TAKE ME TO YOUR ADDICT
While conducting interviews for Recover to Live, several treatment experts emphasized how our culture still tries to overlook addicts’ contributions to society and the common good. Stigmatized and marginalized, people in recovery from toxic compulsions are too often defined by their problems and not by their accomplishments, such as mastery of the life skills necessary to remain in recovery—a feat made even more remarkable because it occurs within that more is better cultural conditioning and overreliance on brain-altering technologies.
What can any one of us, regardless of culture or upbringing, learn from people in recovery from addiction? This book reveals the often inspiring and amazing gifts that addicts must summon and master to maintain the recovery life. But these gifts are usually overlooked by society because of the stigma still attached to the addiction itself.
If you are a non-addict, or “normie,” you may be asking, Where does addiction lead except to jail, a rehab center or hospital, the gutter, or an early grave, right? Not so fast. Consider what it takes to be a successful addict. You’ve got to function halfway decently to keep feeding your addiction. You need to summon the inner resources to survive one of the most punishing and treatment-resistant brain diseases known to man, and you must manage to survive long enough to get into recovery and become a productive citizen again.
Addiction is a full-time job that requires a lot of overtime. You’re an addict all day, every day, evenings, weekends, and holidays. If your addiction is to illegal drugs, your job is even harder because you need to stay out of jail so you can continue to feed your addiction. To constantly hunt down the drugs and get the money necessary to purchase the drugs, and to do this without losing your freedom, takes a lot of focus and skill. Believe it or not, these skills can become genuine assets when applied to pursuing a healthy lifestyle.
Even if your addiction is to something legal, such as alcohol or the human need for food or sex, feeding that compulsion requires the skill to prevent the rest of the world from knowing about the world you inhabit. So you hide and cover up, make constant excuses, and manipulate other people. To be a successful addict you have to work at it like your life depends on it. And often it does.
People recovering from toxic compulsions confront and surmount enormous traumas and challenges in their lives, much like cancer survivors or disaster survivors. And they have more than just their war stories to give us. They’ve mastered coping and wellness skills we all can strive to develop for healthier and happier lives of our own.
Moreover, many personality traits of addicts are the very qualities we admire and need in our leaders. This isn’t just a random theory or an addict’s wishful thinking, nor is it based on simply reviewing the long list of addicts throughout history who have had extraordinary lives and monumental achievements. In fact, a growing body of neuroscience research into the dopamine-using circuitry of the brain supports the contention that there is something special about the addict’s mental makeup.
“What we seek in leaders is often the same kind of personality type that is found in addicts, whether they are dependent on gambling, alcohol, sex, or drugs,” observed Dr. David J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, writing in 2011 for the New York Times. “How can this be? We typically see addicts as weak-willed losers, while chief executives and entrepreneurs are the people with discipline and fortitude. To understand this apparent contradiction we need to look under the hood of the brain . . . the risk-taking, novelty-seeking, and obsessive personality traits often found in addicts can be harnessed to make them very effective in the workplace. For many leaders, it’s not the case that they succeed in spite of their addiction; rather, the same brain wiring and chemistry that make them addicts also confer on them behavioral traits that serve them well.”
This idea of beneficial traits lurking in what otherwise looks like unbridled misery is gaining a research foothold in other fields of mental disorders. An October 2012 study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that creativity is “closely entwined with mental illness.”2
It’s never been a secret in the creative professions that, as a group, they are more likely to suffer from the full range of psychiatric disorders, including addiction, compared to people in other less creative professions. Creatives have felt or seen the flameouts firsthand. But what is new is a growing professional psychiatric acceptance that these disorders “should be viewed in a new light and that certain traits might be beneficial or desirable,” noted Dr. Simon Kyaga, in an interview with the BBC. He and five Swedish colleagues at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm surveyed more than 1.1 million people, evaluating their psychiatric diagnoses and occupational data over a forty-year period, and found definite evidence of that link between creativity and mental disorders. “If one takes the view that certain phenomena associated with the patient’s illness are beneficial, it opens the way for a new approach to treatment,” said Dr. Kyaga. This would be a big step forward from the traditional black-and-white view of these diseases, meaning we can therefore “endeavor to treat the patient by removing everything regarded as morbid.”
While we shouldn’t romanticize people with mental disorders any more than we should people burdened with toxic compulsions, it’s now possible to see the potential benefits of these afflictions without, of course, discounting the obvious liabilities and negative repercussions.
How can we separate the toxic side effects of these disorders and compulsions from the “silver linings”—the artistry, talents, and accomplishments? These are all questions worth asking because the answers, as I hope to show in this book, may ultimately benefit society and humanity as a whole.
WHAT WE ALL HAVE TO GAIN
Who among us hasn’t yielded to a temptation or craving that we later regretted? Is there any “normal” person who hasn’t experienced a temporary loss of control or recurrent obsessive thoughts, even if it’s just a musical jingle you can’t get out of your head? How can we release more creativity in ourselves without becoming too much of a risk-taker? What are the most important lessons to be learned from the collective recovery experience, and what role can those in recovery play in moving human consciousness forward?
At surface level the problem facing addicts is usually easy to identify: They can’t stop engaging in self-destructive behaviors. For self-described non-addicts who also want to improve their lives, the underlying problem or challenge usually isn’t so obvious. Yet in digging deeper, we find important parallels to what the addict faces. It can be the feeling of “stuckness,” a refusal to change, denial, dishonesty with self and others, a fear of the unknown, unrealistic expectations, feelings of entitlement, and selfishness. It can be a “quick-fix” tendency to self-medicate with toxic substances or to engage in risky behaviors to relieve boredom or stress. Such feelings and tendencies are, if nothing else, human.
Whether in the throes of a full-blown addiction or not, many of us regularly fail to make a connection between our current behaviors and the future consequences of those behaviors, a classic trait in addiction. As individuals no less than as a culture or even a species, we discount the future at our peril. We live beyond our means. We don’t save for tomorrow. We postpone getting into recovery from toxic compulsions. We think that Mother Earth will somehow, someday, clean up the environmental messes we make, just like some among us think that time alone will heal all of the emotional messes they’ve stirred up in their families and their lives.
“We ‘normies’ have a lot to learn from the lessons demonstrated every day by the recovery community,” explained Brenda Schell, program director at the Missouri Recovery Network, a group that works tirelessly to support people in recovery and educate the public about addiction and recovery issues. She continued:
People in recovery from addictions have overcome things that, before I took this job, I never imagined people could overcome. I’ve worked with people who were dirt poor, homeless, or came out of a prison or a ditch, and then someone, usually someone in recovery, believed in them and they got the help they needed to build a productive life. I am constantly