What is “recovery” from addiction?
First of all, the term “recovery” comes out of the 12-Step disease model notion. Recovery, of course, comes out of the medical model, where you’re in a healthy state, you catch a disease, and you recover from the disease. Now, that fits very nicely within the disease model of the 12-Step community. Within the cognitive-behavioral model, the recovery term is used rarely or substantially less. Again, it’s used more for practical reasons. I don’t use it at all. I think it has an implied presumption that you’re sick or you’re ill. I think it has a further implied presumption that the best outcome is to return to the prior state of pre-recovery. When you have an addiction, in my professional opinion, the best goal is not to return to this prior state. Generally speaking, people should never return to that prior state, because all that is doing is setting the stage for them to get back into the addiction themselves. People must not only get back to the state that they were in before they got into it, they’ve got to go higher. They’ve got to be functioning higher than they’ve ever functioned for them to really “recover” and go on to live a life without fearing the fall back into their addiction. So recovery is an illusionary concept. There’s even further controversy within the field. “Recover” versus “recovering.” In the 12-Step disease model, they call people “recovering,” implying they never get over it. Within a cognitive-behavioral model, they will talk about “recovered,” meaning the idea that they’re pretty much through with the worry and things like that. It’s a very empowering belief to believe that you can recover and not have to worry about this thing shadowing you for the rest of your lives. Yes, like anything that we’ve learned, like a bicycle, we’re never going to fully forget how to ride that bicycle. However, the notion that we’re constantly on the edge of falling back into that diseased state or addictive state is a very painful way to live life, and is living in a state of fear. I’ve worked with people who can’t take a little trip over to Catalina for the weekend because there’s not a meeting over there; because they’ve been taught that they should fear this disease that never goes away. They should fear themselves being on their own. They should fear thinking on their own. I think those are very destructive ideas and therefore I sort of avoid the word “recovery.”
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