PART ONE
Facing Powerlessness,
Experiencing Empowerment
J. JEREMY WISNEWSKI
Being Powerless to Change
The Wisdom of the First Step
STEP ONE: We recognized that we were powerless over our addictionâthat our lives had become unmanageable.
It is very fitting that this collection begins with Jeremy Wisnewskiâs philosophical reflections on his own ordeal of addiction and the breakthrough made possible by his acknowledgment of it. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, the great twentieth-century German thinker, Wisnewski describes the âworldâ of addiction phenomenologically: he helps us see it âfrom the insideââfrom the addictâs own perspective. This approach enables him to show how taking the First Step is an excruciating struggle. But it is also an opening to possibility, as Wisnewski, with an assist from the American pragmatist William James, explains. This is the first of our many encounters with Twelve Step paradoxes.
There are times when there is nothing else in the world. Everything points either to it or away from it. It is the color spectrum that allows you to see the bright and the dull. That is the core truth of addiction.
To be addicted is to live in a world colored by oneâs object of addictionâit appears everywhere, in everything, behind each emotion, before each decision. Addiction comes in myriad forms, but these forms seem to share a common structure: addiction organizes oneâs entire existenceâit is the force around which a life comes to orbit. It defines how one sees oneâs possibilities, oneâs potential actions, and even oneâs relationship with others. Every addiction has its own peaks and valleysâand each object of addiction displays things in its own unique way. Some addictions are not as disruptive or chaotic as othersâbut they all organize things, highlighting whatâs important and what is merely incidental.
Addiction is an imperialist. It colonizes every aspect of a life. In the most severe cases, nothing remains untouched. Addiction is not content to stay in its own arena, happily consuming its object when possible. It must reach outâit must become the centerâand it will take a backseat to nothing. This is why, for the addict, to give up the addiction is not a simple matter. Everything must change. The center must be found again. This is why, for the addict, a world without the object of addiction is an almost unintelligible worldâa distant shore, a greener pasture.
The addict is powerless over his addiction. He is his addiction. It demarcates the boundaries of his experience, of what is intelligible and what is not. To begin to overcome addiction requires seeing this, and all that it means: to know one is addicted is to know that there is nothing one can doâthat oneâs entire world is owned by a substance, and indeed exhausted by it.
And herein lies the essential irony of addiction, as well as the wisdom of the First Step: it is only by recognizing that one is no longer in controlâthat one lives under the thumb of a tyrantâthat one can begin to find the world again.
Addicted Phenomenology: The World of the Addict
I have been a recreational drug user for most of my life. I first went to a drug rehabilitation institution when I was thirteen years old. I went again at fifteen. Most of my drug use has involved fairly common substancesâalcohol and marijuana. There have been periods, however, when my drugs of choice were on the harder side: LSD, PCP, and hydrocodone have all been central features of my life at various times. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say they were my life.
In each of my addictions, I found a similar situation: my life became organized around my addiction. The actions that were most palatable were those that allowed me to indulge my habits, regardless of what other values I once had. I have lied to and stolen from family members, all the while claiming to love them and to recognize the importance of honesty. I have tried to deceive doctors in order to get prescriptions. I have sold things of great valueâeven if they did not belong to meâjust to get the money needed for my immediate gratification. The values the addict once held most dear are soon eclipsed by the immediate needs that constitute the addictâs world.
The world of the addict is a world of consumption and subterfuge. Addiction doesnât simply make one do oneâs drug of choice with more frequencyâthough it certainly does that; it also changes the way one understands and feels about more run-of-the-mill activities. Life is organized around opportunities for use, or around the creation of such opportunities. The most disturbing thing about the addictâs behavior is not simply what he will do. While I am now disturbed by my own past actions, I am far more disturbed by the fact that these actions seemed necessary, even right, at the time I decided to do them. Addiction doesnât simply lead you to do things you regard as unacceptable; it changes what you count as acceptable in the first place. Addiction doesnât just alter our actions; it alters how we perceive actions in general.
Addictive behavior constitutes the world of the addict. A âworld,â in the phenomenological sense of the term, is the context within which one actsâa context that defines what matters and that makes certain courses of action stand out above others. When the philosopher Martin Heidegger says that human beings are âbeing-in-the-world,â this is exactly what he has in mind.1 To be human is to exist within a context that organizes our activities and gives sense to our lives. For the most part, the world we occupy is a familiar and intelligible one, and this familiarity and intelligibility make it possible for us to act with the fluidity that accompanies normal activity.
The addictâs world has a distinct character, but it too is a structural whole like the world of the non-addict. In everyday language, we speak of âthe world of business,â âthe world of fashion,â and âthe entertainment world.â Such phrases capture, albeit crudely, Heideggerâs central idea: to be in a world is to be absorbed in itâto experience certain things as important, and others as not. In the business world, for example, the importance of profit and loss stands out in a way that it does not in the world of concern captured by the word âpoetry.â Worlds organize experience, make them intelligible, and accentuate certain things over others.
In an important sense, then, we live in different worldsâbut this should not be exaggerated. As Heidegger argues, our being is a âbeing-withâ (Mitsein); our world is a with-world (Mitwelt).2 In watching the Olympics, to take an easy example, one sees precisely how much is shared. The space of concerns that motivate the Olympian is worlds away from my own concerns, but I am able to understand itâto inhabit it vicariously, as it were. As I watch gymnasts, I am quickly brought to see precisely those things that are of concern to the gymnast: the slight bounce of a landing, the grace of a motion, the need to get every movement exactly right without appearing stiff or inelegant. The âworld of the athlete,â in other words, is not my own, but it is one I can understand and, indeed, one I can appreciate.
To talk of the âworld of the addict,â then, is not to talk of a world totally unintelligible to the non-addict. In many ways, the non-addict understands implicitly what the addictâs world is like: it has a central element (the object of addiction) that makes certain actions more apparent than others, that organizes oneâs time, and that constitutes the addictâs sense of whatâs important. In a fundamental respect, then, the world of an addict is like the world most of us inhabit: for some, a career makes our actions intelligible and gives us a sense of whatâs important; for others, oneâs family centers things; for still others, it is athletic accomplishment, or music, or food.
But for all the structural similarity, the world of the addict is not identical to the world of the non-addict. In addiction, there can be no happy balance between oneâs addictive behavior and other activities. While one can have a successful career and also a wonderful relationship with oneâs family, occupying the domestic and the commercial world successively and with equal dedication, addiction will not be made to play second fiddle. In addiction at its worst, every other care and concern is subordinated to a central obsession: consumption of the object of addiction. Indeed, the intelligibility of other things becomes indexed to what one craves: one works in order to have money to use; oneâs relationships become a means to fulfilling oneâs desiresâa source of support for oneâs habits, whether the support be financial, emotional, or even spatial (after all, one must use somewhere).
Addiction comes in many forms, and I have no desire to be overly reductionist. My addiction to hydrocodone was of a remarkably different character than my addiction to PCP: the urges in PCP were stronger; the situation seemed more desperate. I did more that I regret to satisfy the addiction. Physical addiction may well influence and shape an addictâs world in ways we may not find in psychological addiction. Similarly, addiction to legal substances (as opposed to illegal ones) may change certain features of oneâs phenomenological world simply by virtue of the social milieu in which one acts. These are important differences, but they should not be allowed to mask an underlying similarity: to be addicted to something is to understand oneself, and everything around one, in a particular wayâit is to inhabit a world where satisfying oneâs addiction occupies a central position, eclipsing other ways of acting, other values, and, indeed, other worlds. For the addict, we might even say, the world he finds himself in is not even his worldâhe lives only to serve his master, in a world that makes him powerless to do otherwise. The addict finds himself thrown into a world he never directly chose, constituted by desires and values that he does not necessarily want to have, and powerless to change that world without losing the very things that allow him to understand himself as he does.
Addicted Logic: The Decision to Quit
And then things become too much to bear. One recognizes, at a distance, that oneâs addiction is out of control. Small events become opportunities to engage in oneâs addiction: a trip to the grocery store is a chance to get high in the car without having to explain oneâs need to get high; a social evening becomes a reason to partake in oneâs substance of choiceâafter all, this just is what I do to relax. A bit of stress becomes an excuseâI work so hard, I deserve a break. It happens with such ease that soon there are only excuses: one is using constantly, and one sees faintly, from the backseat, as it were, that addiction is driving one to its destination.
And when youâve decided to give it upâwell, you donât really know if the decision is a real one until after you spend some time away from all the resolutions. When (and if) you give it up, thatâs when you know whether or not you actually made that decisionâthere, on that day, when you swore oaths to yourself, weak-kneed but strong-willed, or at least pretending to be.
Thatâs the thing about addiction. The decision to quit is always somehow tentative. âIâm going to do it!â the addict says, already counting up the exceptions, tallying them next to the days it would be better to quit. âIâve decided to quit,â the addict says, âbut I will do it only after the weekend.â The decision to quit is, ironically, usually a decision not to quit yet.
And strangely, the decision to quit produces the desire to do more of the very thing one will quit. The âlast hurrahâ is planned. When it is over, though, it wasnât quite big enough to really be the last one. The date on which one will quit is pushed back into an indefinite future. The addict who sees his problem is always going to quit, and always at some point in the future. By planning to quit, he acknowledges that his behavior is out of control but only in an impractical way. If he realizes that he is unable to put his plan into action, he acknowledges his powerlessness in a much more primal way. However, if he does quit for some amount of timeâa week, or a monthâhe is liable to find reason to celebrate his accomplishment by doing the very thing he is celebrating not doing.
This is addicted logic: at its center is oneâs addiction, looking always for a reason to use again. Here we see again the extent to which the world of the addict is constituted by her addiction. Even reasoning all too often turns out to be servicing oneâs addiction. But the reasoning of the addict is not an exceptional kind of reasoning. Indeed, it is the normal form of reasoning, but at its most primitive form: we want something, and we invent reasons (or discover themâdescribe it as you like) to justify getting what we want. As Hume tells us, âReason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.â3 Whatever else one thinks of Humeâs claim, this much is clear: addiction thrives on enslaving.
Addicted logic is dialectical. It returns again and again to the object of addiction. As it discovers reasons to quit, it supplements those reasons with their opposites. A reason to continue throws itself into the mix of reasons to quitâand if not a reason to continue, a reason not to quit just yet.
The addict is a torn beast. His desire for his substanceâand âdesireâ is still too weak and generic a wordâis so strong that he knows he must quit. And he does want to quit, but it is a want that must exist alongside his desire to continue. He has not forsaken the drug, he has only sworn off it temporarily, and only tentatively at that. He will not do what he wants; he will do rather what he does not want to doâhe will refrain. He will stare at his desire, only to finally give in to itâto treat himself, just one more time; to have a(nother) farewell hurrah; to celebrate his most recent victory by conceding defeat. He has proven he can quit, and therefore deserves to reward himself with what he cannot have.
And here are the facts the addict confronts: using this will kill you and you do not want to die; but yo...