PERSONAL VIEWS ON RECOVERY

PERSONAL VIEWS ON RECOVERY Personal Views Page

(This page will carry from time to time the personal views of some of our members on issues which they believe are important in the recovery process. Our present policy is that these authors will remain anonymous and will be limited to members of the Washington, D.C. Area SMART groups. They do not necessarily reflect positions either of the Washington, D.C. Area SMART groups, nor its National Headquarters. Comments are welcomed.)

A complete list of all previous essays is given at the bottom of this page.

How Do We Stop Drinking?:
A Group Discussion

Some time ago we had a discussion in one of our SMART Recovery groups here about how that magic moment arrives when we make the decision to stop drinking and/or using other addictive substances. Readers may be interested in a report of that discussion, not just for the substance and personal experiences recounted, but as an indication of one type of discussion our groups can take up, sometimes almost by accident. We are asking the "why" and "how" questions not always discussed in other recovery groups, and in fact frequently discouraged. Obviously the report is written in terms which protect the individuals involved, as well as identification of the group itself, since confidentiality is an essential component of our SMART Recovery program.

We had a total of six attendees at the Saturday morning meeting. Before any formal topic was raised, we somehow or other quickly stumbled into a lengthy discussion of how one came to make a decision to stop drinking.

A professional present said he thought that there had to be major trouble in one's life to provide an impetus for starting to do something about stopping drinking. If there were no trouble, why bother to read up on the subject, come to meetings, vow to quit, etc.? Most in the group agreed, but also thought that something more was needed for an effective and permanent stop. A "Just Say No!" approach was not enough. Someone might temporarily stop drinking because of immediate difficulties, say a DUI. But he/she might still carry the desire to drink, and then hope and actually plan that after the trouble went away he/she could then resume drinking.

One person said his own experience was similar to what Jack Trimpey had said in his useful first book, The Small Book: rather than the AA version of the single-minded addict, there co-existed in himself at least two personalities on drinking, one which badly wanted to, the other which badly wanted not to. Which one was the real one? Others noted that there were probably much more than simply two personalities at work, but rather a number of conflicting desires, some of them not related to drinking or using at all.

Another member followed up by observing that for him it was the transition from the domination of the drinking personality to the other non-drinking one that was critical for recovery and the ways this could be accomplished which most needed to be examined closely to promote the move. Stanton Peele had some very good material on this change in his book on addiction and recovery. For him this had come recently through an increased awareness of his very own highly personal responsibility for making a (negative) decision about taking a drink. This was almost a complete reversal of the standard AA advice to "surrender" and turn things over to a higher power.

This person continued that for him, this showed itself in both a feeling of liberation about the ability to choose not to drink, and also a lump-in-the-chest feeling of the immense importance of the responsibility he had for making a decision which affected so many important aspects of his life, including the people he loved dearly. He called this a sense of empowerment, and felt that it contained for him a strong moral component. It was not simply a matter of rationally working out that drinking---or taking the first drink---was not a sensible thing to do, but that it was wrong. It was more of a powerful emotion, rather than simply the soulless philosophy of a rational thinker coldly calculating benefits and costs. This was something he hadn't had with earlier temporary episodes of stopping drinking. But he glumly observed that while he had it now, given his past history there was no assurance that he would have it in the future. He just had to keep working to maintain it until it became a habit. It was definitely present in him now as a major force.

Someone mentioned that at a meeting earlier in the week he had been challenged on whether or not there wasn't some basic unhappiness in his life which caused him to disregard and in fact imperil family, friends, career, etc. by drinking. He believed now that he never saw the issue then in such stark terms. He never saw it in terms of his having to make a personal and moral decision about such matters. Furthermore, at the time he felt, like many, that the decision to drink wasn't all that important. He thought he could get away with drinking and not have effects on the rest of his life, so a great deal of self-deception was taking place. Group meetings were essential for him to get a handle on what "reality" actually was, i.e., the actual effects of his drinking.

All of this, one person suggested, could be seen in terms of genetics, and neurological structure, at least this is what he believed applied to him. He believed he had early on created a "solution" to discomfort by establishing neural pathways through axons, neurotransmitters across the synapses, etc., which encouraged drinking, as a means of coping with difficulties in his life. Then came more drinking on top of that drinking, until his brain was telling him it was essential to his very survival that he drink. In now going from his drinking personality to the abstinent one, he was attempting to erase or neutralize through disuse one set of neural pathways and establish a new set of non-drinking pathways that would dominate his immediate reactions to stress. You could call it changing "habit patterns" if you want, or a "disease," if you were so inclined, but the physiological change was descriptive of what was happening to the body, and the brain in particular.

At some point one person in the group picked up on the "disease" aspect of this and said that she thought addiction or alcoholism might be much like diabetes: you had a disease but you needed to treat it; if you treated it, it was no problem, but it was still a disease. Another member picked up on this and said while he knew many in the cognitive therapy field did not accept that the disease concept applied to addiction, he had some sympathy with the idea. This even though of course the curious thing about addiction, in contrast with diabetes, was that even if you didn't treat it, sometimes you didn't get it. You just never knew when it would strike, and part of the very attraction of drinking was that you thought you might get away with it.

Others said that it wasn't even that clear with diabetes or other real medical diseases. Furthermore, one important part of our program was to get past the notion that drinking or using drugs "just happened," and examine the specific circumstances that led to use. There was always a causal factor or factors; it wasn't just "fate" or "genetics." The trick was to be prepared for such moments.

One professional member interrupted to deny emphatically that he had ever disavowed the disease concept. He thought there was a lot of truth in it. He was a man of science, seeking physical explanations of things. He thought that a lot of recent research was establishing quite clearly the concept of genetic inheritance of addiction, even though the set of genes involved might turn out to be quite complex, and there were a lot of different forms addiction could take. "Alcoholism," for example, covered a lot of radically different behavioral patterns. Research might even lead to indication of some other condition (such as low frustration tolerance in his case, one person interjected), which in turn led to addictive drinking. There were furthermore links between active addiction and other problems such as depression. But the point he had always stressed - because so many people forgot it - was that there were important social conditions---poverty, poor housing, low education, high crime rates---which were the best indicators of a higher incidence of addiction, rather than any set of medical conditions; these had nothing to do with genes or "disease" in the scientific sense.

One member of the group responded that he didn't disagree with this last point about social factors, but as in his own field of economics, what worked for the population as a whole didn't necessarily apply to the individual. Here in this group we were dealing with ourselves as individuals. Global statistics might be indicators of general difficulties for the individual in leading an addiction-free life in the face of likely personal and social problems, but it was still up to each person to make his or her own decisions. Of course, a child, say, growing up in the black ghetto in Washington or the Irish conditions Frank McCord described in his book Angela's Ashes might not be aware in many cases of his or her ability to make these decisions.

Another interjected to say he thought this element of awareness was absolutely critical to the decision-making process. He thought that it was only after one became aware of one's circumstances that the whole idea of empowerment could come about. This is where our group discussions were so important; it was a form of "reality therapy," although not the formal type that went under that name. Others agreed, but some added that one problem here was that awareness was constantly changing for a person. Today's "awareness" might be better than yesterday's, but maybe not, and it would be different than tomorrow's or next week's.

One person noted at one point in our discussion of the disease concept that he was certainly headed away from applying this to himself, although with some qualifications, but that when he had attempted to suggest this to his long-suffering wife, her immediate reaction had been: "If I didn't think it was a disease, we wouldn't still be married!" The group really picked up on this, with most giving positive spins to her comment (his own had been quite negative---she's wrong, but I'm not going to argue with her; she's telling me that if I believe that then I have also to believe that I am responsible for all her past unhappiness over my drinking, etc.). One female participant felt she was telling him that past actions were forgiven, and that she recognized his honest efforts this time around to recover. Another thought she was telling him know how much his past behavior had hurt, and earnestly expressing the hope that it was not going to repeat itself again. The person concerned noted that he and his wife had had almost no conversations on this subject now, although they talked about almost everything else; she was sick to death of dealing with the subject, and just wanted him to handle what she regarded as his own problem. On this last point, he said, he agreed with her: the first step in recovery was accepting personal responsibility. Everything else - recognizing "reality", commitment to change, a sense of empowerment leading to a decision to abstain - followed from that.

This is Essay No. 13, issued February, 2000.

Previous Essays

December, 1999--The Myth of "Self-Esteem" and Recovery

September, 1999--Religion and Recovery

July, 1999--Can People Who Are Not Committed to Abstinence Attend SMART Meetings?

March, 1999--Recovery Is Not a Four-Day Course in Rational Recovery

January, 1999--SMART Recovery in a Nutshell

November, 1998--Other Roads to Recovery

September, 1998--How I Re-Thought My Beliefs on My "Alcoholism"

July, 1998--Why Do People Join SMART Recovery?

May, 1998--A Critique of PBS' Bill Moyers on Addiction

March, 1998--Should People With Gambling or Overeating Disorders Be Welcome At SMART Meetings?

January, 1998--Differences Between SMART and AA

November, 1997--Fifty Ways to Recover

Return to Main Page