The Contextual Model In The Life Journey Of Addiction By Leonie

drug use, and poverty are very much a part of everyday life. The Contextual model states that along with the organism being active the environment is also active which leads to the interactions with drugs and poverty that we see through this novel which sets the stage for Leonie’s husband being incarcerated for possession of crystal meth and Leonie’s own battles with drug addiction that directly impact her inability to be a competent mother. The environment that Leonie lives in is actively contributing to the outcome of her life. The third assumption of the contextual model is that development can be best described as a spiral path rather than unidirectional. This relates to Leonie’s life journey by certain events in the story that prove that

her life isn’t exactly going in one certain path but rather in a spiral path that can be attributed to the death of her brother, the incarceration of her husband, being a mother, a drug addict, and eventually the death of her mother with all attribute to her life taking on many different directions rather than staying on a unidirectional path.

The last assumption of the contextual model is development is viewed as open ended in this system. This relates to Leonie’s life journey by explaining how her life could have turned out any number of ways based on the types of decisions she made which directly contributed to the way she develops throughout the story.
The competing world view I have chosen to use and reference to this story is the Mytho-poetic world view which has a few competing assumptions to the contextual world view. The first competing world view of the Mytho-poetic assumption is that every event has a cause. This is very true throughout this story epically when analyzing Leonie’s character. Leonie has many events that have causes in this story and it could be argued that her relationship with her husband attributed to her drug use. As the reader finds out in this story Michael is involved in a work-related incident where many of his coworkers are killed in an explosion that took place on an oil rig. Being out of work and traumatized by the event led to drug use which coincidently help fuel Leonie’s drug use which snowballed into a series of

events in the story that are directly related to drug use. Every event in this story can be directly traced back to a cause which helps understand Leonie’s identity throughout the story. The second assumption in the Mytho-poetic word view is that the cause or causes of specific events may not be discoverable by empirical investigation. empirical investigation is a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct or indirect observation which in this case would be reading the story and being able to make assumptions based of off what is reveled about her life throughout the story. In this case, there are many specific events in the story that cannot be discovered therefore their cause and causes remain unknown. For example, the death of Leonie’s brother Given which has major implications on Leonie’s own personal identity isn’t very easily discovered due to the lack of dialogue on what exactly happened in the woods that day. It is noted that Given was killed when a bet that was placed on who could kill a buck faster was placed and lost, however it remains unknown of the exact events that took place leading up to Given being shot and killed. The last assumption in the Mytho-poetic world view is the driving force of human life is to find meaning of all we encounter. An example of an encounters that Leonie faces in the story are instances of Given returning as a spirit haunting Leonie throughout the story. When Given appears as a ghost in the story he doesn’t ever directly talk to Leonie and only ever appears when Leonie is engaging in drug use. The only real meaning of Givens appearances as a ghost in the story and the encounters that he has with Leonie remain unclear, however it’s a driving force in the story and may suggest that his appearances may have something to do with Given trying to steer Leonie down a better path where she treats her children better. Given could also be seen in this word view as a power that is far superior to the human beings that he has encounters with in the story, and although he doesn’t convey information that is necessary to the characters in the story his existence as a ghost is expressed through a major theme in this story which is Leonie’s drug use.
Applying each of these two world views helped me analyze Leonie and understand her character in distinctly different ways by giving me another angle to use when I tried to uncover her identity.

When reading this story, it’s easy to think that she is just some drug addict that puts he addiction over everything else in her life but having world views to use when trying to understand why she might be the way she is helps uncover how Leonie is just a product of the environment that she lives in. Although it doesn’t seem like Leonie changes much by the end of the story the reader is introduced to her daily struggles over the course of the novel and its helps to possibly understand that all her shortcomings and failing as a mother aren’t entirely her fault but a result variables in the environment that could be arguably out her

control.
In conclusion, Leonie goes through a lot of life struggles in this story and it doesn’t ever become entirely known if she ever truly gets a sense of her identity by the end of the story since this story mainly just describes how events in the past can have long lasting negative effects that transfer over into the present day which leaves speculation that Leonie may never find her true identity, however using different world views helps give a different view that may possibly help explain assumptions that are not fully explained over the course of this novel.