I see a lot of comments rolling in on my recent post. That really makes my day. Or night, in this case: it’s currently just after 4 AM. Can’t sleep.
I had an amazing two days in England just now, visiting people who work in one way or another with addiction. My first evening there, spent in Oxford, was with two Australian philosophers who’ve received a large grant to study the identity issues of addicts. Lovely people, but I did not learn much from them. In all fairness, they have just begun to analyze the first wave of data in a multi-year study. Still, I recall JLK’s contention that a high level of abstraction sometimes seems to miss the boat when it comes to addiction.
So let’s get down and dirty.
The following evening I met Peter, who has recently posted comments on this blog. I won’t tell his story – it’s his to tell – but after a three-hour train ride to the north of England, I’m received by a large, smiling man, who lives in a small house that seems to be tilting on its foundations, together with a very large dog and a quiet friendly woman, his partner.
But we didn’t go to his home first. On the long drive through rush-hour traffic I told Peter I’d never been to a 12-step meeting. Hint hint. Would you like to got to one tonight, he asked? Indeed I would. He said we’d be a few minutes late but it didn’t matter. We were on our way to a meeting of one of about 30 NA (Narcotics Anonymous) groups in the region.
We walked in the door of a modern, nondescript building, and approached a group of about 30 or 40 people sitting in chairs in a large ragged circle. Many looked up at Peter as we approached, nodding or smiling. He seemed the granddaddy of the group. He’d been clean and sober for over ten years, a state many of the others could barely imagine. I felt their love and their respect for him. And they looked over at me, some with flickering smiles: who is this diminutive, academic looking fellow, never before seen in these parts? What’s his story? I heard them thinking.
So we sat down at the outskirts of the group and just listened. Through very strong accents from the north of England, their stories found their way into my brain and my heart. These people, mostly men, looked like they’d been through the ringer. Their faces were hard, their endurance carved in the creases around their eyes and the grim holding pattern of mouth and jaw. But there was a softness here too. They listened to each other’s miseries with real caring, with a kind of empathy that doesn’t run out, because if there’d been any limit to it, it would have run out ages ago. Later, I asked Peter what was the approximate range of clean time for the people there that night. He said: mostly under a year or so, some a few months, some a few weeks, some just a few days. I could recognize the last group from their constant sniffling and jerky movements. Everyone there was a heroin addict.
With all my negative presentiments about the 12-step program, I found myself shifting like a boat with no keel. There was something intrinsically good here. And I knew what it was: that old thing variously called friendship, warmth, brotherhood, support, caring. These people cared for each other, and given the degree of their helplessness, what better treatment could you want? That’s why they kept coming back. Their stories were sad, of course they were, full of bitter irony and gut-wrenching failure, self-rebuke, hopelessness tinged with a bit of hope. But there was always a smile there too. Maybe not until the last sentence, at which point the person might look up, his face finally relaxing into a crooked grin, as if to say, I know you know that I probably won’t make it, at least not for good, at least not this time, but you know, I might…
On the way back to Peter’s crooked house, I asked him how many of the people sitting there tonight would stay clean…for a good long time, maybe barring the occasional relapse. He thought for a moment and then said: maybe 30%.
He also explained what some people mean by being a “true addict” – a phrase we’ve recently argued about on this blog. From the perspective of NA or AA, being a true addict means that you could not, simply could not, after trying everything under the sun and the moon, time after time, year after year, could not stop. So these groups were really the only thing left. And sometimes they worked. But even if they didn’t, they probably made life bearable. Peter felt that the “true addict” polemic did more harm than good, magnifying differences rather than commonalities. But at least now I knew what it meant. And I was damn glad I didn’t fit that bill.
I asked Peter a lot of questions that night, and I’ll just mention one more. I asked: why the dogma? Why do some 12-steppers insist that this is the only way…when we all know it’s not the only way? He thought about that one for a while. Then he said something like this: When you’ve been trying that long and failing that long and then, finally, something works, you don’t look around and compute the statistics. You tell everyone who will listen: This is what works. This is the only thing that works. The unspoken part remains “for me.”
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