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.
thanks so much for reading and contributing to the conversation here, Dana 🙏🏻
100% -- 'both are true' and I'm here in this piece to share how I feel about this particular shorthand... I hear ya in that it can be helpful as a sort of secret handshake, and how that can be helpful.
Changing my relationship with alcohol changed many things for me too—but as I detail in this and other pieces on the subject, it wasn't the first thing to change, not by any means. That change was enabled by other changes that came first and didn't have anything to do with getting 'sober.' This is certainly part of why I bridle so strongly against putting everything, all my life changes, etc, in the context of "recovery." There's just _not_. So, that's not my experience, and at the same time, I recognize that for some people, everything does fall into the context of recovery. OK... but of course each of us is here to report on our own experience, and any single person or piece of writing will never capture many, most or all of the possible points of view on any subject. There's no need—there are other writers for that.
For my part, once I shifted my own patterns of drinking → not drinking, my friendships naturally shifted along those lines as well. These days I have far more close friends that I've ever had before, and very few if any of them drink much, but I haven't made any specific effort to cultivate sober friends. I guess like-minded and like-vibe folks attact simliar people—at least that's been true for me.
I totally agree that "engaging with an un-ended, reflection-meets-action process" ain't a problem—and for me, I sure ain't gonna call that "recovery." I guess a big part of this is also my interest in language and the specific nuances and valences that words carry. Recovery to me feels a lot like a brand, and it carries a negative back-reference. I don't want to associate myself with a negative, nor with a sorta-brand. But for sure, I'm down for that un-ended, reflection-meets-action process—that's growth, that's life, that's what makes it interesting!
Thanks for that, Bowen. I really do get what you’re saying. Interestingly, while I understand what you mean about “recovery” having a negative back-reference, I don’t experience the word in that way. I feel a sense of safety and refuge in it - almost like a sacred pause.
Interestingly as well, I don’t use the word “recovery” that often! I usually speak of “sobriety.” For me, sobriety is all about saying yes: to surrender and sovereignty, to going straight in, to feeling what’s there, to being honest, to choosing and living a more expansive, present expression of ourselves individually and in relationship with others.
And, yet…I recognize that not everyone shares my definitions. While words certainly have power and impact, they are human constructs and mean different things and bring forth different connotations and experiences for different people.
I see addiction - whether to alcohol or anything else - as existing on a spectrum. For some people, quitting alcohol is literally the choice between life and death. That wasn’t my story, but I am respectful of and believe people when they say it was theirs.
Thanks again for the conversation, Bowen. I sincerely appreciate it. You might check out Carl Fischer’s Substack articles exploring definitions and frameworks of recovery: https://carlerikfisher.substack.com/
yeah totally... I enjoy exploring how language works and yes, in a way, as many linguists will agree, we each have our own unique personal language, made up of how words translate into meaning in our own individual consciousness... I also tend to be a naysayer / non-joiner, and so I often reject anything that (to me) feels like groupthink. I don't say I'm "sober" because it feels like a label that lumps me in with others who claim certain things about what that means to them but OTOH I very much appreciate your definition of sobreity, which, quite interestingly, doesn't have anything to do with addiction, or alcohol. ❤️
I made a typo :) so edited to say humans “struggle” with addiction, but I don’t love using that word here. What I’m trying to get at is that humans experience addiction, same as they experience pain, grief, fear, heartbreak, loss, discomfort, etc. It’s all part of life, as you say.
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 😆😮
Cheers Michael, for your reading and thoughtful commentary. Of course, I don't have any personal experience with AA -- and I wasn't writing primarily about AA, but about capital-R "Recovery"—the idea that 'once an addict, always an addict," and the emergent religiosity of recovery that takes moving through an episode of life marked by a negative or harmful pattern and making that the spiritual center of one's entire life. I reject that, and I'm here to speak against it.
As far as AA goes, I get that the core of it community and connection—and that's where we agree. My own personal experience matches well with the ever-more-often cited line that the 'opposite of addition is connection'—and this has nothing to do with any of the other dogma of recovery.
I would also beg you to bring your understanding of the causes of addiction up to date. The idea that the "alcohol addiction is largely--but not entirely--genetic" was a long- and widely- held sort of street wisdom about addiction but the jury is still wayyyyy out on if there is anything like a singlar root cause in genetics.
It's just plain incorrect, and too reductive to say that genetics is the primary cause. Since that early version of the answer came around, science has long since added to our understanding of genetics. As we know now and refer to as epigenetics, having a particular gene (and, again, whether there even is one for addiction has yet to be shown) does not make it by any means certain that an individual will end up with whatever the gene encodes for.
My own reading of current research points to what I find the most useful definition of addiction as a syndrome: "a set of symptoms that show themselves similarly even if the underlying reasons for their development are very different. Sometimes biology might be the primary culprit, while at other times environmental exposure might wield the power. Some people may have the genetics deck piled high against them, which may be magnified by early childhood trauma... For others, a social group in which drug use is incredibly common and ever-present may counter the impact of supportive parents and a biologically 'clean' rap sheet."
I would encourage anyhow interested in the subject to read some of the numerous works that I cite at the end of this post. For you, perhaps especially Stanton Peele's _Love and Addiction_ and or Adi Jaffe's book _The Abstinence Myth_, from which the above quote is taken.
You and I agree on many things, and I think actually in principle on most of this. I agree that AA serves a purpose, and I know that it does work for a lot of people. What's left out of that sentence is that is has _not_ worked for far more people than it has worked for, and that while AA has ended up as a source of "community and connection" is great, but it comes with a ton of baggage—and again, I'm writing here more about "Recovery" than AA per se, although, granted, as an outsider.
An outside by choice. I "got sober" the way that *most people* do: on their own and without any contact with the world of AA or Recovery, neither of which ever interested or resonated with me.
My point here is simply to state my own experience and opinions and encourage people to do their own research into the actual reality and current science of addiction before embarking on a project of self-improvement following a century-old collection of mostly obsolete ideas about addiction.
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'm certainly not absolving anyone—or myself—of taking personal responsibility for making positive change, and I agree that collective action, so to speak, is the sum of individual actions.
"we must do alone" — hmm, but, I'm just gonna say no. Isn't AA all about community? And it's been well demonstrated that all of the aloneness that so many of us live with isn't serving us at all, and that we don't really do much of anything alone, actually. And, that "alone" is often a big part of the cause of addiction, for many people. I know I'm not really making a coherent argument, just responding to your phrasing.
In a way, we're both saying many of the same things, but in different ways. Then again, we're both calling bullshit. So, there's that.
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.🕺
one thing that comes up for me is that another part of the addiction-recovery orthodoxy is that it's a binary, all or nothing -- but that's false too. Adi Jaffe's _The Abstinence Myth_ is a great read on that subject... I know what you mean about those lumber-sexuals and their tasty hazy and other-IPA's and I have a beer now and then—but rarely, truly rarely. I don't have cravings and the subject (of having a beer) doesn't really come up for me unless I'm out with buddies in a place with twenty tasty taps, which is also fairly rare... but it does happen, and I don't feel bad about it. Not for a second.
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:
Thanks so much for sharing your experience Juan. Exactly... the either-or also comes out in the idea that if we call out the culture then we're somehow avoiding taking personal responsibility... which is, as you've pointed out, exactly what the machine wants: to keep us silent and guilty for our supposed sins.
Thanks for the Ram Dass piece too, I'll check that out.
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.
Thank you Josh. It took me a while to digest your highly intelligent reading and comments! Absolutely, yes, "it can be hard to know when certain vocabulary liberates us from our past by helping us understand...versus just solidifying the power of the past over us even more thoroughly" -- my take on that is that when I find myself getting attached to some particular vocabulary, I start to feel to stop using it. I have the same approach with wayfinding -- if I hear about a place from one [interesting] person, I will likely make an effort to visit... if I hear about the place from a second person, I start to get suspicious... if I hear about it from a third, I'll most likely go elsewhere.
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—or a word—to be 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 weight, as accumulated over the years.
The fossil of capital-R Recovery still carries a lot of cultural weight, but to me, it's a ghost river pouring dust.
We have to find our own meanings, and I'd say that regaining confidence in our ability to identify and act upon messages from the unconscious is a marker not of "having effectively recovered" but of being more fully human and more adult. It's doesn't have anything to do with "recovery." It has to do with living. Many of us don't learn how to do that in the first place, which of course has a lot to do with why do many of us end up dancing with addiction at some point. I want to focus my energy on living, and the ongoing journey of learning to live.
(For me, For me, For me, of course, I have to keep saying "for me") Living is a much larger and more positive frame than "recovery." I'm not here to tear recovery down so much as to say that I never did use that word because it never fit me—and, especially given the prevalence of addiction in our culture, I feel it's important for people to hear that there are other ways to think about living through and onwards from the experience.
So glad to be here with you, and all of you. thank you for the conversation!
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 very certainly don't want to identify as an alcoholic. Really, fuck that. That's never seemed like a productive path to, or for me.
“Healing the collective means healing ourselves,” for sure! — and I hear you in saying that our individual efforts are what make up the collective, and there may well not be anything that we can _do_ other than our individual efforts -- my point here is that we need to speak the truth about the collective, and not load all the healing on the shoulders of individuals.
With regard to your last thought here, I don’t think we disagree. I’ve sometimes heard it said that the problems of the world are “not our fault, but in some ways, our responsibility.”
Seems to me that misplacing fault—loading all the causality for addiction onto an addict’s innate/immutable identity, disease or whatever—creates shame, and shame fuels addiction. Shame is unworthiness to belong, which is the alienation that creates the emptiness addicts use dopamine to fill.
Still, I can’t wait around for society to stop being dystopian before I put down the bottle. I’ve got to heal so we all can.
I don’t think you’re saying anything contrary to that, to be clear. I’m just adding another wrinkle that I think aligns with your essay.
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.
Thank you Faye. "an elevated, chaotic homeostasis" -- I know that feeling well, whew... I''ve written about that quite a lot in my memoir material posted here on my stack → https://bowendwelle.substack.com/s/memoir ... I love your last sentence and I totally agree. I want to be free of that old story, not immerse myself in it. 🙏🏻
Thanks Bowen. You’re a great writer. I’m glad people have choices. I’m allergic to alcohol. It causes me to jump off buildings and out of moving cars and also to over identify with longing and melancholy. I was originally put off by calling myself an “alcoholic” but now it occurs to me I’m just saying “I’m allergic to alcohol” . I believe the forwards to the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous say “we have recovered” rather than we are recovering, but I’m certainly no expert. Recovery sounds to me also like a sort of refuge as mentioned above. Also like re-covering….. as if I had lost my way or shelter or connection and I am re-connecting, re-sheltering, reclaiming my way. Not trying to debate you by any means, your piece simply made me think about how it lands for me. I’m glad to embrace the word and respect your opinion on it also. I’m glad there are lots of ways to improve one’s quality of life. I hope all the doors remain open and that those who need help know they don’t have to do this 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.
thanks so much for reading and contributing to the conversation here, Dana 🙏🏻
100% -- 'both are true' and I'm here in this piece to share how I feel about this particular shorthand... I hear ya in that it can be helpful as a sort of secret handshake, and how that can be helpful.
Changing my relationship with alcohol changed many things for me too—but as I detail in this and other pieces on the subject, it wasn't the first thing to change, not by any means. That change was enabled by other changes that came first and didn't have anything to do with getting 'sober.' This is certainly part of why I bridle so strongly against putting everything, all my life changes, etc, in the context of "recovery." There's just _not_. So, that's not my experience, and at the same time, I recognize that for some people, everything does fall into the context of recovery. OK... but of course each of us is here to report on our own experience, and any single person or piece of writing will never capture many, most or all of the possible points of view on any subject. There's no need—there are other writers for that.
For my part, once I shifted my own patterns of drinking → not drinking, my friendships naturally shifted along those lines as well. These days I have far more close friends that I've ever had before, and very few if any of them drink much, but I haven't made any specific effort to cultivate sober friends. I guess like-minded and like-vibe folks attact simliar people—at least that's been true for me.
I totally agree that "engaging with an un-ended, reflection-meets-action process" ain't a problem—and for me, I sure ain't gonna call that "recovery." I guess a big part of this is also my interest in language and the specific nuances and valences that words carry. Recovery to me feels a lot like a brand, and it carries a negative back-reference. I don't want to associate myself with a negative, nor with a sorta-brand. But for sure, I'm down for that un-ended, reflection-meets-action process—that's growth, that's life, that's what makes it interesting!
thanks again for being here, Dana.
Thanks for that, Bowen. I really do get what you’re saying. Interestingly, while I understand what you mean about “recovery” having a negative back-reference, I don’t experience the word in that way. I feel a sense of safety and refuge in it - almost like a sacred pause.
Interestingly as well, I don’t use the word “recovery” that often! I usually speak of “sobriety.” For me, sobriety is all about saying yes: to surrender and sovereignty, to going straight in, to feeling what’s there, to being honest, to choosing and living a more expansive, present expression of ourselves individually and in relationship with others.
And, yet…I recognize that not everyone shares my definitions. While words certainly have power and impact, they are human constructs and mean different things and bring forth different connotations and experiences for different people.
I see addiction - whether to alcohol or anything else - as existing on a spectrum. For some people, quitting alcohol is literally the choice between life and death. That wasn’t my story, but I am respectful of and believe people when they say it was theirs.
Thanks again for the conversation, Bowen. I sincerely appreciate it. You might check out Carl Fischer’s Substack articles exploring definitions and frameworks of recovery: https://carlerikfisher.substack.com/
yeah totally... I enjoy exploring how language works and yes, in a way, as many linguists will agree, we each have our own unique personal language, made up of how words translate into meaning in our own individual consciousness... I also tend to be a naysayer / non-joiner, and so I often reject anything that (to me) feels like groupthink. I don't say I'm "sober" because it feels like a label that lumps me in with others who claim certain things about what that means to them but OTOH I very much appreciate your definition of sobreity, which, quite interestingly, doesn't have anything to do with addiction, or alcohol. ❤️
I love Carl's work and in fact we have a little conversation about this piece and his work here https://carlerikfisher.substack.com/p/the-essential-ingredients-of-recovery/comments#comment-55866389
I made a typo :) so edited to say humans “struggle” with addiction, but I don’t love using that word here. What I’m trying to get at is that humans experience addiction, same as they experience pain, grief, fear, heartbreak, loss, discomfort, etc. It’s all part of life, as you say.
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 😆😮
and I'm totally down for a discussion about addiction, AA, recovery, changing one's relationship with alcohol -- let's do it!
Cheers Michael, for your reading and thoughtful commentary. Of course, I don't have any personal experience with AA -- and I wasn't writing primarily about AA, but about capital-R "Recovery"—the idea that 'once an addict, always an addict," and the emergent religiosity of recovery that takes moving through an episode of life marked by a negative or harmful pattern and making that the spiritual center of one's entire life. I reject that, and I'm here to speak against it.
As far as AA goes, I get that the core of it community and connection—and that's where we agree. My own personal experience matches well with the ever-more-often cited line that the 'opposite of addition is connection'—and this has nothing to do with any of the other dogma of recovery.
I would also beg you to bring your understanding of the causes of addiction up to date. The idea that the "alcohol addiction is largely--but not entirely--genetic" was a long- and widely- held sort of street wisdom about addiction but the jury is still wayyyyy out on if there is anything like a singlar root cause in genetics.
It's just plain incorrect, and too reductive to say that genetics is the primary cause. Since that early version of the answer came around, science has long since added to our understanding of genetics. As we know now and refer to as epigenetics, having a particular gene (and, again, whether there even is one for addiction has yet to be shown) does not make it by any means certain that an individual will end up with whatever the gene encodes for.
My own reading of current research points to what I find the most useful definition of addiction as a syndrome: "a set of symptoms that show themselves similarly even if the underlying reasons for their development are very different. Sometimes biology might be the primary culprit, while at other times environmental exposure might wield the power. Some people may have the genetics deck piled high against them, which may be magnified by early childhood trauma... For others, a social group in which drug use is incredibly common and ever-present may counter the impact of supportive parents and a biologically 'clean' rap sheet."
I would encourage anyhow interested in the subject to read some of the numerous works that I cite at the end of this post. For you, perhaps especially Stanton Peele's _Love and Addiction_ and or Adi Jaffe's book _The Abstinence Myth_, from which the above quote is taken.
You and I agree on many things, and I think actually in principle on most of this. I agree that AA serves a purpose, and I know that it does work for a lot of people. What's left out of that sentence is that is has _not_ worked for far more people than it has worked for, and that while AA has ended up as a source of "community and connection" is great, but it comes with a ton of baggage—and again, I'm writing here more about "Recovery" than AA per se, although, granted, as an outsider.
An outside by choice. I "got sober" the way that *most people* do: on their own and without any contact with the world of AA or Recovery, neither of which ever interested or resonated with me.
My point here is simply to state my own experience and opinions and encourage people to do their own research into the actual reality and current science of addiction before embarking on a project of self-improvement following a century-old collection of mostly obsolete ideas about addiction.
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'm certainly not absolving anyone—or myself—of taking personal responsibility for making positive change, and I agree that collective action, so to speak, is the sum of individual actions.
"we must do alone" — hmm, but, I'm just gonna say no. Isn't AA all about community? And it's been well demonstrated that all of the aloneness that so many of us live with isn't serving us at all, and that we don't really do much of anything alone, actually. And, that "alone" is often a big part of the cause of addiction, for many people. I know I'm not really making a coherent argument, just responding to your phrasing.
In a way, we're both saying many of the same things, but in different ways. Then again, we're both calling bullshit. So, there's that.
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.🕺
always fun reading your comments!
one thing that comes up for me is that another part of the addiction-recovery orthodoxy is that it's a binary, all or nothing -- but that's false too. Adi Jaffe's _The Abstinence Myth_ is a great read on that subject... I know what you mean about those lumber-sexuals and their tasty hazy and other-IPA's and I have a beer now and then—but rarely, truly rarely. I don't have cravings and the subject (of having a beer) doesn't really come up for me unless I'm out with buddies in a place with twenty tasty taps, which is also fairly rare... but it does happen, and I don't feel bad about it. Not for a second.
Cheers
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
Thanks so much for sharing your experience Juan. Exactly... the either-or also comes out in the idea that if we call out the culture then we're somehow avoiding taking personal responsibility... which is, as you've pointed out, exactly what the machine wants: to keep us silent and guilty for our supposed sins.
Thanks for the Ram Dass piece too, I'll check that out.
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.
Thank you Josh. It took me a while to digest your highly intelligent reading and comments! Absolutely, yes, "it can be hard to know when certain vocabulary liberates us from our past by helping us understand...versus just solidifying the power of the past over us even more thoroughly" -- my take on that is that when I find myself getting attached to some particular vocabulary, I start to feel to stop using it. I have the same approach with wayfinding -- if I hear about a place from one [interesting] person, I will likely make an effort to visit... if I hear about the place from a second person, I start to get suspicious... if I hear about it from a third, I'll most likely go elsewhere.
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—or a word—to be 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 weight, as accumulated over the years.
The fossil of capital-R Recovery still carries a lot of cultural weight, but to me, it's a ghost river pouring dust.
We have to find our own meanings, and I'd say that regaining confidence in our ability to identify and act upon messages from the unconscious is a marker not of "having effectively recovered" but of being more fully human and more adult. It's doesn't have anything to do with "recovery." It has to do with living. Many of us don't learn how to do that in the first place, which of course has a lot to do with why do many of us end up dancing with addiction at some point. I want to focus my energy on living, and the ongoing journey of learning to live.
(For me, For me, For me, of course, I have to keep saying "for me") Living is a much larger and more positive frame than "recovery." I'm not here to tear recovery down so much as to say that I never did use that word because it never fit me—and, especially given the prevalence of addiction in our culture, I feel it's important for people to hear that there are other ways to think about living through and onwards from the experience.
So glad to be here with you, and all of you. thank you for the conversation!
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.
Thanks for your reading and comment here!
I very certainly don't want to identify as an alcoholic. Really, fuck that. That's never seemed like a productive path to, or for me.
“Healing the collective means healing ourselves,” for sure! — and I hear you in saying that our individual efforts are what make up the collective, and there may well not be anything that we can _do_ other than our individual efforts -- my point here is that we need to speak the truth about the collective, and not load all the healing on the shoulders of individuals.
Hell yeah!
With regard to your last thought here, I don’t think we disagree. I’ve sometimes heard it said that the problems of the world are “not our fault, but in some ways, our responsibility.”
Seems to me that misplacing fault—loading all the causality for addiction onto an addict’s innate/immutable identity, disease or whatever—creates shame, and shame fuels addiction. Shame is unworthiness to belong, which is the alienation that creates the emptiness addicts use dopamine to fill.
Still, I can’t wait around for society to stop being dystopian before I put down the bottle. I’ve got to heal so we all can.
I don’t think you’re saying anything contrary to that, to be clear. I’m just adding another wrinkle that I think aligns with your essay.
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.
Thank you Faye. "an elevated, chaotic homeostasis" -- I know that feeling well, whew... I''ve written about that quite a lot in my memoir material posted here on my stack → https://bowendwelle.substack.com/s/memoir ... I love your last sentence and I totally agree. I want to be free of that old story, not immerse myself in it. 🙏🏻
BTW, 47 YEARS.
Seems to me that this a lot of intellectual B.S.
Thanks Bowen. You’re a great writer. I’m glad people have choices. I’m allergic to alcohol. It causes me to jump off buildings and out of moving cars and also to over identify with longing and melancholy. I was originally put off by calling myself an “alcoholic” but now it occurs to me I’m just saying “I’m allergic to alcohol” . I believe the forwards to the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous say “we have recovered” rather than we are recovering, but I’m certainly no expert. Recovery sounds to me also like a sort of refuge as mentioned above. Also like re-covering….. as if I had lost my way or shelter or connection and I am re-connecting, re-sheltering, reclaiming my way. Not trying to debate you by any means, your piece simply made me think about how it lands for me. I’m glad to embrace the word and respect your opinion on it also. I’m glad there are lots of ways to improve one’s quality of life. I hope all the doors remain open and that those who need help know they don’t have to do this alone.