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 😆😮
As a person who went to daily AA meetings for 7 years—hasn’t gone to a single meeting in years—has 14 years of complete sobriety—I think your overall premise is a good recounting of your own individual experience.
I do believe there is a “graduation” in long-term recovery, which most in AA would disagree with. I don’t call myself anything anymore except human.
One of the areas I disagree with wholeheartedly is your idea that it isn’t an inside game. We don’t heal the collective except through individual responsibility and accountability. Blaming anyone’s behavior or addiction on external things—disease—culture—etc is an exercise in blaming and victimhood. “Boohoo I can’t be a good human being in this crazy world.”
Bullshit. To each his own for sure—but the work required for growth and maturity—and the lessons we must learn—we must do alone.
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.
Nice to see you Bowen 👋🏻 Exactly! If you haven’t had alcohol for a year five years 10 or decades, you’re not in recovery you beat it you’re just someone who doesn’t drink alcohol. That being said, I can see how the cravings may never go away and that might be the essence of being in recovery. Like every time I walk into a bakery or coffee shop I am eyeballing the chocolate almond croissants, but I don’t eat that shit anymore. Well, I bought a couple days old the other day. I’m the one in recovery. I’m the guy that went 39 days without alcohol, but had a stressful situation coupled with the fact that I was going to Vancouver for a couple weeks hanging out with my brother-in-law’s who like to drink made continuing unsurmountable for me. I’ve been doing pretty good with moderation lately, and my biggest concern has always been the negative health aspects but there’s hope through intermittent fasting autophagy and a keto diet that I may be able to restore or regenerate all the cellular damage that I’m doing. Now me I’m addicted to the craft beer culture And the after beers of the sport that I’m mostly involved in plus those cool lumber sexual craft beer guys how could they be doing me harm the guy at my local Beer supplies shop is the nicest guy you would ever want meet. Anyway, I have a fucking splitting headache and I only had 3 pints of beer yesterday they were higher alcohol over 6%. Maybe I’m getting to the point where I’m feeling physical withdrawals and that’s really bad but I think I got this.🕺
Agreed, and thank you for voicing this. I spent a week or two in an AA group. I never felt comfortable always having to follow my name with..."and I'm an alcoholic". I felt like I was branding myself for a lifetime of guilt and shame...which only led to several relapses. My drinking began to wane once I'd left AA and completely gotten out of my old environment with its old influences.
Which leads me to my second point. At one of the meetings, the group was asked "is alcoholism a disease or a choice?" The responses varied, many of them very passionate on one side or the other. But the whole time I was thinking...wait a minute, why are those the only two possibilities being discussed? What about a third factor, the toxic culture as a whole? Since I was so new in the group and feeling vulnerable, I declined to add this to the discussion. I didn't want to start a debate, since I wasn't there to debate, I just wanted some relief. But I didn't think that option would hold much water in the group, they were very, very convinced that it was only either one of the two options.
Once I left my toxic job and moved to the countryside, where I couldn't hang out at the same bars with the same people, things started improving rapidly for me. I think that if AA added this third perspective to the group, that people would begin to stop blaming themselves so much and see how much negative stress our culture is putting on everyone. But of course, our culture won't have that. It has to keep going at all costs, and reflection about exactly where and how it is going is discouraged. This idea that you can't move away from your problems is entirely false. Culture is a huge factor, and our culture in particular is designed to keep people from seeing that.
You've mentioned Ram Dass....here's a segment from a live Q&A session from one of his lectures regarding how recovery programs can turn into another addiction, and some valuable insights of how to become free:
Plenty of good points here. I can't speak to addiction, per se, but those with hardcore dependencies seem to see owning addiction as necessary to keeping it at bay. But dependency is a spectrum, and as you say, some on that spectrum might consider themselves recovered -- or feel like embracing a different framing wouldn't necessarily make them more vulnerable to relapse.
It's probably true that trauma gets too much airtime these days, too, and that it can be hard to know when certain vocabulary liberates us from our past by helping us understand, and therefore release it, versus just solidifying the power of the past over us even more thoroughly. But people who have built unhealthy coping mechanisms for trauma need to first acknowledge what happened to them before they can rebuild themselves. At what point do we simply call that "life"?
Some of this goes to the topic we've been discussing for an upcoming series, since it can be difficult to trust yourself if you see yourself as defined by or perpetually at the mercy of past addiction or past trauma. So maybe regaining confidence in your ability to identify and temper unconscious behavior is a marker of having effectively recovered? Which is not to say that we are ever wholly reliable witnesses to our own life, but there is a difference between someone caught in delusion or denial and someone who can effectively self-regulate. Not sure if that's afield of what you mean or still close to the mark.
The one time I went to AA I found myself wondering the whole time whether, if I spoke, I would say, “Hi, I’m Geoff and I’m an alcoholic.”
I’m not sure “I” want to identify as an alcoholic. I’m not even sure that I am an “I”!
This essay reminds me of something said by Charles Eisenstein: “If your fish is sick, do you give it antibiotics or clean the tank?”
Still, I wonder whether our individual searches for meaning—for finding something connective and transcendent to actually fill the hole that addictions distract from—might actually BE what cleans the tank.
In other words, yes, we need to recognize the external influences on individuals’ addictions, but if we’re tending the part of the garden we can touch, healing the collective means healing ourselves.
I've never been through any sort of program or been "officially labeled" an addict... but like you said, we've all been addicted to something. It's human nature. A process of becoming wise, I think. An initiation of sorts... taking different shapes and forms depending on our environments.
For me it was mostly the wild feelings I got from men who treated me poorly, and psychedelics, and what I've come to learn through the process of revealing what true love is, and finding peace in the present moment, is that my addiction was all rooted in the story I told about myself - what I liked, wanted, needed, deserved. It all created a fantastic chemical swirl, an elevated, chaotic homeostasis, and an inability to find peace in the "mundane" reality that love is - that I am enough as I am, without adornment, without a heightened/altered sense of myself.
It's finding magic in the mundane - deep presence and acceptance of who I am, no - that set me free.
So from my perspective, constantly telling the story "I am forever in recovery, I have a disease that will never go away" is the absolute worst thing anyone who wishes to be free of that story could do for themselves.
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 😆😮
As a person who went to daily AA meetings for 7 years—hasn’t gone to a single meeting in years—has 14 years of complete sobriety—I think your overall premise is a good recounting of your own individual experience.
I do believe there is a “graduation” in long-term recovery, which most in AA would disagree with. I don’t call myself anything anymore except human.
One of the areas I disagree with wholeheartedly is your idea that it isn’t an inside game. We don’t heal the collective except through individual responsibility and accountability. Blaming anyone’s behavior or addiction on external things—disease—culture—etc is an exercise in blaming and victimhood. “Boohoo I can’t be a good human being in this crazy world.”
Bullshit. To each his own for sure—but the work required for growth and maturity—and the lessons we must learn—we must do alone.
Thanks for the provocative polemic.
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.
Nice to see you Bowen 👋🏻 Exactly! If you haven’t had alcohol for a year five years 10 or decades, you’re not in recovery you beat it you’re just someone who doesn’t drink alcohol. That being said, I can see how the cravings may never go away and that might be the essence of being in recovery. Like every time I walk into a bakery or coffee shop I am eyeballing the chocolate almond croissants, but I don’t eat that shit anymore. Well, I bought a couple days old the other day. I’m the one in recovery. I’m the guy that went 39 days without alcohol, but had a stressful situation coupled with the fact that I was going to Vancouver for a couple weeks hanging out with my brother-in-law’s who like to drink made continuing unsurmountable for me. I’ve been doing pretty good with moderation lately, and my biggest concern has always been the negative health aspects but there’s hope through intermittent fasting autophagy and a keto diet that I may be able to restore or regenerate all the cellular damage that I’m doing. Now me I’m addicted to the craft beer culture And the after beers of the sport that I’m mostly involved in plus those cool lumber sexual craft beer guys how could they be doing me harm the guy at my local Beer supplies shop is the nicest guy you would ever want meet. Anyway, I have a fucking splitting headache and I only had 3 pints of beer yesterday they were higher alcohol over 6%. Maybe I’m getting to the point where I’m feeling physical withdrawals and that’s really bad but I think I got this.🕺
Agreed, and thank you for voicing this. I spent a week or two in an AA group. I never felt comfortable always having to follow my name with..."and I'm an alcoholic". I felt like I was branding myself for a lifetime of guilt and shame...which only led to several relapses. My drinking began to wane once I'd left AA and completely gotten out of my old environment with its old influences.
Which leads me to my second point. At one of the meetings, the group was asked "is alcoholism a disease or a choice?" The responses varied, many of them very passionate on one side or the other. But the whole time I was thinking...wait a minute, why are those the only two possibilities being discussed? What about a third factor, the toxic culture as a whole? Since I was so new in the group and feeling vulnerable, I declined to add this to the discussion. I didn't want to start a debate, since I wasn't there to debate, I just wanted some relief. But I didn't think that option would hold much water in the group, they were very, very convinced that it was only either one of the two options.
Once I left my toxic job and moved to the countryside, where I couldn't hang out at the same bars with the same people, things started improving rapidly for me. I think that if AA added this third perspective to the group, that people would begin to stop blaming themselves so much and see how much negative stress our culture is putting on everyone. But of course, our culture won't have that. It has to keep going at all costs, and reflection about exactly where and how it is going is discouraged. This idea that you can't move away from your problems is entirely false. Culture is a huge factor, and our culture in particular is designed to keep people from seeing that.
You've mentioned Ram Dass....here's a segment from a live Q&A session from one of his lectures regarding how recovery programs can turn into another addiction, and some valuable insights of how to become free:
https://youtu.be/4C-u9hyB7rE?si=Kcv0pPI-E5v_8I0q
Plenty of good points here. I can't speak to addiction, per se, but those with hardcore dependencies seem to see owning addiction as necessary to keeping it at bay. But dependency is a spectrum, and as you say, some on that spectrum might consider themselves recovered -- or feel like embracing a different framing wouldn't necessarily make them more vulnerable to relapse.
It's probably true that trauma gets too much airtime these days, too, and that it can be hard to know when certain vocabulary liberates us from our past by helping us understand, and therefore release it, versus just solidifying the power of the past over us even more thoroughly. But people who have built unhealthy coping mechanisms for trauma need to first acknowledge what happened to them before they can rebuild themselves. At what point do we simply call that "life"?
Some of this goes to the topic we've been discussing for an upcoming series, since it can be difficult to trust yourself if you see yourself as defined by or perpetually at the mercy of past addiction or past trauma. So maybe regaining confidence in your ability to identify and temper unconscious behavior is a marker of having effectively recovered? Which is not to say that we are ever wholly reliable witnesses to our own life, but there is a difference between someone caught in delusion or denial and someone who can effectively self-regulate. Not sure if that's afield of what you mean or still close to the mark.
The one time I went to AA I found myself wondering the whole time whether, if I spoke, I would say, “Hi, I’m Geoff and I’m an alcoholic.”
I’m not sure “I” want to identify as an alcoholic. I’m not even sure that I am an “I”!
This essay reminds me of something said by Charles Eisenstein: “If your fish is sick, do you give it antibiotics or clean the tank?”
Still, I wonder whether our individual searches for meaning—for finding something connective and transcendent to actually fill the hole that addictions distract from—might actually BE what cleans the tank.
In other words, yes, we need to recognize the external influences on individuals’ addictions, but if we’re tending the part of the garden we can touch, healing the collective means healing ourselves.
As above so below.
I've never been through any sort of program or been "officially labeled" an addict... but like you said, we've all been addicted to something. It's human nature. A process of becoming wise, I think. An initiation of sorts... taking different shapes and forms depending on our environments.
For me it was mostly the wild feelings I got from men who treated me poorly, and psychedelics, and what I've come to learn through the process of revealing what true love is, and finding peace in the present moment, is that my addiction was all rooted in the story I told about myself - what I liked, wanted, needed, deserved. It all created a fantastic chemical swirl, an elevated, chaotic homeostasis, and an inability to find peace in the "mundane" reality that love is - that I am enough as I am, without adornment, without a heightened/altered sense of myself.
It's finding magic in the mundane - deep presence and acceptance of who I am, no - that set me free.
So from my perspective, constantly telling the story "I am forever in recovery, I have a disease that will never go away" is the absolute worst thing anyone who wishes to be free of that story could do for themselves.
BTW, 47 YEARS.
Seems to me that this a lot of intellectual B.S.