Against Recovery
Recovery still carries a lot of cultural weight, but to me it's a ghost river, pouring dust.
This is a follow-up to the series on “recovery” that and I did earlier this year. The original piece that I published as part of that series is Learning to Ride. I’ve been thinking ever since then about this recovery thing, and I have some more to say. I imagine this will piss some people off, or at least that I’ll get some messages telling me that I’ve gotten Recovery—or AA—wrong, and I’m sure that I have, in some ways. On the other hand, there are some real issues that deserve discussion, and arguments that recovery is whatever you make of it, or that ‘you can do AA however you want to’ don’t hold much water with me. A thing is a thing, it can’t be everything, and there are other things—that is, other ways to change one’s relationship with an addictive substance or behavior.
I’m against Recovery.
I’ve changed my own relationship with quite a number of things over the years—tobacco, porn, alcohol, sex, shopping, and ‘investing,’ just to name a few—and the benefits continue to accrue, so I’m all for changing one’s relationship with whatever substances or behaviors one might be involved with in an addictive way—but I still have a chip on my shoulder about this recovery thing.
I’m all for escaping, transcending, or at least understanding and modulating addictive patterns, and for recovering from the damage that these patterns so often do to us.
I’m all for self-help, and for finding ways to be part of community vs alone in the world.
I’m all for recovering more of oneself, and for having recovered from addiction—but still, I’m against “Recovery” as branded by the addiction-and-recovery industry as an ongoing “process of overcoming addiction,” and more specifically the process of “becoming abstinent”—but also a much broader process that one remains engaged in forever afterwards.
I’m against it because it’s mostly the product of an obsolete conception of how addiction works.
I’m against it because Recovery never helped me, and nor did those obsolete ideas about addiction.
I’m against it because recovery as it tends to be understood is a confusing and impractical contradiction—something that on one hand is supposed to be something that can be accomplished, but that which is also somehow a never-ending, lifelong process.
I’m against it because Recovery sells the same line about addiction that the AA community so often does, which is that it’s so hard to change one’s addictive patterns that it requires a lifelong project, and that it “sucks” to give up the booze, the drugs, the gambling, the porn, the shopping, the NFTs, the Instagram, the whatever.
This forever-ongoing sort of recovery sounds like bullshit to me. The life-long process is life, my friends.
Most of all though, I’m against recovery because of how it keeps the focus squarely on the individual. This points to another contradiction that doesn’t get talked about much, but which I think is deserving of far more attention: How can addiction somehow be both something caused by factors outside of our individual control but also entirely our individual responsibility to cure ourselves of?
I will argue here that a significant share of the causes of most addictions (and depressions, and anxieties, for that matter) don’t lie within the individual psyche, but in the collective context that we all live in. This doesn’t change the fact that individuals who spend a lot of time and energy in addictive loops are likely to be well served by doing their damndest to change those patterns, but it does also mean that continually pushing the idea that addiction is primarily a problem of the individual is perpetuating a pernicious lie.
Omitting the role of culture and society—and of our biological and evolutionary history—interferes with actual recovery because if we do so, we spend all of our time trying to fix our selves when much of the problem is outside the self. This lie also shields us all from the fact that we are all contributing to everyone’s individual addictions by our complicity in the cultural factors that drive addictive behavior, and by our willful ignorance of what are actually, in most cases, the most powerful causal factors of addiction.
To be clear, the Recovery that I’m talking about here is in the sense of in being “in recovery,” which is of course much more specific than the broader sense of having recovered from addiction. Capital-R Recovery is a product of what has become something like an addiction-industrial complex, itself an outgrowth of the cultural machine that creates many of the preconditions for addiction in the first (or second) place. The twelve-step community and the industry that surrounds it continue to be the dominant paradigm in our cultural consciousness for transcending addiction, despite the fact that twelve-step programs and “recovery” are only really relevant to those people who a) choose any formal method of response to addiction, b) choose (or are forced into) that model of response to addiction, and c) acutally find the twelve-step model effective for them. Many do not.
Since most people who experience addiction recover without any formal methodology of response, and the vast majority find that twelve-step either doesn’t appeal or simply doesn’t work for them, what is still the most commonly-heard line of thinking about moving on from addiction therefore doesn’t serve the majority of people that deal with addictive behaviors. This should be no surprise, and I’m not saying that it’s due to any malice or conspiracy; it’s just how culture works.
Words change and wear out as they get rolled in the river of years, as do systems of thinking. Often what we understand a thing to be or a word to mean in the present is simply the imprint, the skeleton, the left-behind fossil, or the second, third, or seventeenth generation cousin down the line of what was living there once long ago, and yet those fossil ideas often remain in the culture, still carrying the same name and often an even greater inertia accumulated over the years.
Ideas often persist long after becoming obsolete, and many things can help us along in some ways while being unhelpful or damaging in others. The fossil of capital-R Recovery still carries a lot of cultural weight, but to me, it's a ghost river pouring dust.
By now it’s become clear that addiction is something that most of us experience at some point in life to some extent, and we’ve moved from the early idea that it’s simply an individual character flaw to the also-obsolete ‘disease model’—and then to the contemporary multi-factor model of addiction as a syndrome caused by a combination of biological, environmental, genetic, and social factors, including personal trauma—but the old language around recovery lives on, and continues to perpetuate obsolete ideas about addiction.
The conventional line about addiction not only never helped me, it got in the way of me making changes much earlier on in life. The idea that you only really have “it” if things get really, really bad is both false and leads people like myself to believe that they are don’t have an ‘addictive personality’ just because they haven’t copped a DUI or been fired from a job for being drunk. Eventually I managed to figure out that all the reason I needed to change my relationship with alcohol was the fact that I was sick and tired of the relationship with it that I did have. Even then, I didn’t really have the clarity to see how many addictive patterns there are running around in my head until quite some time after I stopped drinking alcohol.
Several other pieces of nonsense masquerading as wisdom often put by adherents of the Recovery model are that it’s nearly impossible to quit or to change, that moderation is impossible, that use of any ‘substances’ is a failure, and that if you do manage to get sober, be prepared for how much it’s going to suck.
None of these are universally or even that deeply true.
Just as much as humans are built for learning—and therefore for the hijacking of the learning process that is addiction—we are built for adaptability and for change. For most people, change—even radical change—is easy, or at least an interesting, engaging challenge—and that is the story we should be telling, as opposed to trying to convince each other that it’s all so damn difficult. We learn habits throughout life by changing, and then at some other point we unlearn those same habits and replace them with others. What was once normal (how we ‘are’) becomes what’s no longer normal (how we were), and what was once just an imagined—or unimaginable—future becomes the new normal.
The fact is that—as Robert Sapolsky pointed out to author Michael Easter in Scarcity Brain, “most people don't get addicted to addictive substances, or if they do, eventually stop using.” As documented by many others as well, most people manage to move past individual substance or behavioral addictions, and most do so on their own, without any treatment. Many people do moderate or—like myself—completely upend their pattern of, for example, drinking alcohol from drinking 99% of the time to not drinking 99% of the time, and many change their relationship with one addictive pattern or substance while remaining entangled in one or more other addictions, which doesn’t represent so much a failure on the part of the individual to cut more things out of their life but the pervasive nature of addiction itself.
It’s also true that, contrary to what we most often hear, getting sober often happens as a result of other changes that have already resulted in greater wellness which in turn prompts a broader re-examination of other patterns. Contrary to the mythology of Recovery, quitting isn’t necessarily the first thing one has to do. If you don’t like how you feel or how you’re living, just start changing things that you don’t actually or no longer enjoy. Change whatever you can change. The first change you make might not have anything directly to do with addiction at all. Any change for the better will tend to pull your entire way of being in a more positive direction.
However, we tend to hear and retell only the worst of addiction stories, both in widely celebrated quit-lit memoir such as Mary Karr’s Lit, Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, David Carr’s The Night of the Gun as well as in context of treatment. These books are all beautiful, inspiring, and helpful in their own way but this skewed perception—what’s known as selection bias—that has us constantly retelling ourselves the wildest tales of the hardest cases encourages us to think that changing our relationship with alcohol—or any other addictive behavior—is far more difficult than it turns out to be for a lot of folks, and also that AA and recovery appear to be more effecive than they are “because the people who stick with it are different from those who drop out.” It may be less exciting to tell stories of spontaneous sobriety, ordinary moderation, or just moving on to a more balanced life, but those stories would have helped me far more than the hyperdrama of flame-out, ’rock bottom,’ and grinding out recovery like jail time.
I’ve experienced addiction myself, and so I know first-hand how it can be a terrible experience, and that it is indeed very difficult for some people to change. I’m not trying to diminish the power of addiction to supercharge habit-forming and attachment, but I am here as a willing heretic to the addiction orthodoxy.
Basically, I’m unwilling to put my problem on a pedestal. Addiction is even more pervasive than we’ve thought, but this is not because it’s more powerful than we thought it was. It’s because we’re all wired to form habits, and that wiring can be all-too-easily hijacked by modern substances and behaviors that we didn’t evolve to handle in the quantities and concentrations that now abound. It’s not that there’s something wrong with folks who develop addictive patterns so much as they are responding in a very understandable way to the environment around them. The way that we’re living is triggering the addictive pattern—so why don’t we take a harder look at that?
Just like addiction itself, we're making way, way too big of a deal about this recovery thing. Making such a fuss about how difficult it’s supposed to be to stop drinking—and how the process never really ends—just smells like bullshit to me, and distracts us from the deeper question of what’s missing from the rest of our lives, which has much more to do with why so many of us we end up addicted in the first place. A lack of enough of something real going on in life creates the desire to feel something, and to soothe the pain of nothing actually happening. For most people stopping drinking turns out to be mostly a non-event. Not necessarily trivial (although it is for many), and interesting as a process of change, but certainly not interesting enough to become an entire worldview around which to center one’s life—unless there isn’t all that much going on in there in the first place.
The cult-like obsession with quitting often begins to resemble the addiction that it serves to transcend. I mean, nonaddiction is certainly better than addiction, but if nonaddiction requires unstinting attachment to Recovery, then the circle does close rather quickly. What's really needed is not more recovery, it's less addiction—recovered and moved on to more of a life worth actually living and staying awake for, instead of something that drives us to escape.
I want to put my energy and attention into my wellness, not on secondary symptoms of unwellness—symptoms that really only occur due to that more fundamental dis-ease. Centering our attention on “recovery” from addiction is at least two steps removed from the root causes. Of course, some will argue that that’s what “recovery” really means—that it’s essentially a system for living, not so much about addiction per se but a philosophy for overall well-being. Fair enough, I’m sure it does amount to that for many people, and if that’s how you’ve arrived at a philosophy that works for you, OK—but then let’s just call it life—or something else more positive, generative and forward-looking, as opposed to framing it with a constant glance at the dark horseman of the past.
I for one don’t want or intend to wear a permanent bandage of recovery over a wound of addiction that is itself a deeper wound of emptiness. I want to peel back the layers and get to the emptiness itself, examine it honestly—and then fill that hole, and move on. A continued focus on recovery, abstinence, and addiction may well get in the way of deeper change—or, if deeper change does occur, it’s all put in the context of recovery. It feels like claiming the sun revolves around the Earth, just because that what it looks like from where we’re standing. The view from the inside always seems real at the time—but once the view changes, we have to update what we think of as real and important.
My friend Michael Mohr wrote in his piece on Sobriety and Wokeism that “Twelve-step recovery helps you grow up and become less narcissistic and self-involved. You begin to mature and sort your life out and help others and genuinely connect to reality. Victimhood is not supported in AA; taking responsibility very much is.” I do agree with him that an outlook on life that is ‘sober’ in the sense of clear-headed might be an antidote to narcissistic victimhood, just as it is to addiction, but I’d also say that as opposed to AA, it’s that undoing addictive attachments helps you grow up, and that capital-R recovery feels to me to promote just the sort of victimhood that he’s railing against.
Futhermore, sobriety and recovery can very much resemble a sort of identity politics: if one identifies as “sober” or “in recovery,” those identifiers are the passwords to a community of like-minded fellows, but your membership is predicated on your continued identification with and your adherence to the dogma of the community. Perhaps that’s why recovery never really ends; if it ended, then you could no longer be part of the community, which is really what makes the most difference for most people anyhow.
Contrary to Mohr’s point that they’re somehow “diametrically opposed to each other,” I’d argue that orthodox sobriety and “Wokeism” have plenty to do with each other. Both form a trap by espousing an orthodoxy that one cannot deviate from, a dogmatic and victim-centered framing that overweights and over-identifies with trauma and encourages a centering of the past as opposed to the present or the future.
In contrast, I like how Ram Dass puts it in Polishing the Mirror: “I have pains throughout my body. I list them for my doctors. But I don’t identify with them”—and neither do I. It’s the wrong frame. I dig that transcending addiction often requires a sort of spiritual awakening, but there’s a mistake made when we identify with addiction, depression, trauma, or recovery so much that that turns into a religious experience. It’s the change, the transformation, the evolution, the un-attachment that feels more real and important to me, and that is what I want to put front and center. I’m not interested in building a cathedral to addiction, let alone one that I have to live in.
Aside from all of the concentrated substances and high-powered distractions and entertainments that so readily overwhelm our animal nervous system, the deeper reason that so many of us struggle with addictive behaviors is that our culture simply lacks enough meaning and connection, and that the cultural valences of capitalism and consumerism continually reinforce our innate and very understandable attraction towards survival, pleasure and comfort.
Centering recovery or sobriety feels to me like being a priest for the culture that caused the problem in the first place. It seems to me that trying to find the root cause of addiction within the individual is a mostly a farcical waste of time and money. All of this is an attempt to find some cause for addiction other than what we already know to be true, which is that—just like depression—for the most part addiction is a symptom of living wrong, and that people who become addicted overtly, chronically, and acutely are simply displaying a very sane response to ways in which we are living—a response that is entirely predictable and correct based on our evolutionary history and the mechanisms that come into play in the context of our modern culture.
The alluring edifice of addiction and recovery has grown into a perverse sort of modern temple. It’s exactly what the machine wants us to believe—that it’s us individuals that are broken and need fixing, not the machine that surrounds us. It wants us to believe that it’s difficult to escape the pattern, because that distracts us from the larger truth that, in many ways, we’ve constructed a world that is making us sick, if not outright trying to kill us. Spreading the gospel that change is hard is playing into the wrong god’s hands.
I mostly agree with what Sophie Strand wrote recently, that “We live in a culture that prizes the atomized self, inappropriately foisting healing onto individuals when disease and discomfort are the multi-causal snares of systems of oppression within which we are stuck like flies in a spider’s web.” Recovery is a form of this sort of healthism that obscures the collective responsibility in favor of the distress, guilt and effort of the individual. Uncovering the truth that addiction isn’t an exception—that it’s a behavioral pattern that we are all susceptible to, and that is endemic in our culture—has helped me far more than any sort of self-referential pseudo-science.
I mean, hey, whatever works for you, and I know that AA and recovery have helped a lot of people, but the continuing cultural story around these artifacts of the twentieth century is distracting us from a deeper and more meaningful truth about addiction.
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The Series on “Recovery”
Further Reading
The Hijacking of Sobriety by the Recovery Movement, Stanton Peele
The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies about Addiction and Recovery, David Poses
Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope, Johann Hari
The Urge: Our History of Addiction,
Love and Addiction, Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky
- on Reciprocal Narrowing and Modern Addiction
The Abstinence Myth: A New Approach For Overcoming Addiction, Adi Jaffe
Why Spontaneous Sobriety can be the Best way to Stop Drinking, Annie Grace
One Year Without Alcohol & Automatic Quitting,
Sobriety and Wokeism are Diametrically Opposed to Each Other,
What Is Recovery from Mental Illness?,
An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky
Why aren’t Americans embracing the most promising medications for treating over-drinking? — on Naltrexone, and how AA is a uniquely American phenomenon.
What Does Recovery Mean?, Dan Mager in Psychology Today
Not Empty, Not Full, Katy Butler on Buddhism, Zen, and Addiction in Tricycle
This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness, and Change Your Life, Annie Grace
Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, Maia Szalavitz
The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, Marc Lewis
Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass
Lit, Mary Karr
Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp
The Night of the Gun, David Carr
Questions for you
What’s your take on Recovery?
How does change feel to you—impossible? easy? somewhere in between? How has that changed over time?
What major changes have you made in the way that you live, and why?
What’s your feeling about how much personal responsibility we have for our behaviors and additictions?
What’s your favorite song about change?
Please do leave a comment—and click the little ♡ heart
👇🏻 right there to let me know if you found this worthwhile.
I appreciate this exploration, Bowen. And I also appreciate the sometimes differing perspectives in the comments. I don’t claim to represent “recovery”; I can only speak to my understanding, experience, and relationship with it - which, like anything in this body and form - is limited and ever changing.
So, from this admittedly myopic, personal perspective, I’ll say that I don’t consider recovery as solely focused on the individual. On the contrary, when I write about addiction and recovery, it’s often within the context of wider, culturally normalized and promoted addictions.
On the other hand, I’m a practicing Buddhist and see “addiction” as interchangeable with “attachment” in many ways. There IS personal accountability here. And that’s a huge piece in my own process of being and becoming (which you could call “recovery” or just “being and becoming” - it didn’t begin or end with quitting alcohol).
I do not ascribe to the “disease model” of addiction or follow AA in my personal practice, but I deeply respect that those frameworks help and save many others, and I support others in doing what they need to stay sober. I have worked and continue to work in the Recovery field - previously as a Chinese Medicine doctor and acupuncturist at addiction treatment centers, now as a freelance writer. I don’t agree with many things that happen in that industry (within many treatment centers, specifically). But, person-to-person, many folks who work there “on the ground” are coming from a beautiful place - at least, that’s been my experience. I’m more concerned with the intersection of Big Treatment Centers and Big Pharma than I am with AA or whether we call it recovery or anything else.
Back to the personal: I find that using the word “recovery” serves as code or shorthand; it helps me easily find and connect with people whom I may want to connect with. These people don’t drink. In my experience, many of them are showing up in a way that’s more real, raw, and honest than the average person in North American society (and likely beyond, but I was born in the United States and live in Canada currently). Humans struggle with addiction; people in recovery are generally more aware and honest about it. I’m biased, yes. But that’s my belief and experience (which of course isn’t the only valid one).
For me, quitting alcohol DID change everything and open up whole other layers to life, being, and becoming - most especially, perhaps, in relationship with others. Getting sober was most certainly NOT a “non-event.” This is true even though I probably drank less than the majority of so-called normies. Quitting drinking impacted every aspect of me and every single relationship in my life - with loved ones, strangers, and everyone in between. In taking personal accountability and engaging in ongoing personal practice, I impact the collective and (in my own small way) change the collective. We all do.
What I keep returning to when I think about what you wrote here is that more than one thing can be true - whether for different people, or the same person at different times, or the same person at the same time! I sometimes feel so tired of using ANY personal identifiers, but also, they have been useful. Whether we call it “recovery” or anything else, I don’t see engaging with an un-ended, reflection-meets-action process as a problem. I see it as a gift that helps me live more beautifully. As an individual. As part of the collective.
I get it. I'm glad you shared. Takes guts to go against the grain. I still think however that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of AA and how it works. Scientifically, we do know alcohol addiction is largely--but not entirely--genetic, so you do have to accept that fact. That said, AA doesn't claim that outside factors aren't a factor. I've been to countless meetings where members talk about how they grew up, the environment they lived in, etc, and how that made their lives harder/worse and partly led to addiction.
Another thing to understand is that AA doesn't believe you're ever 'cured.' There is no cure, in the minds of the founders. Hence the ongoing work. Sober members of AA may say that quitting is hard and will suck...but they also tell you the future is very bright.
You're right about some things. AA is far from perfect. The main 'text' was written in the 1930s. It definitely isn't for everyone. However, I think what you're mostly commenting on and plugging into is the media version of AA versus the actual lived experience of most people who do it. I'm the biggest contrarian I know and I do it. People call AA a horizontal movement; it's run by no leaders and without requiring money. Think about that for a second! Where else does that happen in a 21st century capitalist society?
The truth is you can do it all your own weird way. I go to meetings but I don't sponsor or do any service stuff anymore. I believe in maybe 65% of the stuff people say in meetings. The core of it is: Community and connection, being with other people who get it. AA doesn't tell you how to live or what to do. You can pick and choose and work your own 'program.'
I think everyone should of course do what feels right. Again: AA isn't the alpha and omega.
I think I disagree with you just in general though on the individualism vs external environment point. Does the external world affect us all? Of course. Can we change the external world? Very little to not at all.
We can, however, change ourselves. And even that is very hard for most of us.
1. Let's go to a meeting, dude 😎
2. Let's do a discussion/debate about AA and record on Substack!
Thanks for the piece. You're wrong. But good stuff 😆😮