As mentioned, I’ve started interviewing a subset of the people who responded to my request for biographical material. These people offered to share the stories of their lives as addicts. Most have recovered. Some are still in process. The point is that this is a rare gift. It gives me a unique and potent data set for my next book – intimate accounts of what it’s like to be addicted and then to try, and fail, and try, and eventually (hopefully) succeed in getting on with one’s life. I haven’t gotten all that far with the book. The proposal has been blessed by my agent. My sample chapter is sitting in his inbox. I’ll discover its fate soon enough.
Meanwhile, I want to tell you what I’m starting to learn from these interviews – even this early in the game.
First, you should know that they take place by Skype or phone – sometimes I see the person I’m talking to and sometimes I have to use my imagination. They seem to last an hour to an hour and a half, and they are full of painful memories – usually memories that have been rehashed many times over, while people try to make sense of them. Now they’ve got someone else rehashing them with them. Sometimes I feel like a dentist, drilling until I strike a new vein of distress or at least discomfort, and I know it must hurt, but we’ve got to get to these details if the book is to be as compelling as I want it to be. I know it hurts partly because I’ve been to similar places, and my memories of the bad times don’t seem to fade much. And I know it because I can get goose-bumps up and down my arms or tears in my eyes. So much suffering! It bowls me over. And so much loneliness – the isolation of being locked in your addiction with everyone you care about eyeing you from the outside.
But I often come away from these interviews uplifted and optimistic, rather than depressed. Because just about everyone I’ve talked to – no, everyone I’ve talked to – has mounted a campaign against his or her addiction and eventually won, or at least formed a truce. And that takes the best of a person: courage, dedication, forebearance, creativity, and plain common sense. I’ve said it before: addicts (ex or still struggling) are some of my favourite people.
I’m learning a lot from the interviews. But here I want to share just one thing that’s struck me repeatedly.
The lives of the people I’m interviewing – and probably the lives of most addicts – have an hourglass shape to them. They start out unique: each person begins with his or her own specific culture, family environment, level of education, personality, social network, personal secrets, and all the rest. But then, when addiction takes hold, these lives start to look exactly the same. 
Regardless of whether it’s cocaine, opiates, alcohol, or even food, that wide range of individual differences shrinks to a narrow tube – the middle of the hourglass. What I mean is that people’s addictions have this fundamental commonality: the initial discovery that whatever it is helps with anxiety or depression, it feels golden, and then with time it becomes irresistible, then it’s no longer much fun, and then it becomes the source of new anxieties and more depression, as the desperation, the cover-up, the way we turn our back on other people, the way we turn our back on our own selves…. seem to be the main ingredients of everyone’s addiction. Then people make whatever attempts they make to get better, to get past it. (I’m not fond of the term “recovery” because that implies going backward, to something you once were.) And usually, eventually, after ten or a hundred tries, they make it. Then they start to live their own lives once more, and here’s where the hourglass starts to bulge out again, in its bottom half. Now individuality, creativity, and uniqueness get relaunched, without that yoke restricting them, and the hollow tube of mindless repetition fans out to a million possible ways to live your life.
That’s what I’ve learned so far. Tell me your thoughts. Have you also experienced the commonality of addiction, or do you see it another way? There may be massive exceptions to the pattern I seem to be noticing. And stay tuned. I plan to share a lot more as the book proceeds and I get caught up in trying to match these life profiles to the brain events going on below the surface. That will require me to go back to the neuroscience of addiction and do more homework, to try to figure out how it is that the features of the brain are necessary for understanding the features of addiction.
Informed by unparalleled neuroscientific insight and written with his usual flare, Marc Lewis’s The Biology of Desire effectively refutes the medical view of addiction as a brain disease. A bracing and informative corrective to the muddle that now characterizes public and professional discourse on this topic.” —Gabor Maté, M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
I like the analogy and will use it in recovery groups I lead. I also don’t like the term ” recovery” but alas that is what it is called and I havent come up with a better one word replacement . HOw about you
Nah. I’ve wracked my brains, but the best I can do is “quitting”…not terribly elegant either. Glad you like the image!
I think of myself as “emerging”. I’m not sure if “emergence” is the right word either. It feels like a surfacing too, under water everything is muffled, senses dimmed, there’s a feeling of comfort, but you only have so much air in your lungs! Under water you are quite isolated but when you surface, everything is available to you. That is also a commonality I find, as we describe our condensed life we share those feelings of isolation, loneliness, shame, and feeling like nobody is there with us and nobody understands. But there are millions going through the same/similar thing. And the sharing gives us the courage to swim up.
It seems that while still using we think we are so unique and cannot admit that we are like other addicts. In recovery that is one of the gifts that we discover, there are others like us who struggled the same way.
Exactly. I’m not a big fan of AA, but the value of connecting to others, one of its founding principles, seems very wise.
There’s some current research about this, something about the dopamine reward system (forgive likely incorrect terminology from non-neuroscientist here) resetting back to where it is meant to be, in connecting with other people, rather than in getting artificially fired up from the drugs. This is part of what mutual-support groups do for folks. I’m going to contact our (SMART Recovery’s) researcher on this for more info.
Reading your book, definitely identify with the depression and not fitting in piece as the catalyst, and the alcohol feeling like the cure. Been thinking of that first drinking experience lately and recalling that dragon more precisely. I recall feeling like it was the cure for my social awkwardness, an answer, finally feeling good, and also the thought, “Now I know why my Dad drank.” Of course it never made me feel quite THAT good again.
Emerging from underwater, from submergence, is another fine metaphor. I clearly remember the feeling of being under water — a cozy watery sense of invulnerability. And even the isolation didn’t bother me….until the drug started to wear off.
Didn’t bother me either, I liked the safety net. Which I eventually realized was a noose. But I didn’t break free until the consequences mounted, as is the case for most of us.
Safety net —- noose. That’s one of the best metaphors I’ve heard in a long time.
Thanks, one motivation to remain sober are such moments of lucidity. And to work on recovery so I might create more of them.
We use the word habilitation when we don’t think rehabilitation is appropriate. How about using covery when recovery is not appropriate?
Oooooh, nice. I like these neologisms. (I think that neologism must be a neologism…which means a new word). But there’s the problem. Who the hell else knows what you’re talking about?
Growing up a kid with a learning disability in the 70s I took little comfort in books or reading . Music and Lyrics were how I was exposed to abstract thought and poetry .
For Christmas one year I got one of the first “Walkmen” from RadioShack it was the size of a brick you strapped to your chest and the headphone were like a stethoscope . Music and Lyrics still to this day play a big part of my education . Canadian musician Kathleen Edwards song ” O’Clock New ” about a man that snaps and get shot by the police sings the line ” You spend half your life trying to turn the other half around” .
I always loved the term “Discovery” over “Recovery” , it just seemed far more powerful and productive .
http://youtu.be/EVtAblO50Fc
I’ll listen later….my poor laptop can no longer speak or sing. But it’s good to hear your story and think about the variety of ways people live and learn before addiction sets in….and then again maybe afterward.
“Discovery” is definitely a good one. The trouble is that it isn’t specific enough to the back side of addiction. I should make this a contest. If anyone can find the perfect substitute to “recovery”, you get a….hmmm….what would be the prize?
I also love this analogy. I’m in the process of writing a review article (perhaps for submission…perhaps not) in an attempt to better understand my own “addiction” to binge-restrict patterns of food intake. I, too, found it fascinating how my behaviors so specifically mimicked those of other individuals with eating disorders, right down to the strange rituals of food preparation and preferences for extremely odd flavor combinations. It seems to me that once I made an attempt to shunt my “higher cognitive” awareness of the external stressors in my life by manipulating my brain chemistry (in this case, with severe caloric restriction and ritualized behaviors), I removed a lot of complexity in my thought processing and reinforced my eating disorder to a greater and greater extent until it became the predominant focus in my life. Bringing more awareness of my environment has removed some of that focus, and definitely worked to lessen the symptoms and quiet the voice of my disorder.
Again, great descriptor of the addiction/recovery process. I’m going to hold on to this and continue to develop a rich “bottom portion” of my hourglass.
I like the sound of that. And it goes with that little icon I put in the post: tilting the hourglass so that the sand runs through faster, so you can get to the bottom half and not get stuck in the neck of it.
Your description of ritual is well taken. Ritual seems hugely important in most addictions. All the components have strong associative connections to the state we are reaching toward…and yet they sequence themselves, one by one, giving a clear sense of order. The need to simplify the complexity of our thinking is a big deal. That in itself provides comfort.
I often have a scotch at the end of the day, before dinner, often followed by wine. I know I’m simplifying and structuring my day by building in a ritualistic state-change at a key juncture — the juncture between work and…evening relaxation (such as it is with two kids). I’m trying to diminish this habit but it’s hard. Rituals that include physiological changes AND cognitive restructuring are damn hard to alter.
At first it struck me as how this is the opposite or obverse of the famous line:
Leo Tolstoy – “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
But, yes. What you’re saying is not unlike the common observation that a bunch of people in a prison camp or in a cancer ward will show far more similarities than differences.
I smile and ask, “Are the phrases ‘I’m better, now,’ or ‘I’m over it’ or ‘I’m past it’ too simple?”
Lovely comment. I just read a book, The Dinner, by Herman Koch. REally spooky little psychological thriller. He followed Tolstoy by saying: happiness does not need to name itself, does not have to be aware of itself. But unhappiness is constantly reflecting on itself, trying to understand itself, something to that effect.
The unhappiness of addiction seems to involve a lot of commonality, and our efforts to understand it and control it have this absurd, almost childish, redundancy.
So going with Koch, rather than Tolstoy, it’s this redundancy that ends up narrowing us, reducing our individuality to a tiresome habit.
“I’m better now”……just an openner on a galaxy of possibilities.
Hi Marc and everyone else.
Great description, there are many roads into addiction and many roads out. Like you I spend a considerable amount of my life talking to addicts. Many are in active addiction and others in various stages and different programmes of recovery. I very rarely find a person that I take a dramatic dislike to. Most of them are very authentic people, almost always searching for some kind of dignity. Often they have lost their moral compass and are simply trying to find their way through a very confusing and scary world. They do what they have to to get by, and I’m in no way excusing their behaviour, having lost all sense of right and wrong.
I was working with a guy, several years ago, who was basically paraciting from an old lady he had met. She genuinely cared for him as a kind of replacement for the son she had lost at a similar age, he was totally manipulating the situation taking what he could when he could. He absolutely hated himself for doing it, and was his own worst judge. For my part, I tried, as much as possible, not to judge him but to merely ask if he was Ok and if there was anything we could do. I met up with him recently and he said that the human contact he received from me made all the difference and kept him going when, at times he was considering killing himself. He is now in recovery and has been able to go back to the old lady and repay some of the kindness she showed him. He wasn’t a bad person, he was doing bad things because maybe thats all he thought he had.
As I go forward in my work with addiction I am beginning to realise that everything I have done up to now has, in some way, prepared me for what I’m doing now. The lessons I have learned from people like the guy above are invaluable and cannot be picked up from books, lectures, workshops or conferences. There’s a very old saying that goes something like, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”, these days I am nearly always a student awaiting the appearance of my next teacher.
Ah Peter. How strange to read your words after spending such good hours together on Thursday evening. That is a wonderful story you’ve given us. Indeed, the teacher appears.
My life’s work is moving closer to yours. There is nothing more satisfying than playing even a very small part in midwifing these miracles.
An analogy that that I like in terms of recovery from addiction, is one of weeding the garden. My flowers now have space to bloom, are no longer choked by weeds…….Could the prize for best word/image description be an all-expenses paid trip to Italy? Kidding.
I’ve thought of the garden and weeds analogy, too, for recovery, but with this variant, which has special application to myself at least. The weeds have gotta go, yes.
They were rampant. However, a helluva lot of bare spots and withered or half-dead plants remain. These flowers are gonna need a *lot* of cultivation and nurture (the old ‘normal’ pastimes, productive activities, and friendships that got seriously neglected
during ‘acting out’ the addiction). As well, some new shrubs and flowers have to be planted in the bare patches, and attended to (new habits, etc.).
Would you guys consider splitting the prize? These are lovely metaphors.
Here’s another: instead of spreading shit everywhere you go, some judicious use of fertilizer may be what’s called for.
This is terrific. Love the hourglass metaphor.
I have been thinking a lot about Anna Quindlen’s way of describing it–how people “harden.” A persona, a habit, an addiction, a tic or trick of behavior….it starts out benign and then hardens into something that is anything but.
Thanks. I don’t know her work, though I just googled her. But that is exactly how I’ve envisioned personality development for many years. I’ve written papers about the process of hardening, or crystallization, or convergence, or “stuckness”, as assessed by behavioural measures but also neural measures — the process of natural selection working on synapses, by which there is a decreasing number of synapses, or pruning, which concretizes whatever networks have emerged. A nicer word for it is “specialization”. And the net result is a highly stable personality by the mid-twenties or earlier.
But I never, until recently, imagined that the personality can grow in the other direction, from over-specialized to more flexible, increasing degrees of freedom. And that seems to be just what happens when we pass through the neck of the hourglass and come out on the other side.