We are never finished products. Even late in life, we are still forming.
Irvin D. Yalom, Becoming Myself
When we accept ourselves in all our weakness, flaws, and failings, we can begin to fulfil an even more challenging responsibility: accepting the weakness, limitations, and mixed-up-ed-ness of those we love and respect. Then and only then, it seems, do we become able to accept the weakness, defects, and shortcomings of those we find it difficult to love.
Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection
The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety — it’s connection.
Johann Hari
Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.
Brené Brown
The journey of the self never ends. For as long as we are able to breathe, new possibilities present themselves, “One day at a time.”
Banal as it might seem at first glance, this maxim allows us to concentrate on what is in front of us at any given moment. Liberated from the weight of regrets from the past or anxieties regarding the future, we can cultivate the art of being present where we are right now, with ourselves, those who surround us, and the natural world of which we are an integral part.
This process of self-understanding is a lifelong process. Now in my 60s, opportunities to question, explore, and reflect are presented to me every day. By overcoming my hesitancy of feeling, showing, and sharing my vulnerability, I find myself in a process of continuous evolution. There is no goal, no finish line.
None of this can be discovered as long as we remain tucked up in our isolation, that place into which some of us — as young children — retreated after the disappointments of abandonment, neglect, and humiliation had been repeatedly endured.
Turning away from, — becoming “apart from” — the world that seemed so threatening, appeared to be an intelligent approach at that time. In the absence of other options such as fight or flight, it was, in fact, the only viable way of surviving what was, for me, a hostile environment. A characteristic of this stance is the belief that goes with it: that we are the only ones beyond the Pale, the black sheep, the odd one out.
Imagine my surprise when, about twenty years ago, I first entered the rooms of Twelve Step recovery and began to explore new possibilities for living. First CoDA (Co-Dependents Anonymous), then AA (the original Twelve Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous), then further topic-specific fellowships, of which there are now almost one hundred, active all around the world.
In each one, that same strange feeling emerged, as if the others in the room had read my diaries or had been thoroughly briefed about my life and inner world in advance. It turned out that I was not the “only one”. Countless people had stories very similar to mine. That feeling of loneliness began to dissipate.
That feeling had become very familiar over time. It was that feeling of being out of place as a child, as if inadvertently dropped off on the wrong planet. The hope that some day, a UFO would land nearby to pick us up and take us to our true home. The relief we felt for the first time, as teenagers, when we took that first drink, smoked our first joint, or discovered any substance or process which provided immediate, temporary relief from the nebulous “unbearability of being” that we felt but could not articulate.
On suddenly finding others who shared the same fate, new worlds of opportunity opened up. Sharing in the spirit of kinship and fellowship helped me grow just as much as it helped the others. The stories shared in such rooms reveal how recovery can be a shared journey of discovery, not just a one-way path to healing.
Those rooms contained what I had been seeking in the bottle and bong for so many years: the safety that enabled and encouraged me to simply be myself, to explore who I was, and to discard the façade I had been maintaining for so long, a habit which had been wearing me down to the point of exhaustion.
This process of recovery began after having “hit bottom”. While the addictive dynamics we adopt — most commonly in the years of youth — do work well for a period of time, the magic wand begins to lose its vitality at some point. Thinking primitively that more will produce more of the desired effect, we simply dig ourselves deeper into the hole, a hole that causes even more problems, to add to the pile we had been avoiding all the time.
One characteristic of addiction is that the deeper we dig ourselves into this hole, the less capable we are of recognising that we are in a hole. Denial and delusion take hold. It usually takes some grave disruption (an arrest, an accident, demise of relationship or loss of a job, etc.) to shake us to our senses. The lucky ones find a way of using the experience of hitting bottom to fuel our new life of recovery.
In my case it became evident that the Grim Reaper had been waiting at my door. My addiction had gotten to the point that it could be described as suicide in instalments. Behind the façade of functionality, my soul was dying on the vine. In a moment of clarity — a moment of grace — I could see that a decision had to be made.
At the ripe old age of forty-two, it was time to decide to give up, to leave this incarnation, to succumb to the suicidal process, or to embrace the Yes! which, though hidden under layers of fear, resentment, and self-pity, still had a beating pulse. Inspired by those who had already been at this turning point and had chosen life, I decided to join them on the shared journey.
Every roomful of recovering addicts is a roomful of miracles. Ask us and most would admit that we should really have kicked the bucket a long time ago. For reasons beyond our comprehension, we had been guided and protected up to that turning point and had been granted sufficient clarity to make the decisive choice.
The prospect of death thus became a constant companion to us, not in any morbid sense but in a way that helped us cultivate gratitude for simply being alive in a world which, we gradually discovered, also contained tenderness, beauty, and wonder.
Embracing, acknowledging, and owning our mortality can enrich life, foster urgency, and strip away superficialities. By coming to terms with our imperfections, our humanity, and our own inevitable death, we learn to live more fully and authentically.
The kinship we discover in the rooms of Twelve Step recovery quenches our deep human thirst for connection. The anonymity of these communities helps create a safe space where we can explore, discover, and share who we truly are, who we are becoming. Authenticity in relationships helps shape who we really are.
The connection for which we yearn was identified by a prominent Swiss psychiatrist some years before AA was founded, and this discovery was to have wide ramifications for multitudes in the decades that followed, right up to today.
In the late 1920’s, almost a decade before Alcoholics Anonymous was started in 1935, an American socialite, a young man of privilege from New England went to Switzerland to be treated for his alcoholism by Dr Carl Jung, — one of the great psychiatrists of his day.
Together with Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Jung is recognised as one of the founders of psychotherapy. His break with Freud came about from his insistence that we humans have an innate desire to be connected to an energy field beyond our comprehension, the totality of Creation. He argued that the fulfilment of this desire was a key element of any healing process.
Jung told this patient, a man named Roland Hazard, that his only hope of finding a solution — and thus the healing from the progressive, terminal disease from which he was suffering, — would be to experience what he termed “a vital spiritual experience”.
Roland returned to New York and surrounded himself with spiritual seekers, members of the so-called Oxford Group. He told a friend in the Oxford Group about his encounter with Jung. This friend, Ebby Thatcher, in turn, related Jung’s ideas to his childhood friend, now a hopeless alcoholic in the late stages of the disease named Bill. W, who ended up being one of the two Co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The conversation between Ebby and Bill is regarded as the advent of the Twelve Step approach to recovery from which millions benefit today. This approach believes that recovery from alcoholism, — and ultimately used to successfully treat any addiction — is a spiritual approach.
It really goes back to Carl Jung. What people don’t realise is that Carl Jung almost didn’t share that information with that patient. In 1961, just months before his passing, in one of the last letters that Jung wrote before he passed away, he writes to Bill W in response to Bill’s earlier — and admittedly very late — thank you note to Jung, acknowledging his contribution to the emergence of the Twelve Step movement.
In his response, Jung reveals that he almost didn’t share that perspective with the patient. He said he was afraid of being criticised because, as a scientist and a man of medicine, if he started speaking about spirituality, he might be ridiculed or at least misunderstood. People have their prejudices, and this fact almost led to him remaining silent. He was reticent to tell Roland, this patient, straight out, that the real solution was a spiritual solution.
What Jung says in this letter reveals an amazing concept. He said what he saw in the patient was that the patient’s craving for alcohol was a lower-level manifestation of “man’s thirst for union with God.”
In other words, what was this person was looking for was that profound sense of self-transcendence and feeling of oneness that we get when we are released from the bondage of self. We rise above the separate ego, and we experience unity consciousness, becoming one with the Universe, with the Everything. This experience enables us to inhabit who we truly are.
That’s what he was really looking for. He didn’t have a clue that that’s what he was looking for, instead simulating through self medicating, through numbing with a chemical. That is the key.
The key is that you can’t just take away someone’s bottle and say: “Now just go sit there and be miserable with yourself, hating life. ”
Our task is to help them find what they were looking for all along, what we had been looking for all along, which is the peace, the serenity, the wholeness, that we get through spiritual awakening. Here it is important to note that spiritual does not mean religious, though spiritual does not exclude the latter. Some of us had experienced religious abuse in our family of origin and so needed to develop our own image of a loving Great Spirit.
The power of storytelling in recovery is something which must be experienced to be believed. Just as in the story above, we tell each other our stories. We relate what we have learned, what has worked and what has not worked, in the first person.
By telling our own story, we harness the power of storytelling to connect generations, preserve wisdom, and leave behind a meaningful imprint. It is the stories we tell — especially the honest, painful, and beautiful ones — that survive us.
This quality of sharing stories and non-judgemental interaction has been referred to as the “spirituality of imperfection”. We do not shy away from our flaws. We candidly discuss regrets, insecurities, and past mistakes — showing that true maturity comes from humility.
Our main qualification as servants of recovery is that we have learned more from our failures than our successes. We qualify by means of the countless failures we have experienced on our corrupt spiritual searching, and our ability to have learned from them as we embraced a more genuine approach.
The quintessence of the spiritual truth is that, as in the case of the acorn, we are fully sufficient in our being. This is not to be confused with self-sufficiency. Fully sufficient implies that we have within us all the ingredients necessary to develop and express the totality of our potential, that we can wean ourselves away from emotional dependencies on the people, places, and things that surround us.
In the realisation of this benign form of self-centredness we begin to experience that which comes from the outer world as a bonus. In the words of the Great Prophet, we find ourselves “in this world but not of it.”
That is the Holy Grail of Emotional Sobriety towards which we grow each day, supported by each other, one day at a time.
