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An alcoholic with some years of successful sobriety behind
him once remarked that when he was still drinking, his notion of recovery was
that it must be like he felt after waking up on Sunday morning and realizing
that he had run out of booze. Recovery, as he saw it at the time through the
lens of his active alcoholism, really meant deprivation, indeed, life-long
deprivation. He envisioned year after year of desperately wanting but being unable to drink.
It was therefore not surprising that he recoiled with horror and disgust from
such a dire and wretched prospect - and kept on drinking for many additional
years as though thereby to flee a fate worse than death itself, recovery(which
for him meant only: prolonged deprivation and withdrawal).
Because individuals in the grip of addiction
characteristically imagine recovery to be a state of perpetual and ultimately
futile self-denial and deprivation with no gain except the questionable(to them) satisfaction of doing the right
thing(and perhaps staying out of trouble with those around them!), they are
seldom attracted, but are far more commonly repelled, by the prospect of a life
without the gratification of their addiction(s). The mere mention of the word
recovery to an active addict may result in the same kind of snarling,
shrinking-back and fending-off that movie vampires display at the sign of the
Cross.
And if recovery from addiction indeed means no more than
giving up the addiction and thereafter existing indefinitely in what amounts to
a state of chronic, unmitigated and fundamentally unrecompensed withdrawal, in a
kind of reduced, constricted and hedonically emasculated pseudo-existence, then
it ought not to surprise anyone that addicted individuals thinking this way,
i.e. the majority of addicted individuals, quite commonly choose to pass up the
chance to embrace it. Thanks - but no thanks! is the common reply to suggestions
that they thenceforth live a life that seems to them both boring and painful.
Alcoholics in treatment(actually in pre-treatment, before
they stop drinking) not infrequently exclaim: 'I'd rather be dead than go to
rehab or to AA!' In part this is an aversion to the embarrassment and
humiliation they associate with such a course; but the deeper dread is that of
an existence deprived of alcohol. Life, they reason, is already hard enough -
even with alcohol. The prospect of living without what seems to them
their sole comfort, protector and enhancer, alcohol, is more than they can or
will imagine. And so they continue to drink, often well aware of at least a
substantial portion of the harm their drinking is doing to them. For bad as
things are for them while drinking, the alternative, i.e. recovery, seems
unquestionably worse - in fact, unendurable. And anyone who proposes such a
course to the active alcoholic risks being regarded as an ignorant, even a
sadistic fool who does not even begin to understand the implications of what he
is so flippantly suggesting: a life without alcohol.
Therefore, the first step in answering the question,
"What is recovery?' is to specify clearly and unmistakably what recovery is
not:
Recovery is not a state of permanent wretchedness
and deprivation more appropriate to a self-abnegating sacrificial
religious mystic of the hair shirt variety than to an ordinary individual
seeking to be set free from the coils of addiction. For if recovery
were indeed such an affair of loss, suffering and perpetual struggle,
who but saints, heroes, masochists or madmen could possibly desire
or hope to succeed(if success is the right word for such a horrific
enterprise) at it?
There is of course much more that recovery is not(but
which pre-recovering addicted individuals typically believe that it is). For
example:
Recovery is not a false, hypocritical, smarmy and
nauseating ongoing Sunday School lesson of the worst possible type,
in which the addicted individual, formerly(as he sees it) free and
independent, is horribly transformed(brainwashed?) into a dependent
and unthinking zombie-conformist reduced to chanting banal bumper-sticker
slogans to console him for his loss not only of his addiction but
of his very self.
What then can recovery be said to be in a truly
positive sense? If we shuck away all of the misleading and instantly repellent
things that recovery is not(but is commonly thought to be by those
regarding it from afar with mingled contempt and horror), what then is left?
Recovery at its simplest and indeed in its essence
is about nothing more or less than the recovery of life itself.
It is about getting back something of value(life), not merely giving
up something that is strongly desired(addiction). For addiction,
which seems to be the friend and even the enhancer of life, is in
reality its deadliest and most incorrigible adversary. Addiction
by its very nature is a form of bondage, even slavery (L. addictere,
to be bound to another). Recovery is the recovery of life and
of freedom.
Recovery, in other words, is about increase, addition,
augmentation, expansion, health and growth - not, as it invariably seems to the
addicted individual, about subtraction, diminution, decrease and even a form of
living death(life lacking any meaning once the addiction is taken away,
&etc.). It is about liberation and freedom from the progressively
totalitarian and constricting demands of addiction(see
"Getting
Away With Addiction?" for more information).
Yet it seems that this simple and amply confirmed
knowledge is seldom effectively communicable to those who most need it, those
for whom indeed in some cases it is literally a matter of life or death. For it
is as though not merely their eyes and their ears have been stopped and
obstructed by the unwillingness of their addiction to hear the truth that
threatens its continued dominance over them - but their very judgment and
intelligence themselves have become so infiltrated and corrupted by the *agent
provocateurs* of the addiction that, like the brainwashed citizens of a closely
censored totalitarian tyranny, they are willfully impervious to everything that
seems to contradict the Party, i.e. the addiction line. back to top
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