Recovery Rising: Radical Recovery in America
http://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/1362/1/Recovery-Rising-Radical-Recovery-in-America/Page1.html
William White
William L. White, M.A., is a Senior Research Consultant at Chestnut Health Systems and the author of Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America.
By William White
Published on 03/8/2007
Something is reawakening inside America. People whose stigmatized condition left them alone or cloistered in subterranean subcultures are stepping into the light to tell the stories of their wounds and their redemption.
Something is reawakening inside America. People whose stigmatized condition left them alone or cloistered in subterranean subcultures are stepping into the light to tell the stories of their wounds and their redemption.... the individual, family and community are not separate; they are one. To injure one is to injure all; to heal one is to heal all.
from book The Red Road to Wellbriety, 2002
In the mid-eighteenth century a number of Delaware Prophets launched the first Native American abstinence-based religious and cultural revitalization movements among native peoples.
Today, a vibrant Wellbriety movement is spreading through Indian country under the sober leadership of Native Americans who are using their own personal transformations as a springboard for the transformation and renewal of Native families and tribes.
In 1845 Frederick Douglass signed a pledge of abstinence and went on to lead the movement to abolish slavery in America. Douglass also played a critical role in the “colored temperance movement” via his assertion that the sobriety of black people was essential to their liberation and assumption of full citizenship.
Today, African Americans in recovery and their family members are again moving beyond their own healing to confront the larger alcohol and drug problems of their communities. They are organizing within their churches and creating new grassroots recovery-advocacy and social-action organizations.
The American temperance movement was fueled in great part by women whose lives had been wounded by the alcoholism of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons.
Their sustained activism played a major role in reducing American alcohol problems over the course of the nineteenth century.
Today, women and men whose families have been injured by alcohol and other drugs are once again organizing to change social policies related to these problems.
In the mid-nineteenth century members of the Washingtonian Temperance Society opened a “Home for the Fallen”—the precursor to the Washingtonian Homes of Boston and Chicago that were among the earliest addiction-treatment programs in the country.
Today, people in recovery are organizing an ever-expanding network of sober houses and recovery homes to once again provide a sober environment for those seeking recovery.
In the nineteenth century charismatic speakers such as John Gough and John Hawkins sparked hope among the addicted through their powerful stories of recovery from addiction.
Today, speakers with similar stories and charisma are replicating this process by calling for social as well as personal change.
Something is reawakening inside America. People whose stigmatized condition left them alone or cloistered in subterranean subcultures are stepping into the light to tell the stories of their wounds and their redemption.
They are offering their time, talents, and testimonies to address alcohol and other drug-related problems in their local communities and in the country as a whole.
They exemplify a transition from self-healing to social activism that could aptly be described as a style of radical recovery.
For the past five years I have had the opportunity to observe and collaborate with these recovery activists from across the country.
The purpose of this brief essay is to honor the spirit of these activists by describing their unique style of recovery.
The coupling of the two words—radical and recovery—seems incongruous. While addiction connotes excess, recovery is rooted in the cultivation of balance and harmony.
To do anything to an extreme would seem more a symptom of addiction than a dimension of recovery.
But some aspects of the recovery process capitalize on this propensity for excess. The first edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous speaks of the need for extreme measures to recover from alcoholism (“half measures availed us nothing”; AA, 1939); Women for Sobriety extols the importance of the “big decision” (Kirkpatrick, 1986); and Secular Organizations for Sobriety emphasizes the “sobriety priority”—a decision to never drink no matter what (Christopher, 1992).
Many spiritual, religious, and secular recovery traditions share a radical commitment to sobriety and a radical reconstruction of personal identity and lifestyle.
Recovery in these traditions is so extreme in its effects that it has come to be defined as far more than the removal of alcohol and other drugs from an otherwise unchanged life.
The discovery that people seeking recovery could achieve together what had been unobtainable alone was itself a radical innovation. Put simply, personal recovery is often radical in its methods and outcomes.
This essay explores a different kind of radicalness—a radicalness directed not at the healing of the self, but at the healing of the world.
The development and resolution of alcohol and other drug (AOD) problems are usually understood on an individual level. Recovery narratives depict the evolution of the addiction experience, the transforming journey from addiction to recovery, and one’s evolving life in recovery in highly personal terms.
There are, however, larger contexts within which these personal addiction and recovery narratives can be understood. The sources and solutions to AOD problems are nested within particular historical, economic, political, and cultural contexts.
In the aggregate, addiction transcends personal tragedy to stand as a symptom of system malfunction—a breakdown in the relationships between individuals, families, and communities.
An understanding of the ecology of addiction and recovery constitutes the very foundation of radical recovery. Radical recovery is not a projection of blame for one’s addiction, nor an abdication of personal responsibility for one’s own recovery.
It is a sustained meditation on the broader social meaning of the experiences of addiction and recovery.
Radical recovery is the use of one’s recovery from addiction as a platform to advocate social change related to the sources of and solutions to community-wide AOD problems.
The phrase radical recovery is not this author’s invention. The call for a radicalized style of recovery emerged as a reaction to the highly commercialized New Age recovery movement of the 1980s (Rapping, 1993; Morell, 1996), but its roots go much deeper.
Radical recovery traditions span the prophetic leaders of eighteenth and nineteenth century Native American healing and cultural revitalization movements (Coyhis and White, 2002, 2003; Brave Heart, 2003), the “reformed reformers” of the American temperance movement (White, 1998), African American activists portraying drugs as a weapon of colonization (Tabor, 1970), and feminist charges that the concept of “codependency” mislabels the cultural oppression of women as a problem of personal pathology (Tarvis, 1992; Kasl, 1992; also see Helmer, 1975, and Morgan, 1983).
Today, radical recovery is exemplified in the lives of the men and women who are at the forefront of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement.
This movement is reflected in new grassroots recovery-advocacy organizations whose collective goals are to
• portray alcoholism and addictions as problems for which there are viable and varied recovery solutions
• provide living role-models that illustrate the diversity of those recovery solutions
• counter public attempts to dehumanize, objectify, and demonize those with AOD problems
• enhance the variety, availability, and quality of local/regional treatment and recovery support services
• remove environmental barriers to recovery, including the promotion of laws and social policies that reduce AOD problems and support recovery for those afflicted with AOD problems (White, 2000).
Radical recovery is the discovery that changing oneself and changing the world are synergistic. It is choosing to become the dropped pebble that generates enduring and far-reaching ripples through one’s family, community, and world.
It is joining with kindred spirits to form communities of recovery that wish to amplify the influence of those ripples.
Put simply, radical recovery is about people in recovery defining themselves as a community; moving beyond self-healing toward social action on issues related to their shared experience; reflecting on the needs of people still suffering from addiction; and forging goals and strategies to widen the doorways of entry into recovery and to enhance the quality of the recovery experience.
Continued in PDF document
Recovery Rising: Radical Recovery in America
from book The Red Road to Wellbriety, 2002
In the mid-eighteenth century a number of Delaware Prophets launched the first Native American abstinence-based religious and cultural revitalization movements among native peoples.
Today, a vibrant Wellbriety movement is spreading through Indian country under the sober leadership of Native Americans who are using their own personal transformations as a springboard for the transformation and renewal of Native families and tribes.
In 1845 Frederick Douglass signed a pledge of abstinence and went on to lead the movement to abolish slavery in America. Douglass also played a critical role in the “colored temperance movement” via his assertion that the sobriety of black people was essential to their liberation and assumption of full citizenship.
Today, African Americans in recovery and their family members are again moving beyond their own healing to confront the larger alcohol and drug problems of their communities. They are organizing within their churches and creating new grassroots recovery-advocacy and social-action organizations.
The American temperance movement was fueled in great part by women whose lives had been wounded by the alcoholism of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Their sustained activism played a major role in reducing American alcohol problems over the course of the nineteenth century.
Today, women and men whose families have been injured by alcohol and other drugs are once again organizing to change social policies related to these problems.
In the mid-nineteenth century members of the Washingtonian Temperance Society opened a “Home for the Fallen”—the precursor to the Washingtonian Homes of Boston and Chicago that were among the earliest addiction-treatment programs in the country.
Today, people in recovery are organizing an ever-expanding network of sober houses and recovery homes to once again provide a sober environment for those seeking recovery.
In the nineteenth century charismatic speakers such as John Gough and John Hawkins sparked hope among the addicted through their powerful stories of recovery from addiction.
Today, speakers with similar stories and charisma are replicating this process by calling for social as well as personal change.
Something is reawakening inside America. People whose stigmatized condition left them alone or cloistered in subterranean subcultures are stepping into the light to tell the stories of their wounds and their redemption.
They are offering their time, talents, and testimonies to address alcohol and other drug-related problems in their local communities and in the country as a whole.
They exemplify a transition from self-healing to social activism that could aptly be described as a style of radical recovery.
For the past five years I have had the opportunity to observe and collaborate with these recovery activists from across the country.
The purpose of this brief essay is to honor the spirit of these activists by describing their unique style of recovery.
The coupling of the two words—radical and recovery—seems incongruous. While addiction connotes excess, recovery is rooted in the cultivation of balance and harmony.
To do anything to an extreme would seem more a symptom of addiction than a dimension of recovery.
But some aspects of the recovery process capitalize on this propensity for excess. The first edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous speaks of the need for extreme measures to recover from alcoholism (“half measures availed us nothing”; AA, 1939); Women for Sobriety extols the importance of the “big decision” (Kirkpatrick, 1986); and Secular Organizations for Sobriety emphasizes the “sobriety priority”—a decision to never drink no matter what (Christopher, 1992).
Many spiritual, religious, and secular recovery traditions share a radical commitment to sobriety and a radical reconstruction of personal identity and lifestyle.
Recovery in these traditions is so extreme in its effects that it has come to be defined as far more than the removal of alcohol and other drugs from an otherwise unchanged life.
The discovery that people seeking recovery could achieve together what had been unobtainable alone was itself a radical innovation. Put simply, personal recovery is often radical in its methods and outcomes.
This essay explores a different kind of radicalness—a radicalness directed not at the healing of the self, but at the healing of the world.
The development and resolution of alcohol and other drug (AOD) problems are usually understood on an individual level. Recovery narratives depict the evolution of the addiction experience, the transforming journey from addiction to recovery, and one’s evolving life in recovery in highly personal terms.
There are, however, larger contexts within which these personal addiction and recovery narratives can be understood. The sources and solutions to AOD problems are nested within particular historical, economic, political, and cultural contexts.
In the aggregate, addiction transcends personal tragedy to stand as a symptom of system malfunction—a breakdown in the relationships between individuals, families, and communities.
An understanding of the ecology of addiction and recovery constitutes the very foundation of radical recovery. Radical recovery is not a projection of blame for one’s addiction, nor an abdication of personal responsibility for one’s own recovery.
It is a sustained meditation on the broader social meaning of the experiences of addiction and recovery.
Radical recovery is the use of one’s recovery from addiction as a platform to advocate social change related to the sources of and solutions to community-wide AOD problems.
The phrase radical recovery is not this author’s invention. The call for a radicalized style of recovery emerged as a reaction to the highly commercialized New Age recovery movement of the 1980s (Rapping, 1993; Morell, 1996), but its roots go much deeper.
Radical recovery traditions span the prophetic leaders of eighteenth and nineteenth century Native American healing and cultural revitalization movements (Coyhis and White, 2002, 2003; Brave Heart, 2003), the “reformed reformers” of the American temperance movement (White, 1998), African American activists portraying drugs as a weapon of colonization (Tabor, 1970), and feminist charges that the concept of “codependency” mislabels the cultural oppression of women as a problem of personal pathology (Tarvis, 1992; Kasl, 1992; also see Helmer, 1975, and Morgan, 1983).
Today, radical recovery is exemplified in the lives of the men and women who are at the forefront of the New Recovery Advocacy Movement.
This movement is reflected in new grassroots recovery-advocacy organizations whose collective goals are to
• portray alcoholism and addictions as problems for which there are viable and varied recovery solutions
• provide living role-models that illustrate the diversity of those recovery solutions
• counter public attempts to dehumanize, objectify, and demonize those with AOD problems
• enhance the variety, availability, and quality of local/regional treatment and recovery support services
• remove environmental barriers to recovery, including the promotion of laws and social policies that reduce AOD problems and support recovery for those afflicted with AOD problems (White, 2000).
Radical recovery is the discovery that changing oneself and changing the world are synergistic. It is choosing to become the dropped pebble that generates enduring and far-reaching ripples through one’s family, community, and world.
It is joining with kindred spirits to form communities of recovery that wish to amplify the influence of those ripples.
Put simply, radical recovery is about people in recovery defining themselves as a community; moving beyond self-healing toward social action on issues related to their shared experience; reflecting on the needs of people still suffering from addiction; and forging goals and strategies to widen the doorways of entry into recovery and to enhance the quality of the recovery experience.
Continued in PDF document
Recovery Rising: Radical Recovery in America