I became a heretic the old-fashioned way: by starting as a believer. I drank the recovery kool-aid, though it tasted odd from the beginning. Nonetheless, I was sure it would help because recovery professionals told me it would help. They told me to trust them and not my own judgment, which, after all, approved the burn of cheap vodka and the bitterness of opium alkaloids. So I went along, faking it in the hope of making it.

I went along, and every time I stumbled I took full blame. There’s a lot of it when you stumble, lots of different ways to say you didn’t try hard enough or you tried hard but not in the right way or you didn’t keep the right thoughts in your head or you tried to run your own life, rather than letting a better-equipped “power” do it, or you’re just a miserable excuse for a human being who would choose intoxication over world peace or a cure for cancer every time.

No one ever broached the possibility that recovery culture might be part of my problem. With the internet just a click away, we can easily find evidence that most treatment programs, from spa-like rehabs to outposts of the prison system, don’t work very well. Recovery professionals know this, yet 12-step-based treatment continues to be the industry standard, and even some newer approaches maintain its essential structure. In a society that professes concern over addiction, this persistence of failed paradigms seems almost perverse.

These paradigms turned out to be part of my problem. Many of the assumptions, principles, and methods of the recovery industry didn’t just fail to help me but actually made me sicker. But the clincher, the thing that kept me from figuring out what was going on for so long, was the self-blame directive. If I was miserable in recovery, the fault was my bad attitude. If advice I was given didn’t make sense, the fault was my weak understanding. If conventional wisdom was demonstrably false, the fault was my “intellectualizing.” I heard such things so often that I started to believe them, started to regard any skeptical thought as an early warning of relapse, rather than as my poor discredited brain desperately trying to get a message through.

During this period, I used to feel guilty when I read scientific articles on alcoholism and addiction. I’d try not to read them because my counselors said I shouldn’t, but, from time to time, curiosity would drive me back to my computer and the massive electronic archives at my state university. Sometimes I just browsed around; sometimes I researched particular topics, such as medications used to treat addictions. I won’t pretend to have a deep understanding of pharmacology or neuroscience, but I ran across some useful information that recovery professionals didn’t seem to know. Doctors either. I wrote a medication guide for mine because I couldn’t find a decent one to give her.

I felt doubly guilty researching the social, political, and economic aspects of alcoholism. Even considering such topics, I believed, was desperately chasing someone to share blame that was rightfully mine. My counselors told me not to do it, and the other members of my recovery group told me not to do it, but, heck, I’m an addict, right? I did it anyway then felt bad about it.

Finally, something happened. I was percolating along in outpatient treatment when I had another relapse and ended up in detox again. And the detox was a bad one, not because the relapse itself was so severe, but because there’s a kindling effect with multiple detoxes.[1] Then, the night before I was supposed to get out, I fell violently ill. The doctor tried to tell me it was just one more consequence of my bad choices, but a nurse felt sorry for me and told me it was food poisoning.

Released from detox, a day late because of the food poisoning, I felt completely wiped out. I had hit bottom before, obviously, but this was a bottom beneath that bottom, an emotional sub-basement that was far worse than any despair I had ever felt: I realized there was no help for me anywhere. This time, rather than “surrendering” yet again and repeating the process that had failed me over and over, I had a new impulse, a simple one:

I had to figure sobriety out for myself.

Feeling scared, guilty and profoundly ashamed, I quit my outpatient program, quit going to meetings, and lied about both to my disgusted family. Then I started trying to work out how to stay sober.

I resumed my research on addiction—without the guilt this time. I read a lot and thought a lot and discovered something amazing: just thinking critically about addiction was helping to keep me sober. I wasn’t sure why, but I couldn’t argue with the results. In addition, I returned to serious meditation, which I had all but given up. That helped enormously.

Gradually I realized that I owed my sobriety to a kind of radical attention, both to my moment-to-moment experience and to the culture that shapes my experience. If I had to describe my approach in disciplinary terms, I’d call it a combination of old-school Zen and cultural studies. I try to understand why I see what I see, think what I think, and do what I do. I consider the influence of politics and media and education. I think about my problem in relation to other social problems and to the systems that create those problems. That’s my “program,” and it works for me.

As of today, I’ve been sober about 18 months. I don’t put much stock in measuring sober time—partly because I stayed sober for 14 years before relapsing the first time—but I know the number matters to some people, so I mention it. What’s different this time is that I finally stopped taking one hundred percent of the blame for failing at recovery and started asking what else might be making the task so difficult, not just for me but for other addicts.

In the process, I discovered that staying sober doesn’t have to be quite so hard. Don’t get me wrong; it’s always going to be a challenge. My brain began adapting to drugs and alcohol in utero, and it continued to adapt as it learned which substances it liked best and how to assure a steady supply. Part of my brain will always clamor for those substances. What I discovered, though, was how much my culture amplifies that clamor and hobbles what resources I have to resist it. That one-two punch is what this blog is all about.

 

[1] The kindling effect is some of that “useful information” I was just talking about. I’ll write about it at some point, but, for now, see Howard Becker, “Kindling in Alcohol Withdrawal,” an NIAAA publication, available at: https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh22-1/25-34.pdf