The Disease of Addiction: Or Is It?

Go to any NA meeting, or just about any other 12 step fellowship for that matter, and you will be indoctrinated into the idea you have a disease called addiction. I learned this in the first meeting I started going to, and it seemed to make a lot of sense. The problem is that what we are passing along to newcomers is that addiction is a disease. We learned it as newcomers, and pass it on as old timers. That is not really how addiction is understood by doctors and neurologists. They speak of the Disease Concept, and the Disease Model.

The distinction is this. Diabetes is a disease with physical components that can be seen and proved to be malfunctioning in some way. Introduction of insulin into the blood will artificially create the blood sugar balance that the body is not capable of creating for itself. Addiction is understood as a combination of psychological processes with physical components. Diabetes is a real disease. Addiction is not. It is beyond our ability to understand the true nature or cause. We can not pin point the location of the disorder, correct the imbalance, or patch the leak. But it is there, and we still have to deal with the consequences and effects in meaningful ways. That means we need to be able to talk about it in terms that we can all understand.

Science uses the term “Concept” in order to convey the idea of disease. Something is wrong, and needs to be treated, or fixed, or dealt with, in order to set things right again. No real physician or scientist or neurologist who is familiar with the research calls addiction a true disease . No part of addiction can be shown with scientifically conducted studies to hold to any of the parameters of a disease in the conventional definition. But we use the analogy of disease so that we may understand and discuss recovery.

Even the word “recovery” is symbolic. What we do is change. We change our attitudes, our thought patterns, our hangouts, our world view, our level of willingness, our focus of energy. As we gradually realign these aspects of how we live our lives, we begin to see significant improvements in the quality of our lives. Or we go on living in the same selfish and harmful manner that we thought of as our own way of life.

This may all seem like a subtle difference in language interpretation, but there is no doubt that many recovering addicts believe they have a disease in the literal sense. That dosn’t prevent anyone from receiving the benefits of recovery, so it may be a pointless argument to make from the very beginning. But I see it as an important function of self image. I am not a broken down piece of defective equipment, who’s natural tendency is to deviate off course, and must be reined in and de-natured to be made to fit into my community and society at large. I am a phenomenal example of complex biology, and am, under carefully maintained conditions, capable of fantastic and exquisite accomplishments that elevate all of humanity.

You can decide for yourself which side of that fence you would like to fall. The fellowship teaches us, inadvertently I think, to examine ourselves in a very negative light. I really do not have much in the way of self hatred. That is something that I have had to learn outside of the rooms. We ought to start teaching it to the newcomers in the rooms. And that needs to start with the very way we define ourselves.

Clean time, who’s counting?

I’ve got a couple of these bronze medallions stashed away around the house somewhere. They were given to me when I was member of a home group that ordered them automatically for members who had their anniversaries written in the calender. That’s a nice thing to do for someone. They get to have someone give a little speech to introduce them, they get to make a little speech of their own, and everyone gets to acknowledge their accomplishment out in the open. The key thing here is that newcomers get to see that this stuff has really worked for others before. The amount of hope this generates for many people struggling to get their shit together is simply not measurable.

But after picking up a couple of these tokens, I came to the realization that it does nothing for me. I stopped picking up both the metallic and the plastic ones quite some time ago. We have a saying in the fellowship (pardon me, but I usually hate to quote our sayings), “Everybody keeps their own clean time”. This is meant to remind us that it is not our place to point out to someone who picks up a 2 year medallion that we remember them picking up a white chip only 18 months ago. They are only fooling themselves. It also keeps us from the urge to dismiss someone with 10 years who has a legitimate prescription for powerful medication. I have taken this slogan to it’s literal extreme, and I keep my clean time myself, and I keep it to myself.

When I say that it does nothing for me to pick up chips, what I mean is that at some point I realized that I used clean time as some kind of badge of honor. I craved the recognition, admiration, and respect from those around me. I believe that the natural tendency to feel proud of one’s self in this manner is virtually universal in human nature. It is also something that many disciplines of spiritual development seek to shed from our earthly experience.

I am infinitely more satisfied when I am recognized as a good living human, or a clever problem solver, or an occasional good choice maker. After all, these are the qualities that we are ultimately seeking in recovery after we dust ourselves off. Once we have put back together our shattered lives, and make an earnest attempt to help put back together the ones we have shattered, what we have left is a constant stream of stress factor to manage, and choices to make. My greatest accomplishments come from tackling the mundane with consistency. The flash and grander of an anniversary just seems hollow and short lived compared to the endless achievement of small goals.

There is a time in our early recovery when keeping track of certain milestones and short term goals is extremely useful. Counting our clean days to 30, 60, 90 and so forth can play a major role in building the foundation of a truly accomplished life. But after a certain point, I just don’t give a shit.

The shear quantity of somesone’s clean time is no more impressive to me than the size of their bank account, luxury level of their car, or flatness of their screen. An accumulation of clean time is often a symptom of working a recovery program, but it is not in-and-of-itself the thing we seek as spiritual beings. In the same way that we say drugs are not our real problem, that we must address the cause of our drug usage, neither is simply being clean the only result we are looking for. In the NA fellowship we borrowed much of the most significant aspects of the AA fellowship. We have however done away with the promises. Our reasons are sound. You simply can’t promis something that you may never be able to deliver. It simplifies our purpose and our focus just to say you never need to use again. But the NA fellowship deliberatly leaves out a vast part of what a new life can be. You are meant to go find it for yourself without the fellowship haveing to sacrifice a sense a unity and clarity. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Sunshine of recovery will rise and set on a Horizon of abstinance. If you want to learn how to identify the “winners”, you are going to have to look at something else.

Let’s Go Nice and Easey

There is so much disillusionment and fallacies about the Steps and Traditions, and basic human nature and spirituality for that matter, that I would love to blow away right from the start. But to be quite honest, I don’t wan’t to rock the foundation right off the bat. One should ease into this kind of deconstructionism. So let’s begin with one of many basic misconceptions that I hear tossed about form time to time in meetings.

I don’t know what the meeting behavioral habits are in your area, but around here it is not uncommon to open the floor to anyone who wants to talk about anything at all. Several moments pass, and bodies squirm in uncomfortable silence while people desperately think of something to say just to penetrate the pregnant pause. This lack of structure is one thing that contributes to such inane subjects and discussions the likes of which make the veins on my neck pulse. A guy with a couple of years under his belt speaks up the other night to talk about his “stinkin’ thinkin’”. He did not use that expression, but he did say that his thought process was one in which his natural state of mind was insanity. He did not mean that he has a clinical diagnosis of some serious mental illness. He is using our Fellowship definition of insanity.

He may not be a paranoid schizophrenic, but he seriously means to say that his compass was broken right from the start. This is what he was taught by the others. Sitting in meeting after meeting after meeting, he has been told he is an addict because he was basically born that way.  What is the proof of this?  There really is none.  Science can not explain it.  It is beyond our ability to understand.  We tell newcomers all the time that this is their natural state of being.  We can not peg it entirely on genetics, though, so we have no authority to say it was due to nature.  We can not peg it totally on families, so we can’t say it was because of nurture.  But we say it like a fact, and believe it like the truth.  The only real fact here is that it is our human nature to produce reasoning and explanations for anything that is beyond our ability to figure out or understand or know.

We say on the one hand that our natural tendancy is to chose the insane choice.  But this ignores the fact that all we ever really wanted out of life was peace of mind.  We talk about a need for crisis, when what we seek through self medication is relief from stress and an escape from life’s dificulties.  So I hypothisize that our natural tendancy is to seek out the balance.  Our state of mind is not naturally insane, but we do seek our comfort at the expense of our ultimate well being, and we sometimes don’t seem to care who is damaged in the wake of our quest.  This unequaled level of selfishness is undeniably one of the main pillars of our common experience.

I am so disappointed at our collective self image as defective humans right out of the box.  We are unquestionably damaged goods, but I just don’t buy into the attitude that it happened at the factory.  I for one believe that I have always been a good, wholesome, and complete being.  I may not have all the parts in the right order, but I don’t see myself as missing any pieces either.

Stop looking at your Navel

This is not one of those blogs where I am going to stare at my navel and bore you with reflections of my spiritual condition. I am not going to pontificate about the nature of “my disease”, the trial and tribulations of “my recovery”, or praise the virtues of “my NA sponsor”. Crap, it sounds like an episode of Scrubs.

I’ve been searching the NA blogs, recovery blogs, and 12 step blogs. There seems to be mostly only AA blogs. What’s up with that? Where are the recovering addicts? Can’t afford a computer yet?

All the blogs seem to have the same general format. Someone blogs about how they feel complacent, how they achieved some gratitude, how lonely Christmas is. Life is so hard, love is so rare, jobs are so bloggity blog blog.

Well I have been looking for someone, somewhere, who is addrssing the issues that the fellowship is facing. That is Narcotics Anonymous I am talking about. Why is it that for the last 15 years or so, every time it looks like the fellowship is finally going to mature into something respectable, there is some rift pushing us out and away from each other.

Have you seen how they portray us in the popular media? A room full of nasty, off the street, undependable fuck-ups gather to whine about their life and praise each other for accomplishing teeny tiny baby steps. There is nothing about what life is like after it gets put back together. Nothing about how sustained recovery ripples through the lives of every one around the addict. And then I go to another meeting, and I see that the popular media pretty much has us pegged.

This blog is all about looking at the navel of the Fellowship of Narcotics Anonymous, and that is not to be confused with the Program of Narcotics Anonymous. You think you know the difference? Show me.

Is it just me, or is the fellowship suffering from a huge fissure or two? Let me know what you think.

In the Beginning, there was Bill W.

This seems like and apt topic to start off with. We in Narcotics Anonymous have a certain type of culture that was created by our founders. I don’t mean our AA founders, I mean our NA founders. We portray ourselves as people who care about the message, not the messenger. Our basic text was written, to a great extent, by many members of the program contributing bits and pieces. We do not idolize any one member as the “Father” of the fellowship the way those in the O.F. (other fellowship, or old farts) practically worship Bill W. We are so democratic in our outlook that we will not stand for any one member setting down the building blocks of our program. We are in NA because we don’t subscribe to the AA mentality of cult of personality and segregation of substances. Or do we?

Ever heard of Jimmy K.? Why have you heard of Jimmy K.? Have you ever seen literature written and attributed directly to him? If you are an “old timer”, you may remember the days before the green and gold How and Why work book. There was a step working guide that was not approved literature, but was passed from sponsor to sponsee, group to group, area to area, and it had credence and validity based on the fact that it was produced by Jimmy K. He is our Bill W., we just don’t want to seem like the AAers in the way they feel about their founder.

We live with this duplicity, this multiple personality, and we don’t even bat an eyelash. We can’t just admit the importance that a single point of origin carries for our Psyche. We need the idol, the prophet, the redeemer. We are human after all, and we are leaders and we are followers. We can’t make it completely on the principles of democratic homogenization. There will always be something missing until we put a face on the side of a mountain to which we can turn to and say, “he paved the way for us all”. Even if it was a collaborative effort, we want to have a certain someone whom we can call our taproot. It gives us a firm psychological foundation. Even Bill W. had that other guy from Akron, Ohio. But we mostly remember Bill.

Our lack of willingness to give ourselves over to the need for leadership has brought the NA fellowship to point where leadership is lacking. It is a systemic failure built into our framework. We have a board made up of more or less permanent seats held by individuals who are suposed to be guiding us in a positive direction. But we still don’t have a feeling of confidence in a great leader. More and more I see the message of NA usurped by the glamor of convetions, the authority of clean time, and the veiled deviceivness of political correctness. The young people, in my area at least, are now flocking to AA the way they used to flock to NA. The Other Fellowship was so full on crumugeonly old men in my early recovery days that they drove away anyone under the age of 30. But AA is now the rfuge for those who don’t want to be encircled by the deviously manupulating scumbags of NA.

We have no room to complain about the way AA views their founding father, not as long as we are closeted Jimmy lovers. We just need to come clean in our need and desire to put him up on the pedastal in public.