Tiger Woods is now a patient at Pine Grove, a Behavioural Health and Addiction Services clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
He is on the Gentle Path program, which will help him regain freedom from the disease of sexual addiction. The treatment includes Exercise Fitness Therapy (aerobics, weight training and jogging) and a ROPES course: a combination of an obstacle course and group therapy among the pine trees surrounding Pine Grove. Tiger will also take part in Expressive Therapy, in which the collective mediums of art, movement, music and drama are combined, which should elevate self-esteem through discipline and accomplishment.
This is lovely for Tiger. If art, movement and a ROPES course give him the self-esteem and sense of accomplishment that winning seventeen majors did not, that is marvellous.
The part I find irritating about this story is the way in which meaning is being leached out of language by this psycho-babble. Addict used to mean something.
A hobo on crack whose body-chemistry has changed so much because of the drug that he can't bring himself to eat anymore, that's an addict. That hobo does need some serious medical and behavioural help to get his life back on the rails. A sports superstar sleeping with ten women over eight years? That's not addiction. That would have been unremarkable, if Tiger hadn't successfully cultivated such a wholesome image. Calling Tiger's affairs, or Serena Williams' shopping habit, addictions somehow feels disrespectful to real addicts. It is clearly attractive for PR consultants to present their clients as victims of some terrible disease, but that diminishes the seriousness of the disease itself.
What Tiger probably needs is not a cure from addiction, but penance. The rhythm of sin and atonement, paap and praayashchit in the Indian tradition, are as old as civilization itself. When Arjuna the Pandava broke the rules of his marriage, he sent himself into exile. When Henry II of England needed closure following the murder of Thomas Becket, he performed his penance by kneeling before Becket's tomb in Canterbury cathedral, while every priest or monk in turn struck him with a rod.
Ideas like ritual penance feel odd in our secular times, when it is tempting to medicalize essentially spiritual problems. But it would feel more honest to say that Tiger is doing his penance, rather than try to believe that art, movement and a ROPES course are somehow going to cure him of his libido.
There's a tendency to present the perpetrator as the victim as everything is labelled as an illness that they have no control over. Choice doesn't come into it. That argument rarely works in court though, you need to be properly ill.
ReplyDeleteMaybe he has deep seated problems that manifested themselves in his behaviour, his life is certainly abnornmal and it wouldn't surprise me.
Problem is that with the PR people involved it's impossible to tell what is actually going on anymore.
Good points Mark.
ReplyDeleteI find it especially odd to hear that someone like Tiger was a victim, that his will was not functioning well enough for him to make choices, because he clearly has an incredibly strong will when it comes to his sport.