15 Comments
Feb 9Liked by Carl Erik Fisher

So wild, seeing these definitions side by side! When defining recovery for myself, I very much resonate with the description you offered for your personal experience.

And, while I’m sober from alcohol, I don’t consider alcohol my most significant addiction. I’m great at abstinence. But addiction to anorexia and disordered eating, obsessive-compulsive patterning, external validation seeking, overwork, etc., have been much harder for me than just “stopping something.” I haven’t had alcohol for four years as of this Sunday and don’t really think about it (outside of writing). I still feel like I’m just getting started with nearly everything else.

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That's one of the biggest problems with recovery definitions that focus too much on abstinence--neglects too many behavioral addictions that aren't so simply divided into all or nothing. Thanks for writing!

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I'm so grateful you are so generous to invite us to all walk through this with you, Carl. It really feels so validating to me that you pose this basic question: What is recovery?" because when I first sought help for my addiction, I felt a lot of sadness and frustration that my medical care providers, while kind, kind of looked at me with blank stares when I asked them, what do I do? How do I fix me? There was no answer. Maybe even worse, there wasn't a dynamic discussion, like you offer us so sincerely here, about how no one really knows for sure, and that that can be an opportunity for creativity in some ways, and a chance to learn yourself, how you see things, what you are open to re-interpreting. That in openly exploring the possibility of what recovery could be, the exploration of what recovery is is part of the recovery itself (so meta!).

For me, what distinguishes my experience of recovery is my experience of addiction. I don't want to see my recovery as a way to forget, degrade, devalue or dismiss what my addiction showed me: the depths of my ability and willingness to abandon myself, to hurt myself, to disrespect myself. I know what is humanly possible, for any of us, under certain seemingly impossible conditions. When I hear the idea of "loss of control" I am troubled by it, how to understand it. Because for me, I was desperate to abandon control. I was trying so hard to control myself, meaning to force myself to be and do things to uphold a false identity, that when I drank it was my greatest relief from that kind of "self-control." I wanted to lose control. I didn't even care what I handed control over to, I was just glad it wasn't mine to hold for a while.

It was fucked up, but maybe becoming addicted to alcohol was actually my first attempt at recovery. My first addiction was to trying to get love, safety, and care by pretending I was okay when I wasn't. I didn't know that I had trauma, I didn't know I was trying to heal myself, but I was.

I don't think I can understand or expand my recovery without honoring the realness that I once knew what it was like to harm myself against my own intentions. If you've never been addicted to something, you cannot understand or have that kind of self-perspective. It's valuable. It's not total trash. It distinguishes my "general wellness" from my recovery. My recovery is a collection of practices all threaded together by my intention to evolve, beyond survival. Beyond that place where I chose to break away from myself because I didn't know what else to do. Now I'm learning "what else to do." :)

General health and wellness can be taken as one off, disconnected activities, like exercise for the body, puzzles for the mind, volunteering for the heart, etc. But recovery is an integrated collection of things, a realization that the body, mind, spirit, and soul are all one. My first community I had to reconnect was the community of me. I would say I had a "god-shaped hole inside' but I would say I had some broken connections inside me, and recovery is how I'm restoring them.

Maybe the difference between addiction and recovery is about answering the question: what identity (or system) are you doing a particular set of things in order to uphold? And who gets to decide which ones are worthy or good? In my addiction, the world decided. In my recovery, I decide. In recovery, we have to first learn to respect ourselves. And to discern. Because what is sold to us as 'health and wellness' in this sick culture can sometimes be addiction in disguise!

I didn't mean for this to be so long. I really cannot tell you how important your work is to me in my recovering life. You give us a chance to be part of shaping our own experience like no one else I've encountered in my recovery. Thank you, Carl, for the work you do and how you do it.

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What a thoughtful comment, thank you so much for sharing, and for the kind words! I think creativity is a beautiful way to put it. And it's so important, as you say, to be creative about how we interact with our identity. Probably to create and to deconstruct (productively) is necessary. And, I love the idea that the activity of addiction is, in a way, an attempt at recovery. That rings true to me.

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Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with me! I’m so grateful.

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Feb 14Liked by Carl Erik Fisher

"Re-cover". You've got me asking myself what are we like when we are properly "covered". What makes being covered a healthy state, if indeed it is. It seems to be a state recovery wants to get us back to.

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My first thought is the healthy kind of "covered" means having the essential ingredients covered. Almost like the foundational levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As in, "I've got that covered." But for most people, there is something meaningful beyond that as well...

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Feb 10Liked by Carl Erik Fisher

Hmmm… Assuming there is in humanity an infinite abyss, assuming there is a God, assuming God can and will fill that abyss…

Lots of assumptions in that intro Carl.

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Well, part of my intention is to point out, as an observation rather than an endorsement, that this theological story is one of the organizing metaphors that's been inherited in recovery talk, implicitly when not explicitly, and not to say that this is the right way. And I meant to question it further in the conclusion... Ie presuming that we lack something, God or even a secular sort of "lack", may be a mistake. Though I can see why you might bristle at the invocation of the God talk at the start!

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Feb 10Liked by Carl Erik Fisher

Invocation seems an apt term. Of all the polymaths in all the gin joints … I can’t imagine many better ways to lose those 1/9 of readers who have no interest in religious approaches to recovery.

I hope it’s obvious to just about anyone with eyes in their head that the 12 Step movement is based on religion, and that the modern treatment industry is based on the 12 Step movement. But what’s to be gained by repeated references to God and spirituality if we’re seeking a universal framework? Can we operationalize and measure spirituality?

And how do we deal with Bill W and the 12 Step movement and the treatment industry’s dishonest use of the terms spiritual and spirituality? Bill W used these terms to hide the religious nature of AA. Even Ernest Kurtz, a staunch advocate for AA, admitted as much.

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Feb 10Liked by Carl Erik Fisher

Good one. Well researched and presented. You might consider reviewing this group of six men writing their individual take on recovery. I offer mine with links in the first paragraph to the others.

https://deerambeau.substack.com/p/trudging-the-road-of-happy-destiny

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Thanks Dee, this is great, I'll check it out.

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Are you familiar with the "Black Sun" tool from the work of psychiatrist Phil Stutz? https://www.thetoolsbook.com/the-black-sun His work informs my own definition: Recovery is the process of learning to "fill up" from the inside rather than the outside.

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I saw the documentary and he seems like an interesting character! I like this tool. It seems to incorporate important aspects of acceptance and mindfulness that are easy to say but super hard to do with cravings and urges.

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On my post about recovery definitions, I got some wonderful comments from an anonymous reader that I want to share here. (posting without editing, I think they mean HiTop not "hitap"):

Can we be pluralists without becoming relativists? I've seen "multiple paths," in RCO and community contexts, turn into a cynical justification for normalizing destructive behavior. And, as I argued before, it too easily becomes an "anything goes" philosophy that abdicates responsibility to actually help people in services.

I suspect, with both addiction and recovery, we need to go in the Hitap direction. The global entities are too obscure, if they exist (nominalism). But symptoms of addiction are a frequently co-occurring family of elements as are elements of recovery. Researchers and clinicians need to move from the global entity to empirically accessible phenomenology and their longitudinal manifestations.

I think there are core, common elements to good recovery. A capacity for self-honesty (for me, a life-long process that I work toward each day). An ability to manage negative emotions. The healing of psychic and emotional damage created by active addiction (often a process that is never fully complete). Genuine social-connectedness (or perhaps other orientedness is better, as I heard once in a meeting). A willingness to live in reality. Are these clinically accessible? I don't know. But do I know when someone in my life has gone from active addiction to cultivating these capacities? I think Brown and Ashforh are right: overtime, it's self-evident.

I still think that too many people misunderstand the basic distinction between clinical and recovery frameworks. In clinical frameworks, we act on people to get a result. And our actions are predicated on (or should be predicated on, rather) a diagnosis reflecting an etiology. In recovery frameworks (at least the ones I know), people heal themselves through exploration and work. The sources of suffering are too complex for categorization or external diagnosis: many of us work our entire life to fully understand them. Understanding the sources of our suffering is itself both a goal and enabler of the process. Healers can create enabling environments and provide exemplary models. However, this is precisely where much of the controversy lies: the idea that recovery requires work sounds too much like a moralist, bootstraps argument for many people. And this cultural reaction covers for something else: the work is hard, and the accomplishment of "riches" without work is a deep seated American dream.

The problem, I think, is that none of the questions (except maybe a better diagnostic approach) are separable for the general crisis of our times. There is no domain, not even the sciences, where we know how to clearly separate pluralism from relativism. Living in reality? In the post-truth era, this has become a structural crisis related to the entire landscape of our media and institutions, and has led us globally to the brink of planetary crisis. Given that citizenship has been hollowed out in the United States, and democracy itself is under threat, how could it be a clear, resonating framework to talk about recovery? Addiction and recovery don't somehow stand outside the legitimation crisis characteristic of modernity--the idea that we can understand them apart from these other dimensions of our cultural and political moment is a clinical illusion.

I agree with Cornel West that we have abandoned a serious, adult discussion of morality to the right. I recently heard him say: maturity comes from wrestling with suffering and history. That is a beautiful encapsulation of recovery.

At the heart of much of this discussion is the incapacity of clinical frameworks to capture the full complexity of human existence, and the impasse that creates for those who are tasked to address addiction utilizing science and through techniques that can be replicated and evaluated for their effectiveness.

As a result, we have expanded the bounds of the "clinical" in, as you note, an eclectic way, so that much of what happens in clinical contexts lies outside my constrictive definition of diagnosis based on etiology (more precisely, causal mechanism) accompanied by standardized treatments. I think that this has created a dangerous landscape of claiming clinical authority while utilizing practices that are closer to craft or art. We need the arts of healing. I see recovery as a cultural movement as one of these arts. But they are profoundly failable in ways that we should not obscure by draping them in the language of evidence.

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