Answer Addiction

Tag: narcissism

  • Why You Should Embrace AA Groupthink and Shed Your Terminal Uniqueness

    Why You Should Embrace AA Groupthink and Shed Your Terminal Uniqueness

    AA encouraged me, a sauced snowflake loaded on liquor and individualistic narcissism, to put aside enough of myself to embrace two traits required to curb my alcoholism: discipline and structure.

    Addiction has a grand irony: For a disease whose treatment thrives on identification with fellow sufferers, its symptoms are extraordinarily individual. Precisely how addiction manifests in each of us — drug of choice, length of active substance abuse, depth of debauchery — varies more widely than nearly any major affliction.

    This is because addiction, like no other ailment, turns us insane and then turns us loose on the world. Ours is not a disease subject to controlled clinical settings; we find ourselves in circumstances that, though certainly following a pattern, have variables as unique as life is complicated. I have a recovering friend who, unlike me, has never sideswiped a taxi in the Holland Tunnel, blind drunk, and kept going. But alas, I’ve never been so creative as to hide vodka in a vase, as he has (#HappyHourFlowers).

    As an alcoholic, then, my addiction-fueled adventures differ from the experiences of other problem drinkers. These exploits also are so abnormal in terms of their setting — namely, civilized society — that they feed another peculiarity of addiction: the “terminally unique” mindset that I am, somehow, alone in my inability to stop drinking at any cost.

    For me, the result was a hopeless alienation that, in turn, only further fed my alcoholism. Afraid and isolated, I gave up trying to give up.

    Amid this lonesome landscape lies the tailored times in which we live. A solid case can be made that we are in the single most individualistic era in human history.

    Take me, for example. Like most people Gen X or younger, from early childhood I’ve been called unique, singular, special. I’ve been told I can do anything, be anyone, and was perfect exactly as I was. I am, it appears, a gentle snowflake.

    Fast forward to today’s iWorld. We have made-to-order music playlists, binge TV watchlists, e-newsletter subscriptions. Our Facebook and Twitter feeds serve up personally-algorithmed news items between posts from our personally-constructed list of cyber-friends. From our social media silos, we see, hear, and click on hyper-customized content — our own little gated communities in the World Wide Web. For God’s sake, even our sleep is customized.

    We do exactly what we want, when we want, how we want. We ultra-individualize, then wonder why modern society is so uber-fractured.

    And then, those of us with addiction get too high or too drunk for too long, and need help. Suddenly, we uber-individuals need help from… well… ourselves.

    And when we walk into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, that’s exactly what we get.

    AA Pluribus Unum

    Despite its imperfections — including those noted by yours truly — nothing has ever made me feel so simultaneously special and ordinary as my early experiences in Alcoholics Anonymous. As a newcomer, I was told I was the most important person in the room; but as a person in the room I was told that, though our experiences may be vastly dissimilar, we were all here for the same reprieve to the same disease.

    First and foremost — before I ever considered that I may have found a solution to my compulsive, destructive drinking — AA provided a cure for my self-diagnosed tragic uniqueness. I wasn’t sure I could quit drinking but, after just a few meetings of identifying with the similar compulsions of fellow alcoholics, I was damn sure that I wasn’t the only one who had this affliction. A lot of acronyms get thrown around in AA; perhaps one should be Alienation Antidote.

    For me, this prerequisite to recovery — this normalization of my abnormality — was an immediate and amazing upside to AA, one that fortunately superseded or masked some of my preconceived concerns.

    Like most people, I skidded along the bottom before finding recovery. Months before my eventual sobriety date, I’d been warned by peers during an unsuccessful rehab stint that AA was a cult or, at least, cultish in its groupthink. I was told that there would be a lot of people spouting a lot of nonsense and, worse, telling me what to believe while they did it.

    And you know what? They were partially right. AA did indeed ask me to set aside some of my individualism — my preconceived notions, my longstanding perceptions, the personal penchants that made me me — in favor of a program that, I was told, had a well-established track record of helping alcoholics achieve sobriety.

    AA encouraged me, a sauced snowflake loaded on liquor and individualistic narcissism, to put aside enough of myself to embrace two traits required to curb my alcoholism: discipline and structure.

    Structured Settlement

    I came into AA a stone-cold atheist and remain a skeptical agnostic, and for a long time I thought AA’s first requirement for newcomers was that they develop faith in a higher power.

    I now realize that this isn’t true. Before AA asks for anything enshrined in the 12 steps (the higher power concept is introduced in Step 2), AA asks us to stop having complete faith in ourselves — or, at least, the drunk and desperate versions of ourselves that, alone, simply cannot stop drinking.

    The salve for this outsized self-reliance comprises some of the very same group-centric activities many AA-haters find cultish: chants like the Serenity Prayer offering a simplified perspective; readings like “How It Works” providing experience-driven direction; ubiquitous signage with familiar phrases and, of course, the ever-present Twelve Steps.

    As someone who entered AA as the Smartest Person on Earth (an unofficial title, it turned out), I fully understand how threatening this can seem. Even as a scared newcomer in desperate search of a solution, I didn’t want to trade my hellish life for a post-apocalyptic Zombieland. Despite the attraction of folks who’d clearly found a way to stay sober, I’ll admit to checking the coffee machine for Kool-Aid during my first few meetings. 

    But what I soon realized was that there was a simplistic beauty to AA’s anti-individualism that, for me, was extraordinarily effective in early recovery. My rehab roomies, I found, were just so full of themselves that, when confronted with a different approach, they reflexively labeled it full of shit.

    Are there cultish aspects to AA? Absolutely. Even Catholic masses don’t end with everyone standing in a circle holding hands. Anyone wondering why some people duck out of meetings five minutes early should re-examine that ritual.

    But by and large, AA’s so-called groupthink offers newcomers a keep-it-simple structure that — as fledgling sobriety becomes longstanding recovery — can be selectively shed. It asks spiritually disarmed newcomers to buy the whole standardized toolset… then allows us to return some piecemeal as we acquire new, more customized tools.

    I for one needed some discipline to replace the chaos my life had become. I also needed certain concepts — powerlessness over alcohol, the hurt I was causing others, the incredibly alien concept that there was, in fact, hope — beaten into my brain. In hindsight, I realize AA is repetitive for a reason.

    I see a lot of newcomers enter the rooms as customized as they are clueless. For them as for myself, rigidity en route to freedom is an entirely worthwhile tradeoff. There is value in a traditions-based organization with agreed upon rules that, when adhered to successfully, work well for many people.

    How has AA’s emphasis on the group helped you? Let us know in the comments.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Joys of Being Wrong

    The Joys of Being Wrong

    I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency.

    I had initially thought to write this story – the story of a person once self-presumed irreparably broken who recently completed chemotherapy turned Ivy League law student in a sensible, stable long-distance relationship – once I had received official acceptance letters from myriad top-ranked schools and the boundless adoration of a future wife, an expression forged in platinum, maybe with a tasteful emerald or cushion cut. Submitting it now, though, amid this very particular brand of uncertainty so laden with the weight of proving my worth, after many rejections and healthily parting ways with my girlfriend, seems a far more fitting representation of the point of recovery.

    What is that point?

    The wording will vary for everyone, of course, but to me:

    The point is not what you get: the point is what you do with it.

    Were I to await the above, the increased likelihood of this lesson being misconstrued as “quit drugs, win big!” would overshadow the actual essence of sobriety. Sure, the cash and prizes sometimes include overwhelming esteem, material gain and skyrocketing popularity; more often than not, though, the promises of recovery entail something less expected – something that we wouldn’t at onset necessarily identify as exceeding our wildest dreams, but that somehow does. That’s one of the most amazing things about all of this, really – that what we think is humdrum is actually fulfilling, and that what we think will be fulfilling actually sells us short.

    There’s a reconciliation of paradoxes implicit to the recovery process. When I heard of the addict mentality described as “negative ego” I didn’t fully grasp its implications until I heard the same rephrased by a young woman who said that, in her active addiction, she felt like a “piece of shit in the center of [her] own universe.” Later I heard such peculiar self-evaluation termed as “arrogant doormat” and “I didn’t think much of myself, but I was all that I thought about.”

    When I first got clean, the catalyst beyond threat of discontinued financial support was certainty that I would finally be recognized for the meteoric talent that I was – that all of the reasons for which I thought I used substances would be reinterpreted and rightly understood as unappreciated genius and, once so affirmed, I would no longer indulge that self-destructive tendency born of being “misunderstood” – no wait sorry – not just misunderstood like you are – distinctively misunderstood. Quitting drugs for me, however, has actually shown its primary benefit to be that I now get to participate in life just as other people do – like a person looking to what actually is instead of constant consumption with what is not, with how they’ve been wronged, with how they are somehow simultaneously better and worse than ____, all at the same time.

    Even now, despite years of practiced right-sizing and spiritual dependence, there is a part of me that continues to sustain the myth that I am somehow so special as to be immune to the conditions that dog other people, despite a consistent undercurrent of fraudulence: that I can put in a little less effort, that I am somehow shrouded in a halo sufficient to enchant those so blessed to gaze upon my angel face.

    We do not look at the world as if it were a mirror, reflecting only ourselves and whatever lies behind us: we look at the world as through a window; we see what is ahead but can’t help also catching our own reflection. Who we are, and what we think, informs what we see. That myth I maintain is delusional, so a part of who I am is delusional, and that part collects evidence to support that delusion’s accompanying grandeur. For as much as I develop my faculties of reason and reality, I think I might always retain a degree of magical thinking where I believe that maybe more is possible than may actually be possible. Sometimes I think that gives me the courage to take actions in faith and belief that might otherwise be precluded by too much logic, or not enough magic; while I can’t parse the precise extent to which that contributes to faith-based actions, it does seem to keep my chin parallel to ground and sky.

    The other day someone asked me “How do you get from pain to faith?”

    When I am in pain I am drawn closer to God. I do not balk at those who feel that pain instead causes division, or interpret pain as an absence of God: it is an absence, if you choose it to be. God is not the cause of pain; God is the solace that might be sought within it. It is almost as easy to blame God as it is to seek God; it is almost as easy to see differently as it is to see the same. When I am disappointed, it is not because God did not respond to my commands – God is not obligated to obey me; to the contrary it is I who is afforded the choice to obey God. All people have that agency – the ability to decide whether or not to honor and uphold that which is divinely informed, however “divinely informed” may be interpreted.

    Whatever face you give to God, whatever name – that entity is with you. God is intended to comfort you in the impossible length of the dark night; God is intended to draw you closer.

    What is closer? What does it feel like? Closer is the humoring of my will, the acknowledgment of its concerns and demands without automating action upon them. Closer is the awareness that maybe someone or some thing, either vaguely understandable or wholly intangible, may know better than I know. Closer is the nearly imperceptible sense of warmth you feel when you’re in great pain but know that this will not break you, that what you feel is not fully representative of your capability, because you are not just you – you are you plus that something greater; you are you and not alone.

    ___________________________________________

    When I am charged with the full control and conduct of myself, as though my will and intention were affected within a vacuum, my ego enters stages left, right and center. When I surrender some bit of my will I am more closely actualized as who I am meant to be, rather than who I think I am meant to be, or who I project that I am. When I willingly enter into and actively sustain that relationship – severing ties to the notion that it has to be just me, that it means more if I do things on my own – then the way that I see the world, as it is and with my reflection, is limitless. I am limited when I am in my own power, convinced of its sufficiency. When I am in my own power, my options consist solely of those that I am capable of conceiving; when I am in God’s power, my options are as limitless as that to which I am intentioned.

    I do not always agree with that to which I am intentioned. I recently received another “no” from an elite law school – another from one to which I was sure I’d be admitted – and have, in the past 10 minutes alone, assigned permanent and predictive weight to that decision. I have convinced myself that both my present and future fate are tethered to those rejections. I have projected that those rejections foreshadow a coordinated stonewalling effect that will prove ever prohibitive of every ambition that I have ever had, and as such I should just learn to teach spin, because that is probably how I will end up – alone, undereducated, and teaching spin – *not even at SoulCycle* (see what I did there?) – for the rest of my life.

    When I fully inhabit my individualized agency I am downright apocalyptic. I allow no slit through which a ray of truth might shine; I do not suffer fools as I misunderstand soothsayers to be. At those times, I am in the most limited space I can occupy. And then, the break; then, the unexpected; then, that which I’d so quickly discounted, manifests.

    View the original article at thefix.com