In Alcoholics Anonymous, they often say that alcoholism is not the problem, it is just a symptom. Many people, especially in early recovery, enthusiastically cast aside drinking for another addictive behavior, and just about everyone in every twelve-step program discovers myriad other self-destructive behaviors they’re engaging in as they take inventory of their lives. These behaviors echo past trauma and abuse. The true problem is that these traumas have taught us that we deserve pain and chaos. We have learned to seek out and recreate our unresolved traumatic experiences even after the original harmful situations have passed. It is immaterial whether we perpetuate it by starving ourselves, berating ourselves, short-circuiting our bodies with harmful substances, underearning, choosing and staying with abusive people, cutting our bodies, or something else entirely.

So what’s the solution?

Well, don’t worry, we have our top psychologists, scientists, and therapists working on that around the clock… oh. We don’t?

Well. Here are a few pieces that might fit.

Every twelve-step program uses the same twelve steps, regardless of the behavior being addressed. And, I believe, part of the reason that this is done and that it works for all our addictive “symptoms” must be that it addresses this core problem. Let’s see what the steps ask us to do that might be vital to recovery from trauma and abuse.

The first step, of course, is to admit that we have a problem. It is a very profound step: it helps us begin to see what we are doing that is harming us. It shows us what is not working, what we want to change. It helps us begin to be honest with ourselves and others, instead of harming ourselves with denial and fear.

Step two gives us the opportunity to explore what we believe about the universe, and what parts of that have and haven’t worked for us. We get to see what has worked for others, too, and see that other people have found relief from these painful problems. In step two, we begin to experience hope that things can be different, which I think is crucial to any kind of recovery.

In step three, we learn to ask for help. We seek a willingness to seek out healing from outside, trustworthy sources – to stop trying to do it all ourselves – to realize that our methods have not been working for us. This is mindblowing for many people, especially for those of us who have learned not to ask for help because we are just a burden. Beginning to understand that that is not actually true, and to see ourselves as worthwhile human beings who deserve support and who deserve to get our needs met, is nothing short of a miracle.

The fourth step brings us back to that honesty. We take a long, hard look at our lives, being as honest as we can about our resentments, fears, and relationships in general. This has tremendous implications: it can lead to much deeper clarity about what things have been like and what is harming us; it can bring us back to the emotions that we’ve numbed for so long; it can teach us where our boundaries really are and what we need to do to take responsibility for them. It is an incredible and far-reaching exercise.

The fifth step is even more terrifying for many people than the fourth. It asks us to share everything we learned in the fourth step with another human being and with a higher power of our own understanding. But when we share this with someone who is trustworthy, we learn amazing things. We learn that we are not alone. We learn that our feelings and actions and experiences are not so horrifying that people will run from us if they find out the truth about them. We even learn that those feelings, actions, and experiences are not who we are. And with all of this this comes a greater ability to trust, and a step toward self-acceptance.

Step six builds on that fourth step work too. We get to look at all of the behaviors that are harming us and start thinking about the possibility of maybe someday not doing them anymore. We get to just be willing for things to change, and to know that for the moment, that is enough.

So with the first six steps, what do people get that helps them recover? The beginnings of honesty; hope; help; reality; feelings; boundaries; trust; the possibility of change; and a door opens toward self-acceptance and compassion. That compassion is not located in any specific step, but undergirds the whole process. It’s the motor that powers all our healing.

What on earth could be left for the last six to provide?A Dozen Steps Toward Recovery

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All of the characteristics of addiction that she listed in her book led me to one word….

ABUSE

The most valuable thing I got from When Society Becomes an Addict was something which Anne Wilson Schaef did not even appear to see.

I found her analysis of society’s addictions to be very powerful, and it helped me understand a lot more about the world in which I live and answer many questions which had been plaguing me about it. But as I read the book, I discovered something even more interesting to me. The more she talked about the behaviors involved in addiction, the more convinced I became that addicts and abuse survivors are one and the same. Every behavior she described was either something I already understood as being caused by abuse, or something new which I could now see would come from abuse.

For example:

She states that we create crises in order to feel, and that addicts are often so out of touch with our emotions that we feel dead, unable to respond to the world. Creating crises becomes a form of self-injury, serving one of the same purposes: to feel something, to know that we are alive. In reality, she says, we feel very deeply but don’t know how to handle that, and we have little abilty to know what exactly it is that we are feeling. And this is all very characteristic of abuse survivors: we have had to block off our emotions in order to survive our abuse. It was not safe to feel; if we had really known at the time how scared or angry or sad we were, what our abuse really felt like, we would not have survived it. (And some of us don’t.)

Schaef talks about dissociation at length, but calls it “forgetfulness” and “blackouts.” She explains that when people are deep in addictive behavior, they can drive around, go drinking, get into fights, fly to another country, and do almost anything wide awake with no memory of it. This is a form of dissociation (losing time) which will be familiar to most multiples — in fact, to most self-aware abuse survivors. I suspect that addictive forgetfulness and blackouts are part of the same thing, particularly given the high correlation between abuse and addiction.

The process of recovery, ideally, is one which slowly heals this forgetfulness and allows us to feel safe being present in our lives. Schaef connects it to addiction even further, saying that “any addictive pattern or process can blur our thinking and block our memory. It causes us to lose contact with what we know and have learned.” This is part of the reason that addiction is considered a “progressive illness” in twelve-step circles — that is, among people who understand it and are working to recover from it. When we engage in our addictive behavior, we can lose all the healthy behaviors that we have learned.

Low self-esteem is also a common, if not guaranteed, effect of abuse prior to recovery. Schaef states that addicts perceive the world in negatives, are hypercritical and judgmental, focused on perfection. Our society’s ideas of luxury and decadence, according to the media, are things like eating dessert without feeling guilty: we are struggling with extreme self-judgement and the codependence of obsessing about what others think. All of these things are forms of low self-esteem and effects of abuse. Abuse survivors become hypercritical and judgmental because we have learned that we are bad people — otherwise, why would we have been abused? Even when we intellectually know that the abuse was not our fault, it is very hard to internalize that fact.

We struggle to be good enough to avoid further abuse even after we have escaped our abusers. Codependence is also essentially an automatic result of abuse. It is Stockholm Syndrome: we have to identify with our abusers in some way to survive. We internalize the abuse and continue it through things like believing terrible things about ourselves and creating more chaotic and damaging environments in which to live, as well as more obviously addictive behaviors. Essentially, we judge and abuse ourselves emotionally (if not physically as well) to escape further abuse, as if we were being chased by a mad gorilla and had to attack ourselves to calm it down.

She also talks about the way that addicts equate responsibility with blame. And this, too, is an effect of abuse. Addicts, Schaef says, think that “cause and effect” means “if something happened it is because I made it happen.” The effect of abuse is to sever cause and effect — to break those concepts so that we don’t have a real sense of what cause and effect mean or how they go together. After all, abuse is the least logical thing in the world, the act with the least apparent or reasonable cause. The mother who explodes in rage when her child loses a library card, or the boy who fondles his baby cousin, is proving that people’s actions don’t make sense. Survivors often spend their entire lives trying to find the sense in these behaviors, which usually leads to the above experience of attacking oneself for experiencing (and therefore causing) them. Many of us are convinced that we must have done something to bring it on ourselves, because it’s easier to believe that than that people can do something so damaging for no good reason.

This also feeds into the confusion of addictive thinking: it’s much easier to believe that “Because it’s 5 p.m. somewhere in the world” is a fine reason to drink if you don’t see connections between things. Personally, I get tripped up by my loss of cause and effect all too often. Some time ago, someone was “spoofing” people in a chatroom I was in, which I realized when I saw that I had apparently said “san fransisco” (sic) without noticing it. And yet, even though my first instinct was that there was a spoofer, even though I didn’t remember typing anything of the sort and I had just been reading and not typing anything, even though I live near San Francisco and can damn well spell it, I still seriously and repeatedly questioned whether I hadn’t just typed it by accident somehow and sent it all without noticing.

Equating responsibility with blame, furthermore, makes people very defensive. We always have to be on guard against attack, or we might get abused again. (This, of course, does not stop that from happening.) And this defensiveness makes it difficult for people to deal with their own abuse, both for fear of being blamed for it again as well as simply out of fear of the pain they have already experienced. As a society, we accuse survivors of “victimology” when they speak out about their abuse — “You just want attention!” And, usually, that kind of attack comes from abuse survivors who resent that someone else can talk openly about the same abuse that they suffered.

When Society Becomes An Addict: The real story

When so many people are outraged at the actions of their government, why do so many of them seem to be frozen? Why aren’t people taking to the streets? Why is the United States the only “first world” country without universal health care?

What is it that keeps people from leaving abusive jobs and abusive relationships?

These questions may seem to be unrelated, but they’re actually all part of what happens…

When Society Becomes an Addict
by Anne Wilson Schaef
Harper and Row, 1987

When Society Becomes an Addict is an easy read, peppered with true stories and funny examples. The content is so true it’s terrifying… all the more so because it was written almost twenty years ago.

Prior to this book, Schaef had broken some interesting ground about how gender and culture work in mainstream American society. In “Women’s Reality,” she broached the idea that men and women have different realities – that is, different cultures with different values and experiences. In fact, she proposed that there were several, including a white women’s culture which is complicit with the corrupt parts of white male culture, and an “emerging female system” which has begun to define and explore itself and defy mainstream societal corruption.

It’s an interesting idea, but it’s not particularly revolutionary – or, for many people, particularly helpful. When Society Becomes an Addict, though, blows all her previous theories out of the water.

The Questions

Basically, Schaef has realized something: she has society’s problems all figured out, but she’s targeting the wrong people.

Our society responds to crises “not with action, but with a widespread malaise.” With each crisis, moreover, it’s becoming increasingly “conservative, complacent (and) more defensive of the status quo.” The worse things get, the deeper we sink into denial. And when we do try to do something, we consistently pick our favorite part of the problem, take it out of context, and begin a misguided uphill battle to fix things.

There are two big questions raised by this: What’s missing in this picture that would let us deal with problems more effectively? And how do we escape the denial and lack of information that pulls us in like quicksand?

Addiction: The Missing Piece

Anne Wilson Schaef has a simple and amazing explanation: Society itself has become an addict.

When Society Becomes An Addict

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