As I look at treatment and recovery methods I see two major themes/goals in most of what we’re led to do in the recovery world: stay afraid of substances, and make sure we never experience any discomfort in life (or at least stay vigilant against discomfort and quickly put an end to it). I don’t think either of these strategies are particularly helpful in overcoming a substance use problem.
First let’s look at fear. Counseling sessions in treatment centers and support meetings have a major focus on fear. We’re taught to fear drugs, fear triggers, fear the disease that makes us “lose control” upon the first drink or hit. We are exposed daily to stories from other struggling addicts about the horrors of their past drug use, or the horrors of their latest relapse. It’s thought that this is good, as it will keep us fearful of ever taking that first drink or hit again.
We’re told to “keep it green” which basically means to never become confident that you’ve gotten over your addiction, but to maintain the extreme fear, panic, and uncertainty you had when you were initially motivated to quit by the mounting costs of your drug habit. Fear seems to be a general strategy in the recovery world, and the biggest remnant of it that I tend to see from people coming out of that world is that they constantly run down a mental list of all the negative consequences and costs of substance use. Many of them keep reading tragic addiction memoirs. They tell me they do all this so they “won’t forget how bad it could be if I go back to drinking/drugging.” And yet they still struggle.
Even the more “progressive” alternative programs give fear an equal focus by harping on “cost/benefit balance sheets.” The costs are what we’re supposed to fear – what’s supposed to stop us from using. Some harm reduction folks are solely focused on harms – things to fear. Granted they want to reduce those harms, but it can still leave a person fully oriented toward fear in their recovery efforts. This is just a partial list of the ways fear is ever-present in the accepted treatments for addiction.
One major fear: the idea that any discomfort will trigger us to go back to heavy use. The recovery world builds up this idea by saying that stress, anxiety, depression, sadness, grief, and other life problems “cause” addiction/relapse. This brings us to the second major thread of recovery: trying to ensure constant comfort.
Treatment methods seem to focus on trying to create a life free from any discomfort, challenges, failures, etc. Tons of time and energy are put into staying comfortable around the clock. We get into every kind of therapy for every kind of problem. We have to “deal with” our baggage, our past, and our lingering trauma. “Family treatment” is needed so there’s no further discomfort with our home/family life. We have to focus generally on “acceptance.” We need to learn to meditate. We’re often told not to take on any new “challenging” goals, and instead to “work on ourselves” (a puzzling decree to most). Discomfort is to be feared as much as drugs, because they’ve led us to believe that discomfort causes drug use. This is just a partial list of the ways in which soothing and comforting the “addict” seems to be the focus of recovery methods.
The result, if it were ever possible to achieve this life of constant comfort would be just a gray blasé existence – one in which, ironically, it would then occur to you that life is so boring that you need drugs to spice it up.
There are many contradictions in all of this. Living in constant fear is discomfort. This is no small point. The two threads of recovery are completely at odds with one another, constantly cancelling each other out. If you’re uncomfortable, you’ll be helplessly forced to use drugs. If you lose your fear and get comfortable, you’ll be tempted to use. When this is your model of the problem and solution, all of your “recovery” efforts become a waste of time.
That’s not to say that these comfort-creating/discomfort-avoidance recovery efforts are all bad. Finally letting go of your “baggage” is a great thing in and of itself. Meditation, I assume, is a good in itself, as is any other thing that makes your life more enjoyable. But when your drug-using future is made dependent on these things, you’re being set up for failure. Discomfort will come. It always does.
Shit happens. You shouldn’t have to feel like you’ll be forced to add to that shit when it does happen, by running out and rekindling a heroin habit, or by guzzling a pint of vodka. But that’s the expectation created in us when “recovery” is attached to being soothed and creating a constantly comfortable smooth life where no shit happens.
Fear will unavoidably play a part in many people’s initial choice to seek help and/or change their substance use habits. But that doesn’t mean fear can be made into the driver of a long-term change. Bad things happen – such as arrests, health scares, etc – we’re afraid of more bad things happening, and so we try to address the source of those bad things: our obsession with substance use. Fair enough; we often quit drugs at moments of great fear. But at the same time, we can point to plenty of times when drug users live in great fear of consequences, yet decide to use drugs anyways. Those consequences are often a sure thing and we know it. Yet we then say “fuck it, I’ll deal with it later” and use drugs. This is because for all the costs involved, we think that the costs of going without our drug will be higher in some subjective way. The fear of going without our drug outweighs the fear of going with it.
What we need to recognize is that fear is not what gets us out of bed in the morning. Pursuit of happiness does. We don’t get out of bed in the morning to avoid problems. We get out of bed to create good experiences, to feel better, to feel happier than we would just lying around.
The pillars of “recovery” are fear and comfort. The pillars of “addiction” are fear and comfort. We feel we need drugs to be comfortable, and we fear going without drugs more than we fear the consequences of drug use. That’s why “recovery” efforts do not help people to reduce their substance use any more than “doing nothing” does (“doing nothing” here means not utilizing formal treatment services, medications, or support groups).
Billions of people around the world face hardships and discomfort without feeling compelled to use drugs. The average person, no matter what their socio-economic status, faces discomfort every day, faces unpredictable ups and downs throughout their lives, years, weeks, and days – without feeling compelled to use drugs. They don’t connect the ups, downs, and discomfort to drugs. because they don’t see drugs as comforting.
Do you think the average person without a drug problem thinks to themselves each day, something such as “don’t start smoking crack today because you could get arrested or have a stroke.” Or do they think to themselves “Don’t start drinking first thing in the morning every day or you’ll lose your job, lose your wife and kids, and develop cirrhosis.” It doesn’t cross their minds.
They don’t wage a constant internal battle over whether or not to use drugs like this. They don’t try to “avoid triggers.” They don’t run around in a panic trying to ensure that they’re comfortable every waking moment for fear that discomfort will make them use drugs. And they don’t even live “balanced lifestyles” for the most part.
Living beings can’t, by definition, exist in a truly balanced state, as life requires action in a constantly changing world. One of the most basic actions we take every day – walking –requires literally tipping your body off balance and falling forward and then only momentarily experiencing brief moments of balance between the much longer moments of taking steps.
My father has been a very successful businessman for most of his life, and also never had a drug or drop of alcohol in his life. Yet he was never living “a balanced life.” I’ve watched him go through ups and downs in business, bankruptcy, closings of businesses and openings of new ones, times where the money flowed, and times where it tightened up. He hasn’t had a balanced diet, or a balanced level of activity, yet he’s made it to 77 years old so far. I say this not to brag about my dad, but to say that even the very successful among us don’t meet the new-age-recovery definition of balance and what’s supposedly necessary to keep oneself from “turning to drugs.” The only thing that can make you “turn to drugs” is your own belief system that says drugs are worth “turning to.”
Talk to people who’ve never had drug problems, and pay attention to their mindset about the topic. You’ll find that most don’t spend a second fearing drugs, and don’t do anything meant to keep themselves from being triggered to use drugs, or to “avoid/resist the temptation to use drugs.” Instead, they just don’t see drugs as tempting. They don’t think that revolving around heavy drug use would make their lives any more comfortable.
“Recovery” misses the mark, by encouraging us into pursuing constant comfort along with a constant fear of drugs. Instead, we should be figuring out how to get into the mindset of people who don’t have drug problems. Those people just think that life is better without drugs.
I had a horrible problem with heroin and cocaine use (among other drugs). I ended my drug problem 17 years ago. I quit a few times in the 5 years leading up to my final successful quit. The beginning of the last quit was just like all the previous quits: I was motivated by fear once again, facing probation and potential jail time once again, being threatened by all sorts of things once again. But unlike those previous attempts, I quickly stopped focusing on fear, and I stopped focusing on soothing myself with therapy (NOTE: don’t take this sentence as a recommendation against therapy – do whatever you want with therapy – but don’t buy the lie that you need therapy to make you discomfort-free so you can be drug free).
My life was very uncomfortable at that time for a multitude of reasons I won’t cover here. My life has remained very uncomfortable in many ways over the years. I have failed at many goals. I have had many emotional swings. I have not lived anything near a balanced life. I am not a paragon of morality or virtue, nor do I have an active “spiritual life.” Nor do I even have a “higher purpose” – I have the career that I have because I like it.
I do not fear drugs. I do not remind myself of what I might become if I start shooting heroin and cocaine again. I don’t spend any mental energy trying to scare myself out of returning to my former life.
Instead, when I quit that last time, I focused on the possibility that I could be happier without relying on drugs, and I proved it to myself. Like anyone without a drug problem, I have known for almost 17 years now that I like this life, and that reliance on drugs would not make it better. I know that drugs wouldn’t comfort me or solve my problems. I’ve drank moderately for 12 years, without a problem, and without fear that it would lead me back to daily heroin and cocaine use, because I do not see that option as attractive anymore.
When I quit my drug habit, I changed my mindset. Not to a mindset of constant fear and constant prevention of problems that would send me back to the needle. I changed to a mindset of no longer believing that shooting drugs all day was the best possible feeling available to me. I changed to a mindset of seeing life as full of challenges that can be enjoyed, and that only would be made worse by daily drug injection. I changed my mindset to one where I believed that living without that horrible pattern of drug use would make me happier years from now, weeks from now, days from now, seconds from now, and right now at this very moment.
The approach that helped me came from Mark Scheeren, with whom I co-authored The Freedom Model for Addictions: Escape the Treatment and Recovery Trap. In it, we show troubled substance users how to let go of the focus on fear and comfort taught to them by the recovery society. Then we move the focus to weighing out your options in terms of happiness potential rather than disaster potential. This simple reframing makes a massive difference, especially when it’s backed up by the hard surprising facts about drugs and addiction that we provide throughout the book.
