Chamblee54

There is a story about “recovery”, An unexpected fix. HT to Andrew Sullivan It is the story of a man who has a residential facility, for people with troubled lives. Not surprisingly, many of these people had substance issues. After a spell of getting started, the proprietor instituted a strict no drugs/alcohol policy for the residents.
The author, Tobias Jones, feels that doing basic chores in community can do addicts more good than sitting in meetings. The therapeutic value of shoveling pig waste is discussed. “It’s not just contact with others that’s important, but also contact with the earth — the origin, after all, of humility. We’re by no means the first to discover the irony that getting muddy is an integral part of staying clean.”
Once, a guitar player named Robert Fripp gave a solo show in Peaches record store. Mr. Fripp had been a star with his band King Crimson, and gave in to the temptations of rockstar life. He entered a facility to recover. Mr. Fripp said that the challenge of this facility was to go out and dig a latrine, with a group of men you did not like. (This show was in 1979, and the exact comment may be slightly different.)
Mr. Jones had some ideas about AA, and recovery. Before pasting in text, it is interesting to note that AA was founded in 1935. It seems to have been around forever, but was founded “only” 77 years ago. The issue of excessive drinking is as old as mankind. For some reason, the 12 step approach seems to have adopted by society as the “official” way to deal with alcoholism.
A corollary of that earthy reality is that, instead of being, in the old-fashioned phrase, ‘opium-eaters’, some of our guests eat a healthy dose of humble pie. And humility, as in 12-step AA orthodoxy, is the first step of the cure. Addicts often have a paradoxical combination of low self-esteem and massive ego, so recognising that they are ‘powerless’ over a substance is a vital reminder that they’re not super beings, just precious, weak humans, along with the rest of us…
AA is, of course, a much-debated institution. Founded in Ohio in 1935, it now has more than 2 million adherents and has been the model for dozens of other ‘Anonymous’ movements. Based on mutuality, it has no organisational structure to speak of, and yet it’s often accused of being cultish and controlling. Inspired by the ‘Oxford Group’ of Christians, it has always maintained that addiction is a ‘spiritual malady’ for which the only cure is conversion. Step three explicitly describes handing over responsibility for your recovery ‘to the care of God’…
Most notably, AA’s notion that alcoholism is a disease — ‘a cunning, baffling and powerful disease’, as the big book puts it — has meant that for decades addiction has been seen in medical terms. This is something addicts yearn to hear, because seeing addiction as a disease allows a degree of self-forgiveness. It suits the medical profession too, because, in the scathing words of the psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple in Junk Medicine (2007), it creates ‘employment opportunities’ for the ‘therapeutic juggernaut’. It’s easier, he writes with sadness, ‘to give people a dose of medicine than to give them a reason for living’…
To my mind the great drawback of medicalising addiction is that it actually obscures AA’s subtler diagnosis of a ‘spiritual malady’. It’s not, perhaps, surprising that in our secular age the spiritual tag is touted less often than the ‘disease’ one. …
Fixing addiction, then, is much more complicated than weaning someone off a needle or bottle. Treatment needs to be holistic, dealing with an individual in the round. It’s not just about repairing a brain, or a vein, but about repairing relationships and the spirit. It sounds very highfalutin’ and, since we’re not professionals, we don’t really know how to do it. But then, nobody does. There’s no textbook about how to repair the spirit…
And therein lies the problem for addiction treatment on a national scale. It’s relatively easy, in a micro-community, to follow Russell Brand’s exhortation for ‘love and compassion’. But it’s almost impossible for huge government agencies to define and offer anything like a holistic environment. The result is, increasingly, a reliance on recovery programmes such as SMART Recovery, a UK charity that has evolved out of a US parent movement founded in 1994. Consciously ‘secular and scientific-based’, SMART was initially rolled out in Scotland and is now being piloted as a treatment throughout the UK. SMART is the cool rationalist’s alternative to the alleged ‘mumbo-jumbo’ of the 12 steps. You’re not powerless, it suggests, and addiction isn’t a disease. The addict is offered masses of bumph: a lot of scientific research and therapeutic ‘tools’ from cognitive behaviour therapy, rational emotive behaviour therapy, and motivational enhancement therapy. There are lessons about ‘urge management’, ‘trigger recognition’ and so on.
In 2010, PG attended a lecture at DeKalb county drug court. His friend Dexter had gotten in trouble, and was going through a program in lieu of going to prison. It was “friend and family night”, and the attendees brought a guest to the lecture. The speaker was insanely boring, with a lot of talk about “triggers” that cause recovering people to relapse.
In an ironic touch, this lecture was the same time as the “teaching moment” at the White House. A Harvard Professor got locked up for mouthing off at a policeman. The two met at the White House, with BHO. Beer was served. In Atlanta, PG attended a lecture on “triggers” that cause drug use. In Washington, a political meeting featured drug use. It is a strange world.
One other irony of using talk of higher powers as a device for recovery is the potential for abuse of those higher powers. PG is scarred by his experience with a Professional Jesus Worshiper who would go crazy over religion. The temper outbursts from this person were every bit as damaging as those from a person influenced by alcohol. And yet, no one ever said “It’s just the Jesus talking”. The Christian religion encourages excessive behavior caused by belief. Often, people substitute one yoke for another.
The fact is, many addicts are damaged people. There is a chicken and egg dynamic to addiction. Is the person a drunk because he is a messed up person, or is he a messed up person because he is a drunk? The damage to the soul is often still there when the symptom of substance abuse is removed. Mr. Jones has some stories about this.
Often, though, it’s more complicated than that. A while back, we had a classic ‘dry drunk’, a man who hadn’t touched a drop for years, but who was full of fury, self-pity, resentment and a not very well-hidden hatred of women. During innocuous chats at evening meals, he would get so wound up he would shake with rage. It was when our six-year-old said she was scared of him that we knew we had to ask him to leave. It’s a not uncommon phenomenon, as anyone who goes to Al-Anon — the support group for relatives and friends of alcoholics — will attest. You’ll sometimes hear people whisper: ‘It was easier when he [or she] was drinking’. The hard work often comes long after someone has stopped, when they’re grieving for the loss of their old friend — the bottle, the needle or whatever — and are having to deal with issues they’ve ignored for years….
Perhaps most strangely of all, we had someone here for four months who was only pretending to have an addiction. We took him at his word that he had battled alcohol, that he was struggling for, and proud of, his fragile sobriety. But we then discovered certain clues that he was probably just your normal, social drinker who merely longed for the attention and solicitude that he thought were reserved only for recovering addicts.
In the comments to the original post, the phrase “attack on AA” was used. One other commenter added: “Certainly not an attack on AA, yet, I feel that the author doesn’t fully understand 12 step principles. I have doubts that the author has ever attended an AA meeting nor ever had an addiction..”
This was written like David Foster Wallace. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.