By April W. Smith…
“Clean and sober!” said the pastor of my church, by way of congratulations. I replied that I don’t use either word.
“So how do you refer to yourself?” he asked.
“Cat-positive radical feminist vegan cupcake goddess,” I wrote.
But I elaborated. Why don’t I call myself clean and sober? I mean, I don’t do drugs. I am consciously, willfully abstinent from alcohol, benzos, and other drugs.
I despise the word “clean” when used in the context of addiction. It reminds me too much of biblical purity codes and the shame inflicted on people who are deemed unclean. You know, lepers, untouchables, women who are menstruating, etc. Describing someone as “unclean” is about as bad as you can get. Calling a formerly drug addicted person clean implies that when using, they were unclean. If we buy the disease model, which I think is pretty functional if not entirely biologically accurate, then a person who is addicted to drugs is no different from a person with a virus or an infection or cancer or diabetes. We in the developed world no longer refer to these people as unclean. It’s highly stigmatized. Let’s just drop it.
“Sober” is tougher. I am sober, as in not drunk. I suspect that you reading this are as well, at the moment. You don’t identify yourself by that current state, however, unless you’ve had an alcohol or drug problem. You might drink and get drunk tonight, or this weekend. For all I know you’re drunk internet surfing even as you read. This is a biological state, not an identity.
To me, being abstinent from alcohol is a precondition for everything else in my life, including being alive. I have that kind of severe biological reaction to alcohol where I almost immediately lose my rational mind as soon as I take a drink and can’t stop drinking without experiencing severe blood curdling withdrawal. It wasn’t always like that – it took years to progress and it progressed the most and fastest during long periods of time when I wasn’t drinking at all. But that’s how it is now. It’s as though I have an allergy, a metaphor that isn’t perfect but works pretty well. Dr. Silkworth used it years ago in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
My uncle Gerald is allergic to almonds. So allergic that if he eats an almond, he may have to go to the hospital. I think he carries around an epi pen. I live many states away from Uncle Gerald and I still feel vaguely awkward when I eat an almond. Given that I eat almonds every day, I think of Uncle Gerald often.
I don’t define Uncle Gerald as an Almond Allergic. Sure, he limits some of his actions due to almonds, but it doesn’t severely impact his life. He lives without Marzipan, and seems just fine. He has a PhD, is an ordained minister, and is the longest serving employee at Duke University as an academic dean. His almond allergy is not stigmatizing. It’s just, well, not a thing.
My alcohol problem has been more of a thing. It affected my life a lot. It’s an experience I had, and it shaped who I am, but it did not make me who I am. I am not my disease.
It’s something I survived, much like sexual assault and the GRE. (To be fair, I liked the GRE. I test well.) Being a survivor of sexual assault has presented me with some traumas that I had to work through. It helped a lot when I finally got some help, professional and otherwise. The same is true for alcohol.
Defining me as sober sets me apart from you, if you are not a former addict. We are likely both not drunk at this moment, but my status of “not drunk” can be made to take on meaning different from yours. I don’t want to be labeled that way. I refuse to buy into the stigmatizing idea that I am always going to be a disease from which I have now recovered.
To call me clean and sober, even when you mean it as a compliment, sounds condescending to me. I define myself. You can respect my identity or not. I appreciate that my pastor asked how I would refer to myself, and I try to refer to others as they define themselves, not as they are stigmatized by society.
We have all had many experiences, traumas, and problems. You may have had credit card debt, but even if you have paid it off now, I wouldn’t refer to you in public as “debt-free” because that brings up the notion that it was ever my business whether you had debt or not. If you’re not defaulting on loans from me, it’s just not my business. If I try to claim that you have a character defect and are less than I am because you had credit card debt, regardless of your current credit score, I suspect we are going to have an interpersonal problem.
This is not to trivialize either the disease of addiction or the weight of credit card debt. It is to let people out of jail if they have suffered from a stigmatized situation, and to allow people to define themselves, not be labeled.
I do not need to be defined as an alcoholic in order to remain abstinent. I recognize much better than you can imagine that if I drink I will die. In fact, the re-stigmatization can be demoralizing to the point of being a self-fulfilling prophecy. What we say we are is what we become.
I choose to call myself an alcoholic when at AA meetings because that’s contextually appropriate. However, I’ve cut back on my meeting attendance and stopped working the steps because I don’t want to allow the subtle subconscious messages that I am somehow damaged to infect my self-image. For those for whom frequent AA meetings and the steps work, great. I have no quarrel with you. For me, that is not the one true path. I’ve found my way through AA and other programs, like SMART Recovery. But most of all, I’ve found my own self-reliance, a practice that AA discourages.
For those who wish to define themselves as alcoholics and addicts, I respect your right to identify however you choose. There is a sign in the staff kitchen of my food co-op that shows a picture of two kinds of sponges and says, “I’m a dish sponge. I’m a counter sponge. Please respect our identities.” I respect your identity as you define it.
I ask that others respect mine. Those who want to be in communion and communication with me recognize that I do not want to be defined by a disease from which I suffered greatly, any more than I want to be defined as a sexual assault survivor. I am not the sum total of my traumas: I am a living, breathing, growing and evolving human being. I am an incredible baker of vegan cupcakes, one of the best organizers you’ll ever hear about, and a darn good kitty mommy.
Call me a radical feminist. Call me a crazy cat lady. Call me maybe. But don’t call me clean and sober.
Thanks y’all.
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
Thank you.
Great post/comments
I never liked alcohol so 99% time i never drank enough to throw up or black out but have few times during hs/college and consider that “normal”.
So i continue to have a drink or two with friends and am so lucky to have my dream career. I feel i cant say “clean and sober” cause i socially drink, but i stopped “using” drugs completely!
So i say, i havent used in __.
Some may not like this, but lifes not black or white
I dont believe were addicts, We all have different levels of self control
I to cringe at the phrase of clean and sober for much of the same reasons as you stated. As a person who faithfully attended at least 1 AA meeting a day for 10 years and eventually decided that athough i was abstinent, AA meetings were not meeting all my needs. Besides an addiction to alcohol I also am unfortunate to have to manage a serious mental illness. I often heard from members of AA that I was not truely sober as I did not have ¨”emotional sobriety” and thus was white knuckling it as a :dry drunk”. These are all counter productive labels I wish to no longer associate myself. I prefer to think of myself as an actively evolving individual not just in a state of clean and sober.
excellent post, April. I, like you prefer not to identify myself by my sickness or disease. I don’t even like to call myself recovered from drug addiction. That person who was sticking a needle in my arm full of heroin some 43 years ago was a totally different person that I am today. In the same way I would never call myself a bank robber if I robed a bank as teenager. A drug addict is what I was but that is not true of me today. If I were to attend a 12 step meeting I would refer myself as an overcomer, or an addiction survivor but never an addict.Drugs is what I did but that is not who I am today and I don’t feel I need to identify myself as an addict to keep me from relapsing.I have remained clean over four decades because I chose to remain clean. I am an Overcomer.
That’s an interesting view point, and one I did’nt think I would agree with. But you make a good point. Its easy to be stuck in the stuck in the addiction if you surround yourself with sick enough people ( like we can do at AA meetings ). We can consider ourselves all in this together, when in fact we are slightly different having had several years of sobriety. Where I am now, like yourself, is not where I was way back then. I am therefore not like everyone in the meeting, I am different, I am sober.
Very refreshing. I drink non alcoholic liquids, eat as best I can, and am fit for a 65 year old fine fiddle. I’m also a treatment provider specializing in Trauma Informed treatment of “addictions”. Can someone please coin a term that does NOT bear such a judgmental ring to it? I began in AA. For 16 years I invested significant buy in, but after becoming more keenly aware of the co-relationship between Childhood Complex Trauma and compulsive behaviors including use of alcohol and other drugs, I lost my tolerance for well-meaning but ignorant sponsors who did more to retraumatize their “pigeons” than to help. Just as an aside, I refer to addictions as maladaptive attachments to behaviors that make the mind think everything is ok, even when the results are disasterous…repeatedly. And this is true of chemical and behavioral attachments. Don;t call it recovery. Recovery implies there was something there to begin with. Would I have wanted to recover the mind and functioning of a 12 year old at the age of 38? I think not. And finally, for every half measure taken in change, remember that within those “half measures” are half results that can be acknowledged and built upon.
Thanks for your comment, Louise. I still use the word “addict” despite its connotations, because…well for many reasons. I was one myself. And the fact that I can say I was an addict but am no longer allows me a lot of flexibility in my use of language and self-reflection. Similarly, I can say I was a teenager, a saxophone player, etc….things I once was but am now past. Also, I find people’s efforts to get around the word are more trouble than they’re worth. The stigmatization just is. It’s real, it’s unavoidable…. I’d rather accept it, understand it, fight it, and help people honour themselves despite the stigma. And also, definitions like “maladaptive attachments to behaviors that make the mind think everything is ok” are just a bit unwieldy.
No Marc. The efforts to “get around the words” are not more trouble than they are worth for “people”. Gently I will tell you I think you are part of the problem, and you can be part of the solution if you want to see people as whole complex beings.
Oh wait…I reread that, and I think I may have misunderstood a bit. Not to mention I like some of your ideas. Apologies.
But I do agree with you about the term “recovery”…. In my recent book I show how misleading such a term can be. As you imply, development never goes in reverse…thank goodness!
Wonderful insight. Thank you so much. I like your definition “maladaptive behavioral attachments”. I might even go further with the non judgement..”unskillful behavioral attachments”. After all, weren’t we just unskillful and we are more skillful now? What do you think? Peace.
This really does a good job of explaining the importance of person first language when talking about people with addiction. I truly believe that calling someone an addict or junkie or anything else runs the risk of defining them and them internalizing that label. When someone believes they are an addict, then of course if makes sense to them they’re using drugs again, after all, they are an addict. Personally, I say that I lived a decade of my life with addiction and found treatment that allowed me to become abstinent and have a productive life. The information has always been well received when I have presented it that way and I have never once felt like doing so defined me as being different from the person I was talking to. I am studying to become a social worker and am looking forward to teaching other people about not using words like “clean” or “addict” or anything else like that in interacting with their clients or thinking about themselves.
Denial can be a Motherfucker, hopefully some day you’ll come out of your superficial closet and face reality.. We have thousands like you hidden behind phoney imagines, but the different it’s that in recovery the mask has to go.. Good luck hiding in church with your pastor… Non junkie.. Feminist.. Lmfao.
Tons of people drink/smoke everyday and have better lives than any of us. Anyone trying to better themselves is a winner and we should all support each other, who cares about labels or a “process”, help your fellow man, karma will come for you
Totally agree. I hate clean+ serene, sober, and more than anything recovering addict.
Being in recovery is not what or who I am. I am not hiding behind any mask. I am fully aware of everything I was, am, and will be. Recovery is to return to your former state before you started using alcohol/drugs and NO thank you. That is when I was a mess and why I started using, to begin with. Hell no, I don’t want to return to being like that. Great post!
But Marc, I do like what you said in your comment about accepting it + the stigma is there. Point blank. It is very true. That is a new way to look at things.
To add to that thought,
People do not simply return to a former state after a major relationship.
The experience invariably changes them, its a “Life Experience”,
And it is the same with addiction.
Seen in this way, addiction is not simply a disease that one “recovers” from due to a “cure”.
Addiction is a major life experience, and ALL people have major Life experiences of some form or another.
This is a great post, thank you. I recently decided that abstaining from alcohol is the right path for me, and this post helps. Both my parents were “alcoholics,” they were severely abusive to me and each other, and there was lots of dysfunctional talk in our family about who is and isn’t an “alcoholic” / “the one with the problem,” etc. etc. growing up. The old language of addiction is insanely, unproductively loaded for me because of those experiences.
Having to totally redefine myself *permanently* as an “alcoholic” had so many severe connotations for me that I believe the word itself caused me to resist abstaining from alcohol and getting help. I would have just rather kept hurting myself than take on the mantle of what that word connoted to me. I wanted to prove I could drink normally so I could prove that I was still “normal”, lovable, not abusive “like my parents,” could still have some kind of future (unlike them).
Using a disease model and different language made it possible to take my own healing seriously. The old language was getting in the way of me seeing that this addiction was truly hurting me and was going to kill me. I think I’m still looking for the right words for me, but so far “survivor” feels pretty good.
Thank you for the inspiring post and comments. I arrived here through the question “If you are now staying sober for the same reasons you used to drink, are you still an addict?” Were you ever an addict in the first place if you had a daily drink because it was pretty much pressed upon you? Many of the thoughts here clarified my vague sense that “recovery” is not a valid term for any real transformation that involves ritual or habitual behaviors like drinking alcohol. As the socially controversial substance it is, both approved and reviled, both legal and subject to mental-health sanctions, alcohol and the brewing-distilling industry have now amounted to a burdensome bothersome waste of time & though I feel every bit as loathsome, lazy & slothful NOT drinking as when I lifted the daily toast, one less glass to rinse DOES seem to make my life a tiny bit better…
All I know is I was born with the disease of addiction and it wants me maimed and under its control.
Hallelujah!!!!. The only things I will call you are brave, enlightened, empowered, honest and generous. I thank you, my warrior woman sister, for shedding light on how the language of addiction and recovery need to change. . We dont need to fix ourselves, we aren’t broken. We dont need to get clean, we were never dirty. I dont need to hit rock bottom, there is no measurement. I dont need to get with the program, this isn’t Broadway. I dont need to acknowledge that I am powerless, quite the opposite. I HAVE THE POWER.. ME, YES ME. The power to love myself, be kind to myself. Be honest and patient with myself. The rest will follow . Thanks, warrior woman..You’ve done some educating today.