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.)

How I Re-Thought My Beliefs on My "Alcoholism"

One issue that has always interested me is how people bring about major changes in their belief systems. Part of the SMART Recovery philosophy is that such major changes in thinking are needed for recovery to take place; it draws heavily on Albert Ellis Rational/Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) to accomplish this. AA takes much the same view on the need for changes in belief, although the changes they recommend differ sharply from those of SMART Recovery. One reason the question fascinates me in particular is that I wonder about myself: how did I, a person with fairly standard views about alcoholism come to change these radically in the course of less than a year to ones which were definitely not commonly accepted (although I believe that they will come to be)? And how do I, now several years later, continue to hold these views?

My Current Beliefs on Addiction

In spite of an impressive history of alcohol addiction, for example, I no longer believe that I am an "alcoholic." I also do not believe, as I did some time ago, that I have a life-long permanent "disease." I believe instead that on many, many occasions in the past I was addicted to alcohol, but that now the addiction is gone and may (not must) re-occur only if I begin drinking again. I further don't believe that to "arrest" the active phase of this condition---uncontrolled drinking---that I require or even am helped by a belief in the possibility (which I consider either highly improbable or non-existent) of the intervention of outside forces, either in the form of God or any other Higher Power. For all these reasons, I therefore don't believe that lifelong participation in a 12-Step program such as Alcoholics Anonymous is a pre-condition for continued sobriety in the future. But I also don't believe it can be cured virtually overnight, as Rational Recovery seems to suggest---it takes time and effort, just not a lifetime.

I believe that my problems with alcohol have been not physical or spiritual but rather behavioral, influenced by the beliefs I hold. The decision to drink---or not to drink---is one that I, and I alone, make. It is not determined by outside factors "making" me drink, such as genetics, physiology, current emotional situation, or persons or groups such as AA, SMART Recovery, my wife, my family, or others. My current outlook is one that says quite simply that for eminently practical reasons, dictated by an honest review of my past history, I have made a decision that alcohol is not an option for me, either now or in the future. Finally, I believe that if I were to drink it is not a major or even a minor disaster, either morally or practically; it would simply be one mistake in judgment, one which would be immediately correctable.

How It Worked

How did I arrive at such a change in outlook? Some time ago, I made the observation over lunch to a friend of mine that I had discovered for the first time a program for stopping drinking which fit my understanding of myself, not other people's understanding of me. But this process was gradual and clearly involved a number of stages. First, I had to become aware that the standard recommended approach to my stopping drinking, as typified by AA, simply wasn't working; I had too many relapses even while "following the program" and "working the steps" at over 1,000 AA meetings to think otherwise. For many years I thought that it was my fault, that AA was okay and it was me that wasn't. But at a certain critical point---which I identify as my last hospitalization, where even in my weakened physical and mental condition, I simply refused to participate in the 12-Step, AA-oriented "recovery" program there, and was thrown out (quite legitimately, I thought at the time, but don't think so now; alternatives should have been available, not the least of which is SMART Recovery)---I first had the realization that AA might not be the solution. Something different was needed, but at the time I didn't know what. As I expressed it to an professional addiction counselor at the time, citing an AA adage, "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Looking at the Alternatives

For the first time I did some serious reading in the field outside the standard AA literature. This soon revealed many alternatives to the Twelve Step approach which had never been presented to me. Some of these alternatives still stressed the goal of complete abstinence from alcohol (At the time I ruled out any suggestion of "moderate" drinking for me, at least for the time being; this has since become for me a goal of permanent abstinence.)

Finding SMART Recovery

Without knowing much about it, I found that the most attractive of these was SMART Recovery, not because I had any real understanding of its philosophy, but because its literature seemed the most sensible of any I read. (I also looked seriously at Rational Recovery, and found Jack Trimpey's first book, The Small Book , inspiring but his second quite limited, dealing only with the immediate problem of drinking rather than the broad range of problems inspiring the behavior). Even here, I note that I had an innate sense that my own personal judgment in these matters was important to my recovery; I should not and could not simply rely on the wisdom of others, however well-intentioned and experienced they might be. SMART Recovery was also available in the Washington area, and a Hotline listed in the phone book to tell you where they were. (At the time, the years-long "training" of AA and the generally benign view of society toward "support groups" as a means of solving personal problems still dominated my thinking.)

An Open Mind

Still, having entered SMART Recovery meetings and philosophy with only an open mind (perhaps even skepticism, more about my ability to make any program work for me than about SR itself), I found something considerably more. As I told my friend at lunch that day some two years ago, I realized that I felt intellectually comfortable with this approach. This was something I never really had with AA, where I felt I was required to accept things in my guts and mind I knew I simply didn't believe. It was as if I had miraculously found a key which fit the lock I had been trying to open for years. I suspect, with some misgivings, that the Heaven's Gate cult members at some point must have had a similar experience, although they obviously believed that theirs was a transcendent solution which applied to all mankind; I never believed my key worked for anybody but me. Indeed, one of the things I have come to see is that AA, Moderation Management, Rational Recovery, etc., or indeed only parts of them, all can have validity for different people.

With AA I had always felt that it should work for me, but never that it would work for me. More importantly, I never felt it was personally applicable to me or compatible with the way that I thought I was constructed. AA was a "one size fits all" approach (and RR, especially in its more recent versions, didn't seem that different). SMART Recovery emphasized individuality. And it turned out to be more of a neutral problem-solving methodology, a sort of construct-your-own-route-to-sobriety approach rather than an ideology or "what-you-must-do" kit. SMART Recovery's approach was based on cognitive theory, in particular Albert Ellis' Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which emphasized close identification of all thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, followed by examination of them and challenging of their irrational (self-defeating) elements. This was something I had been doing in other areas of my life all my adult years!

In retrospect, I have come to feel that the several hospitals and treatment programs I experienced, although at times I sensed that some of them had somewhat different philosophies from the 12-Step approach, never emphasized these differences enough. They were too dependent on AA for outside support and indeed for much of their professional staffs. And---let's face it---they were sadly behind the times in medicine, never considering what is now becoming standard practice in other branches of medicine, the importance of patients' contributions to their own recoveries.

As I gradually become more involved in SMART Recovery, chairing a few meetings after a couple of months and even taking over the coordinatorship of the group after half a year, I began to realize that I was beginning to adopt as my own its core philosophy on addiction---a confidence in the ability of human beings to correct their own errors, to examine their own problems rationally and methodically, and to find their own solutions. It emphasized not only personal responsibility, but personal ability. The power to free myself from addiction rested solely with me and not anyone else, no Higher Power or even any God that I might come to believe in some day (Many people come to SMART Recovery because of its secular humanism base; I didn't and would still like to believe in something beyond human beings, possibly a moral construct).

I Stop Being An "Alcoholic"

I can see only in retrospect that perhaps the critical stage in my development in this first year was that I early on abandoned my view, fostered by AA, that I was a single "alcoholic" personality. I replaced this with the SMART Recovery view (this was early RR, too---Jack Trimpey abandoned this in his later writings) of an addict as having two distinct personalities, one of which wanted to drink or use, the other which equally desperately wanted not to. I came to understand that for my drinking life, there was no "real me," but rather a combination of these two conflicting "me's."

Equipped with this radically new view of myself, I nevertheless in the first few months in SMART Recovery still had an essentially negative approach, although at the time a highly useful one. Even while recognizing the importance of my non-drinking personality, I understood only that I personally was able to resist drinking. But that was enough. I also came to understand that what I was abandoning was merely temporary addiction, not permanent alcoholism---getting rid of the absolutistic approach was important, too. A critical moment came early on when I was able to isolate the most irrational thought I was carrying around with me about my addiction---that it was inevitable that I would relapse again. I discarded this dependence on the past.

I Begin Taking Responsibility

As time went by, my feeling of personal responsibility for any drink I might take deepened (or for taking any actions, particularly those which might encourage addictive thoughts), and I found myself having a much more positive view of this responsibility. This eventually led to a strong sense of my own empowerment which made me more confident of my ability to make choices which would lead to a better life, ones that I determined by a process of rational analysis.

By this time, my views on the dual nature of my personality dealing with alcohol had undergone yet another change. The "pro-drinking" side, (which RR calls the Addictive Voice, but seems to me more subtly captured by a variety of terms for irrational thinking related to addiction) had so lessened in intensity that for weeks on end only the non-drinking personality was present in my consciousness. By now I regarded this (as far as drinking was concerned) as the "real me;" the "pro-drinking" voice was an unimportant sideshow, although still potentially dangerous. I could see that the next task for me would be to integrate this non-drinking personality into the much more general view I had of myself as I attempted to live my larger life. Drinking was simply becoming unimportant to me in this larger picture. My view of myself as an "alcoholic" was now entirely missing.

I Become Fully Integrated Through SMART Recovery Meetings

The group meetings of SMART Recovery I attended proved to be vital in adding to my understanding and sense of empowerment. While many if not most in the group were anti-AA, or at least non-religious, there was a wide variety of approaches and beliefs in those I encountered. The open format of discussion, allowing for cross-talk and argument among the discussants, was congenial to my own approach of problem-solving. Here the scientific method of examination used in REBT was a constant part of the exercise for me, carried out through its ABCs methodology. I realized that I could only exercise my decision-making power after I fully understood the realities of my situation.

I quickly grew to look forward to the group meetings, feeling free to raise any drinking-related problem I had, knowing that the free-ranging discussion would usually give me some new insights into my problem(s), not least through simply listening carefully to what I myself was (as honestly as possible) saying. But I also came to understand that the chemistry that was going on in these meetings for me---and I think for most other participants---was not so much that of a "support group," that is, one automatically providing understanding and backing for whatever one's views or actions were. Rather, it was a "self-help" group, one in which I was expected to work on my own problems and draw from the others some insights which would be useful in my own recovery from past addiction. Constructive observation and criticism, not "support," (which came anyway) was the key element in these meetings.

Here again, the emphasis was on the self and the ability to decide and take action accordingly. And here again, too, the direction of "enlightenment" for each of us was a greater understanding of what made us tick, why we drank or used (the forbidden question in AA!) and how to stop it and stay stopped. In my own case, it even allowed me to construct a working mental model of my addiction which I believe accounted for the physiology involved but at the same time told me I had a temporary predisposition toward alcohol abuse which I could combat in certain specific ways and which would diminish with time.

Not Everything In SMART Recovery is Gospel---By Definition

I also used or discarded various parts of the SMART Recovery program as I went along, using my own judgment about their usefulness or applicability to me, but still fulfilling the larger emphasis of the program of self-analysis and responsibility. Some, such as the "pro-drinking" personality part, I soon translated into my own ideas about the function of neural pathways. Others, such as the almost universal clamor for "self-esteem," I was eventually able to identify as a useless red herring in my search for freedom from addiction. I also found I had to substitute "self-enhancing" and "self-defeating" for "rational" and "irrational" in many settings, since there were too many irrational thoughts and actions I had which were clearly either harmless or actually helpful. I further came to claim as my own one group member's assertion that in moments of greatest stress, falling back on a blind faith in the correctness of my earlier rational decision not to drink was entirely legitimate.

Finally, I further strengthened these efforts---indeed, it almost became a separate track of recovery---by writing down in great detail my observations and analyses of my own alcohol-related activities and thoughts. This was not for the benefit of any future historians! I found leisurely contemplation and actually thinking through thoughts came only by writing them down. (Montaigne in his Essays says, "The only time I think is when I write.") This was crucial for me to understand myself---and with this understanding there then later came specific answers to immediate problems which had encouraged my drinking in the past. An important part of the process was that I introduced some of these ideas into the group discussions and got further feedback, which refined and in many cases changed my thinking.

The Future

The journey for me has been a surprising one---not the least part of it its end result of not drinking for what has now become a period of several years. I am now espousing beliefs I could not have dreamed of earlier. Some experienced in "alcoholism" treatment may claim that the seeds of all of these beliefs I outline here are in fact present in one form or another in some of the approaches I insist here I have abandoned. But I would maintain that they have been largely suppressed or ignored, and that the 12-step package taken as a whole is clearly a fundamentally different philosophy, as indeed is RR's single emphasis on the immediate addiction alone and its physical location in the primitive parts of the brain. Neither of these approaches could work for me. As a result, I have been not only more successful in my efforts to overcome addiction but have become a better person and contributing member of society as well. Although the emphasis throughout these remarks has been on personal transformation, I know that the end goal of the well-lived existence can only be achieved through my caring about and integrating into the larger elements of this existence---home, family, work and society at large.

This is Essay No. 6, issued September, 1998.

Previous Essays

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

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