In the last two posts – one by Persephone and one by me – we talked about the possibility that 12-step treatment offers a “static” rather than “developmental” approach to recovery. Persephone argued that certain features of 12-step practice kept the addict or alcoholic in a frozen state of heightened anxiety, much like PTSD. My last post was an attempt to extend and articulate some of Persephone’s points. I was really taken with the similarities between her idea of “static recovery” and PTSD, and I provided information about traumatic memory maintenance in support.
But today I want to take a different approach – and I think it provides a real reconciliation between the pro and con positions on 12-step recovery. The point I want to make is that any and all recovery has to be developmental in nature. Pure stasis simply cannot correspond with recovery.
The term neuroplasticity has been bandied around a lot. Norman Doidge seems to think he invented the concept, or at least brought it into the limelight, but it’s been around for ages. Dr. Eric Kandel of Columbia shared a Nobel Prize in 2000, reflecting decades of research on how the brain changes when learning occurs. In a nutshell, Kandel showed that the connections among neurons – synapses – must change physically if memories are to be formed. He showed this at a molecular level, validating Hebb’s famous insight from the 40s: What fires together wires together. Well all the neural change that takes place when we learn and remember things is really just neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is strongly amplified when people are highly motivated to change, probably because of the strong emotions that come into play and focus one’s attention. In her wonderful book, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young describes the many cognitive exercises she devised for herself, in order to overcome her very severe learning disabilities. They worked. She went from a high-school student who could not comprehend history, who even had a hard time understanding simple sentences, to a writer and teacher who has set up roughly 70 schools for learning-disabled children in North America. Barbara, whom I met in Australia last year, has a delightful phrase for neuroplasticity dedicated to replacing bad habits with good ones.
What fires together wires together, and what fires apart wires apart!
(I don’t actually know the origin of this phrase, but I like it.)
In 1993, Mogliner and colleagues looked at the brains of people who had been plagued with webbed fingers. That means that some of their fingers could not operate separately – they functioned in total unison. After surgery was performed to allow the fingers to move independently, these authors looked at changes in the (somatosensory) cortex. What they found was that the synaptic wiring of neurons in the corresponding brain regions had changed substantially, just weeks after people started to control their fingers independently.
The parallel with addiction seems striking. You “learned” your addiction through neuroplasticity, which is how you learn everything. You maintained your addiction because you lost some of that plasticity. As if your fingers had become attached together, you could no longer separate your desire for wellbeing from your desire for drugs, booze, or whatever. Then, if you did 
indeed recover, whether in AA, NA, or standing naked on the 33rd floor balcony of the Chicago Sheraton in February, that means you got your neuroplasticity back. Your brain started changing again – perhaps radically. You started to separate one set of desires from another and to act on them independently. And just as in Mogliner’s study, your brain began to regrow its synaptic patterns – to allow the change to take place, to hold onto the change, and thereby to permit a new degree of personal freedom.
The take-home message is simple: All recovery is developmental. Without developmental change in mind and brain, you would stay exactly the way you are.
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