I had discovered these sites over a period of months or years.

If the process had taken longer, I might well have fallen prey to the same misconceptions, been trapped into the same limited perspectives, or seduced by the same cult attractions, and been bitten once again by my own ignorance.

Instead, I emerged from this adventure with what I now realize is an appropriate, and perhaps even necessary, mixture of excitement and dread at what I discovered. I found the answer I had been looking for. But what to do with it?

A final horrific realization

My first thought was to track down someone - anyone - who might be applying these principles in private or clinical practice and see if it was possible to arrange for treatment.

At least four times previously in my own search for relief, I'd paid a high price for what I and my caregivers didn't know about addiction. But in 1999, for perhaps the first time in my life, I felt as though I couldn't be taken by surprise any more. I felt sure that I finally knew both the rules and the risks. But I had one last unpleasant surprise coming.

"Ignorance had bitten me once again. The solution I'd found could and would work...but not for me."

I soon discovered that many of the core principles underlying this model were already being practiced in not one field but two...no wait, three...five? Eight? Fifty?

Armed with the appropriate keywords I soon discovered that a whole host of people were successfully applying a chronic-condition model based on shock to conditions of this type, and in a highly diverse collection of specialties, too.

The field turned out to be far more open than I had ever dreamed, and it quickly dawned on me that a remarkable phenomenon was at work here. I resolved to seek out the best possible help I could find, and when I began talking to these individuals by phone or e-mail, I quickly learned that what I had only discovered recently was relatively old hat to them.

But it was also new science. As I chatted with these people, I discovered that while they were as certain of their knowledge as I was of mine, they seemed to have either the fear of a miner who's just found gold amid a crowd of dry claims, or the arrogance of a miner who has struck so much gold that they see themselves as uncrowned royalty.

This was also new gold, and as such, most of it was still locked in unrefined ore. And I quickly discovered that there wasn't much refinement to the techniques they were applying. Most of those with whom I discussed this material seemed capable of the work they were doing, but not quite up to the task of dealing with a four-time loser in treatment, even armed with this new knowledge.

It took a full year of searching, but I did eventually find four highly knowledgeable and skilled practitioners whom I thought I could work with.

I lasted two sessions with one, one session with another, didn't get past the initial consultation with the third, and ran into a series of strange communications problems with the fourth. This time, I actually did manage to get out without scars, but not with results. And I was not at all happy about what this implied.

The Sonora model is based on principles which extend far beyond what the model itself covers. One of those principles is validity of the human developmental structure as we currently understand it. This structure, best known in the form of Maslow's hierarchy, was originally constructed to cover the evolution of personality from birth to old age. More recently, perinatal psychology has begun to look even beyond the consciousness of infancy and peer into the experience and significance of fetal life.

Shocks which occur in fetal development can also result in addictive/compulsive symptoms. But the current methods and techniques which address infant shock aren't quite sophisticated enough to reliably address the effects of shocks to the fetus. Some truly remarkable successes have been recorded, but this field is among the most primitive and experimental in existence today.

Ignorance had bitten me once again. I have a relatively major birth defect which has neurological as well as physical manifestations. Even my family doctor would probably admit that this defect could be traced to a form of fetal shock, probably one of several during my gestation.

If any of those shocks had played a significant role in my addictive/compulsive problems, then I was confronting a hard, thick wall. The solution I'd found could and would work...but not for me.

Technical and clinical understanding are still maturing slowly in relation to infant shock. Prenatal shock - prenatal psychology and biology - is a whole 'nother ballgame, and it appeared that my chance to take advantage of these discoveries would have to wait until the current game is over.

"Why me?"

When people ask me why nobody has taken on the task of properly documenting and publicizing this information, I have an easy answer: either they don't want to risk the exposure, or they don't have the personal desire or interest.

"Why do I do this? Because I have to. I have to believe that there are better options than walking away or waiting patiently for progress."

When people ask my why I took it on, the answer is a bit more painful to give.

If my hope lies not with the cutting-edge research and technique I first discovered in 1999, but instead in the next generation of treatments and the next level of understanding of human experience, then I have very few options. I can sit and wait for the science to emerge, I can walk away and try to endure life as painlessly as possible, or I can take a proactive approach to the problem.

Why do I do this? Because I have to...because it now appears that my chance for real relief won't come until the books begin to close on infant shock and the real work begins at the prenatal level. I have the ability to describe this material in ways that people can understand, and I have the time to do it. And a deliberate and thoughtful effort toward raising awareness of these discoveries could very well shorten the wait.

Nature doesn't encourage masochists and martyrs, and I have no desire to be a martyr. I could rhyme off fifty things I'd far rather do with my life, but none of them are realistic choices in my current condition. And I have to believe that there are better options than simply walking away or sitting and waiting patiently for progress.

My hope appears to lie in connecting with those who have already moved beyond this model and who are already exploring addiction from a higher level of sophistication. It appears to lie in somehow connecting with those individuals and possibly participating in treatments or trials which are as obscure and invisible today as the Sonora model was to me ten years ago.

Necessity, as some say, is the mother of invention.

As others say, usually under their breath, it's just a mother.

I learned in 2003 that offering a fair and relevant personal disclosure beyond what I've offered above isn't possible at this time without sabotaging the purpose of this website.

The last incarnation of this site, which was pulled from public view after just ten weeks in 2003, included what I felt was a fair and relevant self-description, and in retrospect, that was a mistake.

For some visitors, a quick look at my bio was all they needed to dismiss the model as the deluded ravings of a sick individual. Others felt that my credentials and motives were downright insulting to such a vitally important message. A few even suggested that I did not appear to be someone fit to say anything on a matter of this importance.

In a world in which the appearance of the messenger often matters more than the message itself, I have to accept that the semi-heroic, half-told tale above probably serves the advancement of the message - and of my own cause - better than the unvarnished truth. The less significant detail I offer about my own situation, the more effective I can probably be in conveying and promoting the message, and ultimately, promoting my own cause.

1. This line is quoted from the book Alcoholics Anonymous (Copyright 1939, 1955, 1976 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.), usually referred to by AA's as the "Big Book". The entire paragraph reads as follows:

"Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest."

This is the opening paragraph of the fifth chapter, entitled How It Works. The entire passage, some six paragraphs in length, falls immediately before the book's only listing of the now-famous twelve steps to recovery. These paragraphs, and the twelve steps that follow, are referred to as the "preamble", and are read aloud by an individual or the entire group as part of the traditional ritual which begins almost every AA meeting.

This description of the "unfortunates" is commonly used in AA recovery, and seems intended to describe what we now refer to as sociopathic personalities. This description has never been updated, is still repeated aloud at virtually every meeting, and perhaps as a consequence it has been widely misinterpreted as having very different meanings. It is often quoted or paraphrased among AA's as an explanation for chronic relapse, preference for non-spiritually-oriented recovery, and perhaps most cruelly, the inability to accept "spiritual" solutions as the only valid long-term solutions for addiction. >>Back>>

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