[Guest Blog by SMART Facilitator Rick Kuplinski]
The deeper I get into recovery from my addictive behavior, the less patient I am with stereotypes of people like me and the stigma associated with our addictive behaviors. Sometimes it feels like we are being reduced to caricatures and then shoved into boxes based on overgeneralizations and misperceptions.
What’s got me so riled up recently is a published news interview with a very public figure talking about her even-more-very public figure boss. (No further identifying details are necessary.) In this interview, its subject describes her boss as having “an alcoholic’s personality.” She explained that she does not mean substance abuse, but “a temperament defined by exaggerated confidence and risk-taking.”
Here we go, I thought, getting shoved into a box once again. Here is yet another broadbrush description of everyone with substance use issues, in this case alcohol. Where is the proof that these traits generally apply to people like me? Is it not a description that can be applied to some number of all people?
Exaggerated confidence? Like many people, I often struggled to feel self-assured in a variety of situations and circumstances even when I was intoxicated. And I still do as a non-drinker. Risk taking? I tend to live my life by the “Rule of Caution” which I understand as saying one should never take an action without fully contemplating the potential consequences of that action. I am a measure twice; cut once kind of guy. “A master of carefully planned spontaneity” is how my wife describes me.
Yet there it is in this interview. Without challenge or qualification, the stereotype of “a temperament defined by exaggerated confidence and risk-taking” is added to the stew of associations many people will think of when they hear the word alcoholic or addict. And it is stigmatizing because it “others” people like us; it suggests that we are unordinary, wired differently, weird, diseased, etc.
I am so tired of this, but also glad that my participation in SMART Recovery empowers me to step outside the box. It is up to me—not the world—to decide who I am and how I want to be. At the same time, I wish the world would better understand the following:
Labels do not adequately define me, and they don’t motivate me to change. I like that SMART Recovery does not require us to call ourselves alcoholics or addicts. We can if we want, but I never found it helpful. In fact, quite the opposite. To me, embracing the word “alcoholic” as my identity meant that I was allowing myself to be placed into the box of perceptions associated with the word—some of them spot on for me, yes; but some of them only true some of the time; and some of them wildly inaccurate. So, I spent way too much time in my contemplation stage trying to avoid fitting into someone’s definition of an alcoholic based on measures of how often I was drinking, how much, and how long. Instead, I should have been spending more time (and eventually did) taking an honest look at the ever-diminishing benefits I was getting from booze vs. the ever-increasing costs it was having on my ability to live life in harmony with my professed values. Ultimately, my recovery progressed because I decided it was the right choice for living my best life more than it was to address my “alcoholism” based on those other measures of frequency, quantity, and duration. I feel more empowered by the idea of choosing not to drink vs. the idea that I can’t. I find it more helpful to think of myself of a guy who doesn’t drink, rather than being “a recovering alcoholic.” I even like using the word “discovery” instead of recovery because I think it more accurately describes what I intend to be the result of this journey.
Our stories are as different as they are alike. Go to a SMART Recovery meeting. Listen to the check-ins and crosstalk. Get to know the people as individuals. Yes, you will find many common themes in our backstories, in our experiences with addiction, and with the obstacles and challenges we face in changing our behaviors. But you will also find, as I have, that there are many, many, important differences in how we came into addiction, how it has affected our lives specifically, and in our “recovery capital,” the assets we have to help us overcome addiction; things like adequate health insurance, transportation, employment, legal status, a safe and supportive home, and so on. Here we have a survivor of trauma. Here we have someone whose use of prescription pain drugs progressed to street drugs. Here we have someone struggling to deal with a co-occurring mental health condition. There we have someone who has become too used to using intoxication to deal with job stress and boredom at home. And over there we have a person trying to decide if their DUI arrest is reason enough to change. Everyone in the room has something about them that makes them them, their stories their stories. So, overgeneralizations are not helpful. If we want to support someone in their decision to change, we need to be mindful of who they are—not who we think they are based on what we think we already know about people like them. And that takes resisting the temptation to tell them how they should change vs. having a conversation about what positive change looks like for them. Even if it is the smallest of baby steps. Which brings us to . . .
Celebrate positive change in all shapes and forms. We all know the old saying that “the longest journey always begins with the first small step.” Yet this tried and true wisdom too often gets ignored in dealing with us who have issues with addictive behavior. Having a preconceived notion of what we think change should look like for someone else and how fast it should occur is a critical error; another attempt to shove us into a box. For example, insisting that addiction is a disease and abstinence is the only cure simply does not work for many people; in fact, it can be a non-starter to even having a helpful conversation. This is why the clinical community is more and more embracing the notion that people recover most successfully when we feel we are empowered in the change process, are able to select among legitimate recovery pathways, and have the autonomy to adapt plans based on new experiences and acquired knowledge. Insisting someone go cold turkey is not helpful for the person who is convinced there is still a chance for successful moderation. Residential treatment will only be so successful if someone is forced to go under threat and against their extreme protests. Telling someone that taking their prescribed medication still makes them an addict is non-sensical to the person who finds it helpful for reducing urges or treating underlying conditions like clinical depression. Practicing harm reduction helps keep the prospects for change alive along with the person contemplating how to do it. Instead of dispensing advice, we should be listening. Instead of telling people which road to follow, we should be extending a helpful hand and walking with them to the crossroads where they can decide for themselves which way to go. Instead of putting people into boxes, let’s help people like me find the space and the freedom to build own lives beyond addiction.
*If you’d like to read more of Rick’s essays, you can find them by searching his name in the SMART Recovery blog or collected here: Supercharge Your Recovery
To find and in-person or online meeting go to the “Meetings” tab at www.smartrecovery.org
